Singing out of the flock.

Longtime Joshua's Army soldier Zeb Gardner earns himself a commendation and a huge tip o' the kefiya for bringing this killer post from blogpals Omar and Mohammed over at IRAQ THE MODEL to my attention.

In it, they examine attitudes in the Arab world towards the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel via a comments thread on an Arabic forum on the BBC Arabic website and come up with a surprising result..the democracy virus appears to have taken hold in Iraq and destroyed some of the commonly held myths still prevalent in the rest of the Arab world!

Here's an excerpt of this sooo-perb must read post:

"Actually it’s a compilation of selected reactions of more than a dozen (out of hundreds) people to one of the hot topics of these days which is the kidnapping of Israeli tank-gunner Gilad Shalit and the Israeli military operation in Gaza strip in the attempt to free him.

The reactions I gathered were posted on an Arabic forum on the BBC Arabic website. About three dozens of comments were made by Iraqis both inside Iraq and in exile and all these comments were supportive of Israel or at least against Hamas as far as the topic is concerned except for only three comments; that's a 10:1 ratio while as you probably have guesses, the opposite ratio is true about the comments by the rest of Arabs.

These comments and some of the non-Iraqi Arab reactions they stimulated caught my attention.

In fact Mohammed and I spent an entire day reading through the 500+ comments in that thread and thought we could share some of the best and most interesting stuff with you.

What was written in that thread stands as one example of the change in the Iraqi way of thinking since the day we got rid of the dictator and shows that logic and facts are gaining more ground at the expense of emotions and conspiracy theories.

Perhaps our problem is that we in Iraq are evolving politically faster than we are doing when it comes to economy, security, etc. that we are even ahead of countries like Egypt or Kuwait in holding real elections and having a permanent constitution and fair representation of all the segments of the people.

Of course this lag between political and material progress will bring on difficulties and challenges but at the same time what cannot be denied is the impressive evolution in awareness considering the short time elapsed since we got our freedom back.

But what really makes me feel optimistic about this new Iraqi way of thinking is that it shows how Iraqis are beginning to distinguish between terrorism and rightful acts of resistance not only in Iraq but also on a global level and are showing decreasing tolerance for extremism and this in my opinion is what builds peace in the region or any given region of this world.

It is true that terror organizations stepped up their attacks after America and the coalition came to Iraq but at the same time more and more Iraqis are standing against terrorism and extremism and on the long term this is how our world will become a safer place…Enjoy the reading:"

Indeed I did, fellas...and I recommend that others click on the link above and do so as well. If you don't mind me quoting a famous Jewish poet, `the time's they are a changing'...at least they appear to be in Iraq.