Exiled in Britain

One of the reasons I believe this revolution sweeping the Arab world will not likely end badly (ie. with Islamists taking charge) is that fact that so many of the Middle East's leading intellectuals have spent much of their lives living in Europe or North America and thereby understand what democracy is all about. Some of them have been students. Some have been driven into exile by the regimes that crushed their homelands. Here is an article about one such exile living in Britain, a journalist, who has become a conduit for the voice of the Libyan people:

Libya: how an exile in Britain finds the chinks in Gaddafi's wall of silence

Of course, he has the advantage of technology devised by Westerners, which is certainly a critical sub-theme in this entirely astounding event unfolding across the Arab and Muslim world. These are some of his words:

"I only broke down once. And it was at a most unlikely moment. Not when someone was relaying some awful account of a massacre, but when one man in the middle of a demonstration congratulated me. It is the good manners of people facing death that gets you. He said "Hello" in that tone that over the past few days has become familiar to me, which says everything you need to know about the struggle between fear and hope, optimism and the abyss. When I introduced myself he said, "Congratulations, Mr Hisham, I hear you have a new book coming out."

Those, both his own and of the person he was speaking to, are words of hope.