BERLUSCONI VIEWED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES (Roger Cohen)

This is an op-ed colimn by ROGER COHEN published on February 21, 2011 in the New York Times


BERLUSCONI'S ARAB DANCER
  LONDON — It says something about the miserable European response to the Arab spring that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s personal contribution to North African affairs — his alleged liaison with a then-17-year-old Moroccan dancer — only just takes the prize for most abject performance

His foreign minister, Franco Frattini, was not far behind with his response to the brave uprising of the Tunisian people that ousted the longtime dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali: “Priority number one is the deterrence of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist cells.”

All manner of worthy things may be wished for Arabs just across the Mediterranean — and they were by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fatuous brainchild, the 43-member Union for the Mediterranean — but of course democracy and freedom are not among them.

In his own way the aging multibillionaire Berlusconi — with his too-black hair and his fawning entourage and his control of the media and his private villas and his debasement of the Italian state — has aped the manners of the very Arab despots the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia and Libya and Bahrain have risen to oust. Like them he has confused self and nation, entranced by the cult of his personality.

Or, and it hardly matters which, these Arab dictators and their business acolytes have aped Berlusconi, mimicking the worst of the West while bringing nothing of its political openness, creating a valueless simulacrum of moneyed European sophistication while their people languished without the most basic rights the European Union upholds.

Designer labels without freedom of speech or the rule of law constitute a virulent form of contemporary savagery.

Berlusconi epitomizes a long trans-Mediterranean connivance with Arab subjugation — a marriage of convenience that condemned Arabs to be supplicants (Moroccan dancers there to titillate). Men and women across North Africa have taken to the streets to overturn this dignity-denying status quo. They want to stand on their own two feet rather than forever being cast as peoples in decline.

A judge, Cristina Di Censo, has now indicted Berlusconi, 74, on charges that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, Karima el-Mahroug, who has denied having sex with him. People power, Italian-style, brought a half-million protesters into the streets on Feb. 13.

I’d say this particular Italian soap has run long enough: A leader more consumed with his virility and Arab women one quarter his age than with governance does not serve Italy well.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen .

Picture: gallery.panorama.it