“Of all the promise of the Arab Spring [..] perhaps the greatest was the idea that the region could escape the paralyzing political trap that offered Western-backed dictatorship or radical Islamism as its only alternatives. These repressive Arab societies — so illustrative of Western hypocrisy in their power structures, so deadening to the hopes of the young, so shot through with nepotism and cronyism, so distant from a glimpsed modernity — resembled factories for militant Islam rather than bulwarks against it. When the only place to gather is the mosque, when ‘secular’ equals Western-backed dictatorship and when ‘elections’ amount to a rigged farce, the consolation of the Islamist cause grows.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/opinion/global/the-egyptian-debacle.html?_r=0