Oh no! Ghannouchi is back. Will Tunisia fall to burqitude? What if Egypt goes Islamist, the real fear that we're supposed to have? Panic! Despair! Hey our American or "Western" principles all become "democracy, shmemocracy" when there are bearded sharia-creepers around.

Folks, anti-Islamism is vastly overrated and possibly far more deadly than the condition itself. It was the reason for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which led to the Taliban and binLaden), the rationale for decades of Western sponsoring Saddam Hussein especially in one of the region's bloodiest wars (Iran-Iraq), the cause and excuse for endless Israeli delays and repressions and ultimately unsuccessful splatterings of Lebanon, the perennial excuse of Mubarak today and Nasser yesteryear for creating generations-long vampire police states, the excuse for Ben Ali to gouge a nation, the cause of clumsy backfiring attempts by the US to influence local Pakistani politics, the reason for Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to decimate one of his own cities, a good part of the reason Lebanon slaughtered itself for years, a good part (yes!) of the reason Syria intervened in Lebanon initially, a central part of the reason the corrupt elements of the Palestinian Authority get tons of Western and even Israeli aid, the reason for the frustration of a genuine democratic regime change in Algeria which led a gruesome civil war in the 1990s.

It is the reason the US is starting to shred its time-honored constitution, set up no-charges detention camps, have popular quasi-pogroms against houses of worship, and probe the genitals of its traveling public.

All this because Khomeini made the US mad and scared, and because Israel still hasn't fathomed why the Palestinians are really pissed off, and because women and others are socially repressed in backward societies, something which happened and would happen with or without Islamism (though it has made it worse), but will unhappen with normal progress.

And anti-Islamism also becomes an excuse to sacrifice all basic principle because one briefly successful industrialized criminal Islamist Pancho Villa and crew can blow up several buildings and airplanes in intermiittent and generally unpopular among Muslims murders .

And because we can't even find him, we have to live in unprincipled and ridiculously clumsy fear of everything that reminds us of him (even when those things are quite varied in themselves or actually unrelated).

Meanwhile democracy means democracy. It's not hard.