Middle East Nations Riot Over High Food Prices

Mosaic News – 1/06/11: World News From The Middle East

The grievances in Tunisia are similar to those elsewhere in north Africa: Rising prices, repression, grotesque corruption and unemployment.

Something is happening in predominently muslim-arab populated countries in northern Africa, and the arab world in general. Call it an awakening if you will, but protesters in large amounts, of all ages, are taking to the streets, rioting not against Israel and the Jews, or the west,  but are angry at   their own  totalitarian leaderships and governments  over high food prices, lack of employment and human rights issues, while their  dictators live in luxury.

Starting in Tunisia, whose government was just overthrown last week with Tunisia’s dictator President fleeing to Saudi Arabia, while his lavish wife is believed to be holed up in Dubai,   the riots have spread to Algeria and Morocco.

“Tunisia was in a state of complete and full dictatorship, with no outlets for expression,” wrote Abdel Rahman Mansour, a journalist and blogger

And it hasn’t stopped in these African nations. Neighboring Egypt too is being affected, as hundreds of Egyptians have poured into the streets, warning authoritarian president, Hosni Mubarak. And in neighboring Middle East muslim Jordan, Jordanians have taken to the streets venting their anger at the government’s inaction to curtail rising food prices, while the leadership themelves lives in luxury. One spokesperson at the protest in Jordan said:

“We are protesting the policies of the government — high prices and repeated taxation that made the Jordanian people revolt,” Tawfiq al-Batoush, a former head of Karak municipality, told Reuters at the protest outside Karak’s Al Omari mosque.

One cause is the skyrocketing price of oil itself, which has quadrupled since 2002. It is helping push many ordinary people toward poverty even as it stimulates a new surge of economic growth in the gulf.

Waiting to take over,  and instigating  on the sidelines, of course, are your homegrown   Middle East Israel hating  terror groups and The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s opposition,  backed by Iran. The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization for Hamas and some of the groups that recently merged into al-Qaeda, including Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

These riots that are rapidly spreadly over muslim north Africa and the Middle East tell us how rapidly things are changing in the dangerous  world and times we live in.   And we haven’t even hit a ‘global scale’ riot and civil unrest from skyrocketing food prices that hit a record high this past December. Much worse times are indeed coming. Are we witnessing a taste of what John the Revelator warned about in Revelation 6:5-6? Written by: Toni Toni