More often than not, revolutions take place in conjunction with violence of the zealous and fanatical kind, with a burning question ever in mind: Are revolutions a transient gateway for perpetuated violence, or is violence a transient gateway for revolutions that usher in a new and better world? In the case of the Arab revolutions, perhaps, this concomitance reached a peak in Libya, where violent radical groups took advantage of the revolutionary climate to murder the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi. On a much smaller scale, groups affiliated with the Syrian uprising have been engaged in acts that border on being violent for violence's sake, which has nothing to do with the revolution and its objectives. In reality, the optimism that has surrounded the eruption of peaceful uprisings, beginning with Tunisia, has suggested that zealous violence was going to be pushed into the fringe, until it finally withers and dies. This optimism, however, had a strong proof in reality to back it. When the U.S. troops managed to take out Osama bin Laden, the master of that kind of violence, this event did not preoccupy many. Indeed, the revolutions, which were taking up all the limelight, walked past the corpse of the ‘Sheikh of the Mujahedeen' that was cast into the sea, without paying much attention to it. In a sense, it seemed that those uprisings, while they were toppling regimes, were also toppling al-Qaeda and its violence. But it turned out later that things are more complicated than this simplistic interpretation. Indeed, between prolonging the conflict by the regimes and their inviting of jihadi violence, as is the case in Yemen but especially in Syria; and between the ramifications and implications of the uprisings, as was the case in Libya in the conflict with weapons and fighters going out of control; we now face a reality that says revolution and violence will remain juxtaposed until a further time when one of them would end the other. Today, we find this juxstaposition unfolding in the national sphere of some countries. But we also encounter it, on a much larger regional scale, in northern Mali, not far from the birthplaces of the Tunisian and Libyan revolutions, with preparations currently taking place to turn this African nation into the equivalent of Taliban-style Afghanistan. It is no exaggeration to say that the Arab uprisings that have triumphed are required to address such problems more than the West is. For one thing, while jihadi violence may be a security concern for the West (which is not unlikely to intervene militarily in Mali), it is a much bigger concern for the revolutions themselves. This is because the jihadi role, in addition to the security risks it poses to the countries where it operates, threatens the revolutions in both their meaning and their objectives, and forces them to dissociate themselves from it and to seek to sever the compulsory juxtaposition with it. In Syria's case, it is clear that the West, particularly the United States, is pushing in the direction of accelerating this severance and is helping the rebels to achieve it. If Western support for the revolution is going to be greater, with the new American administration, then what is certain is that the revolution must meet these efforts halfway. The reason is that the party that will help the rebels will no doubt ask them to help it back in a battle against those who are the enemies of both the ‘Crusader' West and the Arab revolutions in their pursuit of freedom. In short, the battle with the jihadi tendencies, whether in Syria or elsewhere on a national scale, or Mali on a regional one, is an opportunity for revolutions that must not be missed, to prove that they are what they claim to be, that is to say, revolutions and not episodes of violence – as their opponents who want them to be thus claim they are.
