Libya Gears Up for Elections

One of the biggest election events in Libyan history was held in Tripoli on Wednesday. The rally occurred just three days before the country’s parliamentary elections on Saturday. The vote will be Libya’s first free election in 42 years, and comes about eight months after its former leader, Muammar Qadhafi, was overthrown and killed.

Although campaigning for the July 7 elections has been fairly subdued, several thousand supporters of the Al Wattan party rallied in the nation’s capital on Wednesday. Party strongman Abdul Hakim Belhadj, a rising star in Libya’s new leadership, headlined the rally with a speech. Belhadj has had past ties to jihadi groups, and the Al Wattan party also has the backing of one of Libya’s leading clerics, Ali Salabi.

In early 2011, the revolution in Libya was just beginning and Western nations were still in the preparation stages of bringing down Qadhafi. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warned that Libya’s revolution would not be a victory for democracy, but for radical Islam. He said to watch Libya, because it was about to “make a severe and rapid turn into the radical Islamic camp.”

In February, author John Rosenthal proved that Qadhafi’s overthrow was not the organic, grassroots uprising that the Western media had painted it to be. Revealing facts that were uncovered by British court cases, United Nations files and several Western intelligence agencies, Rosenthal showed that the violent rebellion was years in planning, and that it was part of a calculated radical Islamist strategy. “[T]he uprising in Libya was the realization not of democratic aspirations, but of the longstanding ambitions of Islamic extremists,” Rosenthal wrote. “It was an ‘Islamist Spring’ that paved the way, for today’s ‘Islamist Winter,’” he said.

Watch for Libya’s upcoming elections to push the nation more solidly and more permanently into the Islamic camp.