This is a question that has been asked over and over again in the West, despite tons of information about the Libyan Revolution being available from both quality journalists and the Free Libyans themselves. Reporting on the "rebels" has mostly been from the east of Libya, where the Libyan National Transitional Council has has been set up as an interim government in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city. Until recently, the fact that the Libyan people have also freed themselves from the Gaddafi Regime throughout large parts of the west of Libya had all but been ignored by many in the western media.
When I last wrote about Libya, I demonstrated that the Libyan Revolution had been a mostly peaceful, countrywide uprising, which had only turned violent when Gaddafi's forces started slaughtering demonstrating Libyans with anti-aircraft guns, tanks, and artillery shelling.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
The Gaddafi Regime has tried to paint a very different picture of the "rebels" with its propaganda machine, accusing them of being Al Qaeda, ecstasy-taking drug addicts, foreigners, Israeli agents, criminals, etc., etc. Some of this propaganda has been parrotted by people in the west and has even sometimes found its way in to mainstream reporting.
Now that independent media are increasingly on the ground in the free parts of western Libya and the Libyans themselves have been able to better communicate directly with the world because of repaired phone services, we are seeing just how ridiculous and dishonest the Gaddafi Regime propaganda has been. In the Nafousa Mountain Range, south of Tripoli, where both Amazigh(Berber) and Arab Libyans have been pushing back Gaddafi Regime forces, the Washington Post's William Booth provides us with some compelling insight into the mentality, desires, and nature of the people who have risen up against the Gaddafi Regime there.
Among Libyan rebels, reluctant warriors
By William Booth, Monday, July 18,
JADU, Libya — As armed rebellions go, the enthusiastic revolutionaries here in Libya’s western mountains are amateurs, many schooled in battle from playing video games. They confess they sometimes fire their rifles over the heads of their enemies because they don’t like the sight of blood.
But being bad at war might turn out to be a good thing for Libya.
As a few thousand poorly armed, barely trained young rebels wearing flip-flops and soccer jerseys advance and retreat against the loyalist forces of Moammar Gaddafi, a quiet but perhaps equally important revolution is taking place here behind the front lines, where people are reassembling a society after four decades of dictatorship, trying to hammer concepts such as democracy onto ancient tribal ways.
At a checkpoint near the front lines in the town of al-Qualish, as the two sides lobbed rockets at each other, a young rebel fighter with a rifle dating from the Italian occupation in the first half of the 20th century shouted to a reporter, “Thomas Jefferson good!”
Booth confirms that, like in Benghazi and Misrata, Libya's second and third largest cities, this is a civilian-driven uprising, with people being eager to establish a more egalitarian, pluralistic, and informed society. And contrary to what is said by Gaddafi Regime propagandists, they are very obviously
not blood-thirsty extremists.
The rebels want to take Tripoli, they want to remove Gaddafi and his sons, but they don’t want to slaughter a lot of people to do it. That is, at least, what they say now.
“Because later, we will have to make a country together,” said Ibrahim Taher, a teacher who commands 130 men.
Members of the new city councils are as likely to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as the Koran. Rebel military commanders say they wish they didn’t have to shoot at fellow Libyans. They are slightly less squeamish about shooting at foreign fighters dragged into the conflict from poor nations such as Mali and Niger.
A common reason given for the slowness of the advance toward Tripoli?
“There are too many families in the way,” said Jamu Ibrahim, a top rebel leader in Zintan.
As in other parts of Libya, these "rebels" are regular people, who desire alot of the very same things that all human beings of conscience desire.
Some days, it seems that half of the rebel leaders are engineers — and the other half are schoolteachers. “Most of our battalion are university graduates,” said Mabrouk Saleh, a lawyer who commands 130 men in Zintan, a center for the rebel forces, where 115 fighters have died in the five-month civil war.
snip
Asked what kind of government they would like to see if Gaddafi surrenders power, a member of the Jadu transitional government, the animated Salem Badrini, said, “First, we want a country of love, where all are equal, all the same. We all say these things: We want justice, democracy and freedom, no arguments, no problems, okay?”
That is a fairly typical answer.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
It breaks my heart to see such kind, generous, thoughtful, and innovative people having to take up arms in order to achieve freedoms that many of us take for granted.
A friend of mine, who is currently filming in Misrata, recently wrote me a facebook message stating that the people there are generous and kind to an extent that she had not been able to imagine, and that she was not used to from her life in Europe.
While the Gaddafi Regime will surely continue to rant about "ecstacy-popping Al Qaeda criminals", it has become increasingly clear that the Libyans are an incredibly brave people who fully deserve the support of all nations and people with a conscience, and a desire to see people enjoying the basic human rights that everyone across the globe should be able to enjoy.