I believe Democracy to be a political system which, in an imperfect world, is as close to perfection as any human creation can become. Ideally it is also the ultimate guarantor of personal freedom, a concept which, in my humble opinion, should be treasured by every sane human being anywhere on this globe. For that same reason, I am as attached to it as I am to my own heart.
Yet, for all my reverence, I have to concede that it exhibits one major flaw: it guarantees constitutional rights to people whose ideologies, be they political or religious, constitute the very antithesis of the democratic concept, and who, more often than not, actively work to pervert it or even to destroy it. Therefore, political and religious bigots are always mindful of the fact that such rights are a golden highway for the establishment of the most perverse forms of dictatorship that a twisted human mind can conceive.
It is at that point that your freedom and my freedom become irreparably endangered. So, unless we want to risk getting to that point, we must, in all earnest, ask ourselves the following crucial question: until when will Cleopatra continue to allow the viper to bite her bosom?
