Maybe being the one sticking out among your neighbors isn't always a good thing.
Yes it is. It's not functioning well at the moment, but it is a democracy.
"Democracy" to these people very specifically means "Western aligned democracy".
Everything else is labelled "not a democracy" and is thus a target of regime change to forcefully align them with the west.
It’s not functioning well at the moment,
Ηmmm reminds me of some other country...
And the Soviets went into Afghanistan to support the democratically elected government, but since when has context mattered to anyone?
Did they? The Democratic Republics of Afghanistan seized power militarily and only carried out elections a decade after the Soviet intervention began.
A "democracy" where 40% of the population living on the territory it claims sovereignty over are denied even the most basic human rights, let alone the right to participate in the "democratic" process, and are kep in Bantustans that are essentially open-air prisons.
Except the obvious reasons It's also not out of the ordinary. Israel gets grouped in with Europe in a bunch of things like sports and culture.
It does get a lot of its morals from 1950s America, which in turn gets a lot of its morals from puritanical Christianity. The mythology of Scientology is a mix of pulp science fiction and an orientalist version of Buddhism though. Practically speaking, it's a vehicle for funneling money and slave labour to its upper echelons. Rhetorically, they bill themselves as a sort of self-help thing to begin with, and a lot of the initial ritual is "self-help".
So functionally capitalist with spiritual aesthetics? I thought you said it wasn't Christianity based?? huehuehe
They specifically call them churches and use a cross symbol to obfuscate the fact that they're a weird self-help pseudoscience space cult
