Nouri Lumendifi agrees with the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Akbar Said) and believes that foreign intervention and/or poking and prodding can yield credible results when it comes to furthering democracy in the Arab world. Nouri says, “…there would never have been elections in the Gulf without American agitation. Democracy will never reach the Arabs unless they are aided in some way by foreigners who have already achieved democracy for themselves, because democracy is a foreign concept in Arab society and the nature of much of the current societies in the Arab world is extremely xenophobic and anti-democratic.”