Johann Hinrich Wichern proclaimed, "There is a Christian Socialism," at the Kirchentag Church Convention in Wittenberg [Germany] in 1848, the year of the publication of the Communist Manifesto and a wave of revolutions across Europe, and created the "Inner Mission" in order to address "works of saving love" to all suffering spiritual and physical distress.
Revolutions travel, and in the Arab world they travel faster: after the first world war, a wave of revolutions swept through the region: Egypt in 1919, Iraq in 1920, Syria in 1925, a guerrilla war in Palestine from 1922-35 and a full-scale popular revolt from 1936-39.
The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully (with the exception of the Romanian Revolution) overthrew all of the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe.
In the nineteenth century, a wave of nationalistic revolutions swept Europe and reached the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans.
There are a lot of Lenins in there, many of them pulled down during the Euromaidan – a wave of pre-revolution unrest in Ukraine – two years ago, the rest cast away by various groups and countries no longer as keen to celebrate the man responsible for the deaths of millions as they once were.
Since the 1980s a wave of "people-power" revolutions has swept aside tyrannies around the world.
And as a wave of protests and revolutions swept the Arab world in 2011, it became clear that the region's dictators had safeguarded their plundered wealth through intricate accounting practices.
Given the sweep of political conflict and religious extremism roiling the Arab world, Mr. Obama said, "it is tempting to turn inward, but this is precisely the time to respond to the wave of revolution with a resolve for peace".
Today, the political gains that accompanied the first wave of revolution have largely been reversed.
With the wave of revolution and violence that has engulfed the Middle East in the seven years since that day, Hezbollah's actions are now largely a footnote.
But the wave of revolution spreading through the Arab world has caught France unprepared, exposed its complicity in the region and weakened its voice.
