Just hours before he announced his decision to step down, President Hosni Mubarak, in a phone conversation with Israeli parliament member Binyamin Bin Eliezer, warned that Muslim extremists would take over Egypt if his regime collapses.

Mubarak's warning did not surprise the former Israeli minister of Defence, as well as other West Asia experts in the US and Europe.

Like most of the secular dictators ruling the Arab world, Mubarak has long been using the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as an excuse to cling on to power.

These dictators have been telling the West that the Muslim Brotherhood (the Ikhwaneen), Hamas, Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad are the only alternative to their corrupt regimes.

Exploiting the West's growing fear of radical Islam, the Arab dictators promised to crack down on the religious extremists.

True, Mubarak and ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abidin Ben Ali did take strong measures against Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic groups in their countries.

But Mubarak and Ben Ali also cracked down harshly on secular democrats and reformists, targeting political opponents, newspaper editors, human rights activists and others.

At the same time in a political sleight of hand, Mubarak and Ben Ali made sure that the Muslim Brotherhood groups did not vanish altogether. The two dictators needed the radical Muslims around so that they could continue using them to scare the West and as an excuse to remain in power indefinitely.

In fact, by targeting the secular opposition in their countries, Mubarak and Ben Ali drove many of their constituents into the open arms of islamic extremists and prevented the emergence of a third way option.

This explains why the predominantly young secular Facebook generation who toppled Mubarak and Ben Ali don’t have a leadership.

For decades, both Mubarak and Ben Ali regarded the secular opposition as the main threat to their totalitarian regimes. That’s why they unleashed their mukhabarat [secret police] against Western-educated liberal and pro-democracy secular figures who dared to rise against dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia. Now, in the absence of secular leaderships, it’s more than likely that the well-organised Islamist groups would, sooner or later, come to power in the Arab world. Muslim Brotherhood followers in Egypt and Tunisia have dealt in a very clever manner with the crises in their countries.

Aware of the West’s fears, Muslim fundamentalists preferred to hide in the shadows while the Facebook and Twitter protesters took to the main squares to demand the removal of the dictators.