I crashed last night on Egypt. The sense that a deal is in the works that will sell out the young people in Tahrir Square, the sense that the U.S. and the authoritarian Egyptian regime are still working hand in glove, the inevitability of the Israel lobby as a factor. At dinner, my wife said to me, It’s going to take a long way to work its way out. Great things are happening. Then I thought about when the paper, The Israel Lobby, came out in the LRB five years ago and I ran around the house with my six-guns going and shouting, It’s high noon! High noon for the Israel lobby! Well, these things take a while. People in Washington had to read it in brown paper bags.
After dinner I watched a lot of TV and took heart. Mona Eltahawy is always exciting.
She sees it as her job to rally the west, not to let our spirits flag. Not to be at all pessimistic. She spoke with joy of the Wael Ghonim story— the google executive who was just released by Egyptian authorities after 12 days in jail. It is a beautiful story. This young man came back to Egypt from a fancy job in Dubai to liberate his country, he is as indifferent to the blandishments of corporate/elite life as the well-educated hijackers were ten years ago, but for completely different reasons. And on seeing the photos of the dead after 12 blindfolded days behind the bars, Ghonim sobbed and apologized to their parents before excoriating the regime. What a human being!! What a spirit! I want to learn everything about this man.
Then later on Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN, he spotlighted Khalid Abdallah, a British-Egyptian actor who has chosen to be in Egypt for the same reason, to fight for his society, for social justice, freedom of expression, the right of assembly… He is optimistic. He spoke by Skype from a high-ceilinged room in Cairo, and I recognized the space. An old house. An open window on the streets and rooftops and cats of gracious old Cairo.
You can see that Cooper is radicalized by his experience in Egypt. He talked about the gov’t “lies” repeatedly last night and raced ahead of Abdallah to lay out the cruelness of the regime. He identifies fully with the youth of Tahrir Square, feels loyalty to their cause. I sense that this is not some one-off for young Cooper, that he is with us. He knows that America must change for Egypt to change; and that it is vital to show Americans the people who so affected him in Cairo, the Khalid Abdallahs who can reverse our stupid racist images of the Arab world.
We need heroes to keep this revolution alive. Let journalists find the charismatic leaders and tell their thrilling stories. We have time now, let us dig deep to learn their stories. The New Yorker must do a big piece telling us how the revolution came about, 60 Minutes must also do the story, and we will meet these people and hear what they care about. Facebook is one thing, now let us put a face on the revolution.
[Update: Please go watch Wael Ghonim’s interview at the top of this page. Staggering intellectual and moral leadership. Our only agenda was the love of Egypt. Now is not the time to impose ideologies…]
