The American leader should quickly call for democracy and regime change in Egypt, instead of settling for mere reform.
AJE writer in Cairo
Last Modified: 09 Feb 2011 17:24 GMT
Al Jazeera
Opposition supporters carry a huge Egyptian flag amid the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square [Reuters]
Dear President Obama,
From here at Tahrir Square, it seems clear that you are a very confused person. In your heart, you obviously want Egypt to become a democracy — what rational, ethical person wouldn’t? Yet it seems that you are being fed such a sream of propaganda and dire warmings about a take over of America’s most important Arab ally by Islamists and other anti-American forces that you seem to have decided to sell Egyptians up the river Nile in order to protect US “interests” against this frightening prospect.
I could explain how this is total nonsense, how the Muslim Brothers are not at all the dominant force here, how the movement is divided, especiallygenerationally, and how Tahrir represents an unprecedented co-mingling of old and young, rich and poor, secular and religious, and political persuasions of every type. But surely you’ve been told that in your briefings, or at least read it in the more astute journalistic analyses of events on the ground here.
And yet you still can´t just bring yourself to throw the full weight of your office behind the most important revolution in a generation, your very own Tiananmen Square and Berlin Wall at the same time.
I have a solution for you to break the impasse inside your head; come to Tahrir Square now, before its too late. Spend one afternoon, or better one night, and I can assure you all doubts about which side in this epic struggle to support will be erased. Don’t worry, you will be safe here. Indeed, you will never feel safer.
Mr President, you’ve no doubt heard that this is a “Facebook revolution”. But in fact the real leaders are not Facebookers but five year olds, the majority of them little girls, who from 8am till 1am are carried around the square and lead the people in song, singing newly crafted limericks against Mubarak and his henchmen. In particular Vice President Omar Suleiman, of whom you seem so enamored, are the subjects of anger and scorn. You should know why this is the case, since Suleiman has plied his ugly trade of oppression and torture for the direct benefit of the US government. Do you really want to be denounced in the same sentence as Suleiman and Mubarak? Shouldn’t that give you pause?
You have clearly been convinced that unless the very people responsible for Egypt’s sad state of affairs are given more power to lead the country, it will fall into anarchy. Come and let yourself be swept through a crowd of half a million people or more, moving against each other like powerful ocean currents, which at any moment could explode into a violent stampede. And yet not a single person panics or is harmed.
Listen to the voices of hundreds of people, each one, with her or his own megaphone, shouting out their particular philosophy, ideology or agenda, while tens of thousands of people parade by, stop for a few minutes, and move on to hear the next one. What has been created here is the perfect amalgam of a pre-modern and postmodern public sphere — high-tech tweets meeting the most intimate forms of human communication. It is a glimpse of politics at its purest.
Yes, technology is crucial — it seems everyone here is either on their mobile talking to someone or snapping photos or video with their phones and updating their Facebook pages. But that’s actually incidental to the most important dynamic, which is that people are talking to each other in ways that has rarely if ever happened here (and sadly hasn’t happened in the US in far too long). Source Article
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