Have Americans become risk-averse to freedom?

">"If you think yourself a man, then come with me on January 25th..."


And the rest is, as they say, history.
With those words, Asmaa Mahfouz, a young woman brimming with courage, challenged the men of her nation to take a stand for freedom. Little did they know it, but those men and women who chose to accompany her one week later to the heart of Egypt were making a date with world history.

Although Asmaa's passionate appeal turned out to be a perfectly-timed ultimatum, the basis for her urgent Tahrir call is nothing new in Egypt. The cauldron of discontent has been heating steadily for many years. Now it is boiling over. Mubarak and his crew saw it coming, but instead of reforming their police state--as elected leaders should do--his government sought to repress the grievances of their people.

As it turns out, now with the going forth of a young woman's impassioned youtube message, the captive genie of justice has been released from its bottle. No, the basis for demanding reform through free elections is not a new development in Egypt.

In 1993, Edward M. Said wrote:

"With literally no exceptions, every Egyptian I know and have discussed these matters with for the past half dozen years says the same disaffected, even disgusted things about the government. Deals on every conceivable commodity are made by middlemen and commission agents, usually with some minister or Mubarak-in-law as a front; public discourse is so devaluated that it is virtually impossible to tell the truth; the country is in effect ruled by a series of autocratic measures licensing the government to stop articles in newspapers, to jail and torture dissidents under emergency laws passed by Sadat but still in force now, and to prevent unions, political organizations, secular human rights groups from assembly or action."

"We just want our human rights and nothing else..." pleaded Asmaa, on her grainy, un-hyped video posting of January 18.
"If you have honor and dignity as a man, come! Come and protect me and other girls in the protest..."

And come they did, by the hundreds of thousands.

Now cautious, comfortable people around the world are asking: Does this impetuous demand for popular government portend a soon-to-come takeover by Islamofascists? Does it pave the way for usurpation of rising democratic impulses by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other extremist groups?

That could happen, yes. Freedom is always a huge risk. Recall from your middle school social studies class what our founders risked in order to emancipate themselves from the burdens of King George III.

But the freedom and prosperity of the people of Egypt is worth taking that risk.

As a Christian who supports Israel, I say: Go for it, Egyptians! Go for freedom and justice. Go for constitutional government.

And as a born-free American, my insistence on freedom of assembly--my conviction that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth--requires that Egyptian citizens must be allowed to elect, in internationally-validated elections, their own leaders. And those elections should be arranged as soon as possible, before Mubarak's crew has time to neutralize the presently positive thrust toward reformative democracy-- and even, perhaps, before extremist elements have the chance to get their explosive ducks in a row.

It's time for the people of Egypt to vote! United Nations, figure out how to make it happen, and how to effectively moniter those elections so that they are, as many have advocated, "free and fair."

This could be a grand lesson in democracy for every nation of the world, including our friends the Israelis.

Glass half-Full

From bitches to burqas

We in America and other postchristian societies have among us a widespread cadre of libertines whose identity is founded upon crossing the old fuddy-duddy moral boundaries. A voraciously sensuous video-cinema media/web feeds the frenzy of sex obsession that goes viral every time a new star is found among the constellation of party-down celebrity icons.
From Hemingway to Kerouac to Hefner to James Dean, James Bond and the Jagger blather, through Gurley Brown, gaypride and Gaga, downward toward gahenna, ever-more-permissive westerners celebrate their taboo-busting liberation. Woohoo.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Muslims say no thank you to all that western decadence. One way that they public reject our degenerative licentiousness is by seeking to embrace their legalistic Islamic heritage. Women wearing burqa and hajib is the most obious religious practice by which the neo-Islamists publicly refuse to submit to Euro/American hedonism.
As a Christian who has struggled most of my life to resist sexual provocation of all kinds, I can relate to their resistance.

The aidsy-douchy end of our libertine ways takes many forms: sexually transmitted diseases; epidemic abortions; disappearance of romantic love, of fidelity and of marriage itself. I came across a video this morning that illustrates how far our descent into the libido inferno has taken us. Its one of those undercover videos stealthily obtained at a Planned Parenthood office in New Jersey by a faking pimp/prostitute due. Its a real ear-opener:
http://www.redstate.com/mdannenfelser/2011/02/01/planned-parenthood-caught-aiding-and-abetting-sex-trafficking-of-minors/

Meanwhile, there are among us a few sycophants who have traveled the paths of liberality and lived to tell about it. Phyllis Chesler, erstwhile feminist/neoconservative shares her concerns today--prompted by the current rumblings in Egypt--about the victimization of women in fundamentalist Islam. She posts an alarm today about the trend among women in Islamic countries back to the burqa and the hajib. She includes some "revealing" photos:
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/02/01/am-i-the-only-one-troubled-by-cairo-street-scenes/

The class pictures show, as Phyllis says, "Cairo University graduates in 1959, 1978, 1995, and 2004. Clearly, there is a progression—a regression really, in terms of women’s rights. Former feminist gains have, increasingly, been washed away."

Most of the students in the earlier pics appear very much like you or I would have dressed for a class portrait in 1959, '78, or '95. But the 2004 photo with the Cairo women mostly clothed in burqa and hajib is real eye-opener.

I can see Phyllis' point about the "Islamization" of women in Muslim cultures. From a democratic standpoint, I share her concern, especially with the looming possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood strongarming their way into power in post-Mubarak Egypt.

On the other hand, the Islamists have a legitimate point. It just could be that societies function better when women are willing to keep themselves modestly clothed. In that sense, I think the revolution in Egypt, and even the one that happened in Iran, is about more than politics. Its about the clashing worlds of fundamentalism and libertinism.

As for me and where I stand on this--I'm caught in the middle, like many an existentialist post-religiot westerner, and like many an Egyptian citizen standing in Tahrir right now, somewhere between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mubarak police.

Glass Chimera