The Egyptian revolution is coming– to the U.S.A.

Philip Weiss

The Egyptian revolution is sure to have a great victory within days: the ouster of Mubarak. But a greater victory even than that will be the liberation of American thinking from the crude paradigms about the Middle East that have held our political imagination in such thrall for 50 years. I speak as someone who for all my liberalism was also captured by those paradigms, who so doubted the Arab world I would never have dared to imagine what is happening in Cairo.

But today the darers and dreamers of Tahrir Square hold up signs in English because they know they are leading me too
The liberation of American thinking is evident all around us but nowhere so much as in the sudden and utterly-deserved stardom of blogger Mona Eltahaway and academic Tarek Masoud. These people have become our guides. Brian Lehrer of WNYC features Eltahawy on the ad for his show, and NPR this morning questioned Masoud about Islamism. No doubt, uninformed people like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post will continue to get a platform in the MSM to spout cliches about Islam. But you now hear Fawaz Gerges on the radio, and Lawrence Wilkerson too. The best example of this shift in culture was on Fareed Zakaria's panel Sunday. He gathered three Establishment types, former ambassador Martin Indyk and the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haas and Steven Cook, but Masoud was there, and he led the conversation. He said that the U.S. has been on the wrong side of history for years, that it has prized stability not democracy, or by implication justice, for 50 years. The pleasure and amazement was watching Cook and Indyk agree with him, even defer to Masoud's understanding, because he is so smart and reasonable. Though, yes, Haas had a long face.
Read more