Category: Timely

Our Woman in Cairo

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Yasmin Moll, a Ph.D. student in socio-cultural anthropology at NYU, has been our woman in Cairo, reporting what she saw during and after the protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign.  I asked Yasmin last week what she thought of George Friedman’s analysis of the events.  Friedman, editor and CEO of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence service, writes in “Egypt: The Distance Between Enthusiasm and Reality“:

What we see is that while Mubarak is gone, the military regime in which he served has dramatically increased its power.

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CPAC and The Problem of the Conservative Woman

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Amanda Hess writes in her article for TBD, “The Evolution of the Conservative Woman”:

But in the conservative movement, real women are still hard to come by. Despite the high-profile women headlining this year’s CPAC, male speakers on the main convention floor outnumbered women ten-to-one. In the 112th Congress, over 75 percent of female officeholders are on the other side of the aisle. And CPAC attendance has hovered at 30 percent female since 2007. At the conference’s conclusion, two college-aged men stand in front of a flat-screen television, their eyes glued to a bar graph illustrating the conference’s gender disparity. One of the boys shakes his head, turns to his friend, and says: “Sausage fest.”

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Friday's Reflections: Egypt Rises…And Triumphs

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Yasmin Moll: After 30 years of autocratic rule, Mubarak stepped down today. The announcement came around 6 pm Cairo time. I had just finished giving an interview to a documentary filmmaker where I expressed great fear that Mubarak will continue to defy the demands of millions of Egyptians and cling to power. I have never been so happy to be so wrong.

Today is not just Egypt’s day – today is for all people living under despotic regimes and yearning to be free, especially in the Middle East. First the Tunisians and now the Egyptians have shown them that what just a little over a month ago seemed impossible is possible.

Indeed, February 11 2011 will go down in history not so much as the day Mubarak’s rule crumbled, but as the day the will of ordinary citizens triumphed. And contrary to the expectations of many, they triumphed not through violent upheaval, but through peaceful protest.

Tomorrow Egyptians will face some tough question marks about the future. But tonight we celebrate. Continue Reading →

Friday’s Reflections: Egypt Rises…And Triumphs

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Yasmin Moll: After 30 years of autocratic rule, Mubarak stepped down today. The announcement came around 6 pm Cairo time. I had just finished giving an interview to a documentary filmmaker where I expressed great fear that Mubarak will continue to defy the demands of millions of Egyptians and cling to power. I have never been so happy to be so wrong.

Today is not just Egypt’s day – today is for all people living under despotic regimes and yearning to be free, especially in the Middle East. First the Tunisians and now the Egyptians have shown them that what just a little over a month ago seemed impossible is possible.

Indeed, February 11 2011 will go down in history not so much as the day Mubarak’s rule crumbled, but as the day the will of ordinary citizens triumphed. And contrary to the expectations of many, they triumphed not through violent upheaval, but through peaceful protest.

Tomorrow Egyptians will face some tough question marks about the future. But tonight we celebrate. Continue Reading →

Enter the Dragon: How Al Gore, the U.N., Earth First!, and an Episcopalian Bishop are All in Cahoots… with Satan

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by Jack Downey

In 1964, Richard Hofstadter published a rather enduring essay in Harper’s Magazine that succeeded, if nothing else, in accomplishing what most (egomaniacal) writers only fantasize about: he coined a new phrase that had legs, and has proved a valuable addition to our intellectual lexicon.1 “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” investigated the social psychology behind the contemporary rise of the anti-intellectual “Radical Right,” and witnessed profound similarities between his allegedly secular subjects – although the distinction is not as clean as he seems to hope (especially in his treatment of anti-Catholicism) – and Christian millenarianism:

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind…2 The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regards a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events.

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Christian Porn: Tackling the Elephant in the Pews

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by Clint Rainey

Some pastors view Super Bowl Sunday and church attendance as inverses—if the first, less of the second. (The joke is pastors conclude their sermons the week before that second holiest of Sundays with “See you in two weeks.”) But this year, replete with bizarre props, attracting media attention like iron filings, Pastor Craig Gross decided to try riding on the game’s coattails to a victorious inverse of his own: Christians and porn use.

Through XXXChurch.com, the “#1 Christian porn site,” Gross runs Porn Sunday—this year, for the first time, Super Porn Sunday—to get churches to confront Christian porn use, what his ministry calls the “elephant in the pews.” For the weekend’s festivities, he moved his hub from Las Vegas to Dallas, home of Super Bowl XLV, where he tweeted pics of his car in the city’s freak snowstorm and complained about Texans he believes didn’t know how to drive in it. Sunday, he was 30 miles away from Cowboys Stadium in the Addison Conference Center. More than 350 church services that morning simulcast a 35-minute video he put together with a lineup of NFL players: quarterbacks Matt Hasselbeck and John Kitna (who tells us his Pandora’s porn box opened with Janet Jackson’s exposed breast) and Ryan Pickett, the Packers’ defensive end. “I would love to have been with you guys today,” he says at the start of the tape. “But fortunately, I’m a little busy.” Continue Reading →

We Are All Egyptians

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by Yasmin Moll

There are tens of thousands of Egyptians in Tahrir today. And there are millions of Egyptians who are not.

If we believe some international media outlets and domestic opposition papers, these groups make up two distinct camps: those for democracy and those for Mubarak. And if we believe the state press, the dividing line is between trouble-making youths allied with “foreign agents” and law-abiding citizens.

From the vantage point of those of us in Cairo, however, the picture is much more complex, fluid and messy. And simplifying it for the sake of a sexy story or a catchy headline risks marginalizing the many Egyptians from all classes and backgrounds whose political stances don’t fit neatly into one or the other of these categories.

Take my friend Mansour.* On January 28th he and I attended the protest downtown after Friday prayer. Marching peacefully along with hundreds of others up Kasr Al-Aini street, we were met with a volley of tear-gas fired by the central security police blocking access to Tahrir Square. Continue Reading →