–an exasperated Dr. Ibrahim Kamel, entrepreneur and supporter of President Hosni Mubarak, arguing with a reporter on BBC Radio, Feb 3, 2011
Dr. Kamel asks a good question.
What would the collective reaction of the Western media be if, say, 50,000 supporters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) descended on Lafayette Park outside the White House, demanding that President Obama immediately resign?
Would these demonstrators be allowed to represent the will of an entire country of some 300 million people?
The snobby, snide BBC reporter who interviewed Dr. Kamel on Wednesday refused to engage with this line of questioning. He was more eager to humiliate his guest, and taunt Kamel with queries about when President Hosni Mubarak will step down and respect the will of his people.
Based on his dodging and ducking, the reporter’s answer to Kamel’s question, we can surmise, is “yes” – as far as Egypt goes, there’s no harm in mob rule. Whether the reporter would like the BBC’s editorial policies determined by mob rule is not yet known.
Who else will answer Kamel’s question in the affirmative? Iran’s leaders believe the answer is also “yes.” The mullahs see the crowds in Cairo’s streets as proof of the “awakening of the Islamic Egyptian people [and the rise of ] an Islamic liberation movement” that they “salute.”
(Again, like the BBC interviewer, however, it’s not at all clear the mullahs want to see Islamic liberation movements, or movements of any kind, rising up on the streets of Iranian cities. They typically deal with such actions in a harsh manner.)
The mullahs are wrong to see the riots as mainly religiously-inspired. But they are correct in calculating that a period of mob rule in Egypt represents their best-ever chance to embolden religious zealots in the Arab world to rise up, seize power and build Iranian-style Islamic Republics.
A starchy BBC interviewer and Iran’s ferocious mullahs in agreement on mob rule as desirable (or, at least not objectionable) for Egypt – who would have guessed it?
Myself, I favor Dr. Kamel’s stubborn insistence that noisy crowds of a certain size do not have an automatic right to determine who will lead a nation. I believe that the people of Egypt need to work out their problems among themselves, without foreign journalists or foreign religious leaders lecturing them.
This means I have to make an odd alliance of my own. Not many people seem ready yet to support Dr. Kamel’s argument. So far, the most prominent government to take up this view is Russia’s.
“We do not consider it is useful to produce any recipes from outside or to deliver ultimatums…We want today’s socio-economic and political problems to be peacefully solved as soon as possible.” So said Russia’s foreign minister this week.
BBC interviewers and mullahs alike may believe they answer to some higher power, and need not concern themselves much with practical issues, like whether mob rule in Egypt is all that desirable.
For the rest of us, the question of whether or not Egypt decays into mob rule is very important and very practical.
To paraphrase an ancient teaching, let’s not wish for others to suffer through something that we ourselves would never wish to endure.
