BAD VIBES FROM CAIRO – AT 10:37 P.M. ET:  Oh, do you remember the revolution in Egypt?  That was the one a few weeks ago, before Wisconsin.  Remember all the smiling Western reporters dancing in the streets over the "people's" revolution?  You know that reporters will be enthusiastic when the guy being overthrown is an American ally.  Take that, Yanks!

And now the details are emerging.  CBS reporter Lara Logan is beaten and raped by a mob of "the people."  A Pew poll shows that "the people" might just go for a gang of Iranian-style Islamic mullahs.  And a slick-talking fundamentalist preacher makes a triumphant return to Egypt, just like the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979.  (It's not the same thing as MacArthur returning to the Philippines, believe me.)  Legal Insurrection, a great blog run by a sane Cornell law professor named William A. Jacobson, laments what we are now seeing: 

The television screens were filled with stories of relatively western figures such as Google employee Wael Ghonim, who became the face of the new Egypt -- educated, professional, and desirous of freedom as we know it.

Now that Mubarek is gone, the western media mostly has moved on to the next revolution, secure in the perception that Egypt is moving in the right direction.

But that is a false comfort. As I posted yesterday, over a million Egyptians turned out in Tahrir Square last Friday to cheer the vile anti-Semitic Sunni cleric Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had been exiled by Mubarek, and who espouses the fundamentalist Islamic view that Jews must live as Dhimmis under Islamic control. Instead of accurately reporting the significance of this event, The New York Times whitewashed the cleric as someone who supports a "a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy."

And...

Where was the western hero Ghonim?

He tried to take the microphone to speak to the crowd, presumably to preach his western values, but he was kept off the stage by Sheik al-Qaradawi's security.

But you probably haven't heard that, because it was not widely reported, except by AFP:

Google executive Wael Ghonim, who emerged as a leading voice in Egypt's uprising, was barred from the stage in Tahrir Square on Friday by security guards, an AFP photographer said. Ghonim tried to take the stage in Tahrir, the epicentre of anti-regime protests that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, but men who appeared to be guarding influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi barred him from doing so.

Ghonim, who was angered by the episode, then left the square with his face hidden by an Egyptian flag.

This is the problem with those, like Roger Cohen in The New York Times, who glorify the "Arab Street." Ghonim was not the face of the "Arab Street," he merely was a face to which western media could relate.

Will the western media be as vigorous in exposing what is going on now in Egypt as it was in exposing the wrongs of Mubarek? I think not, because the truth -- that the western media acted as willing dupes once again -- hits too close to home.

COMMENT:  That is exactly right.  Once again, some reporters are becoming Lenin's useful idiots.  Add to Roger Cohen that most useful idiot of them all, The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof, who feels the pulse of the Egyptian people inside his Rhodes Scholar head, and who is scheduled to hear the pulse of some other people once he uses his frequent-flyer miles and checks into a new hotel. 

Fasten your seat belts, as Bette once said, it's going to be a bumpy two years.

February 20, 2011