Saturday, January 29, 2011

Well, This Morning's Twitter

...has this to say:
"Thousands are on the streets of #Egypt, #Mubarak is the only one respecting his #curfew! #jan25 #Egypt The revolution continues."
and
"Doctor at Sayyed Galal Hospital, Cairo tells BBC live bullets have been fired on protesters"
and
"We keep saying that Arab youth have no good role models. Now they have thousands of them"
And from Sandmonkey:
"yesterday chants "not baradei, not Ikhwan (brotherhood), we're Egypt's tired people"
and
"people are NOT done"
And from regular news outlets, right now there are 16,258 articles on the uprising in Egypt. From the Globe and Mail:
"Thousands of Egyptian protesters gathered peacefully in Tahrir Square in central Cairo Saturday, demanding President Hosni Mubarak step down and cheering as though it were a World Cup victory.

Members of the military, riding in tanks and armoured personnel carriers, guarded important government buildings, but largely avoided clashing with protesters.

The ruling party's headquarters, next to the square, were still smoldering after being lit on fire during massive and violent protests the night before.

But on Saturday, with a shift to a more joyous and respectful tone among the crowds, people were picking up litter off the streets and throwing it in refuse bins."
[---]
"In scenes that haven’t been witnessed in this capital since the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, tens of thousands of people protested in the streets on Friday, battling thousands of riot police that tried, and failed, to prevent the protesters from overrunning the city’s core."
The same article puts the death toll so far at only 48.

There are also rumours that both of Hosni Mubarak's sons have high-tailed it to London.
And the thing about Egypt, as with Iraq, Islam is not the only source of identity:
"Early Saturday, reports from the scene indicated that the Egyptian army had secured Cairo's famed antiquities museum, arresting looters and protecting thousands of priceless artifacts, including the gold mask of King Tutankhamen.

Some young men — armed with truncheons taken from the police — formed a human chain outside the main entrance in an attempt to protect the collection inside from the looters before the military arrived.

Ahmed Ibrahim, 26, said it was important to guard the museum because it “has 5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we'll never find it again.”"
Indeed, 3,700 years of it.

I don't know about you and I've said before, I tend to be Pollyannish. But I'm getting more and more hopeful that this is not going to be one of those coups or counter coups or coups to counter the counter coups or counter coups to counter the counter coups that has characterized the Arab (and Muslim) world for so very long, those that simply replace one creaking old dictatorship with a new one, just as rotten, nor is the old guard going to survive. I think a new day is dawning.

Latest from Aljazeera, relations between the army and the people is warm and friendly, but police are doing the looting in some places.

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