Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt again

Well, Egypt is a pretty big country, after all. And a lot of things happen there, especially just now. And today's Thomas Friedman surrogate mashing up the distinct and mutually hostile parties into one terrifying "Islamist" majority is the normally unpanicked Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, on Morning Edition:

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in Egypt are flexing their growing political muscle. They control the legislative agenda in parliament, and in recent weeks introduced controversial proposals to curb social freedoms and legal rights.

Islamist lawmakers also handpicked a 100-member panel that began meeting this week to write a new constitution, which is widely expected to enshrine Islamic law.

Clouds 2 Elephant. Uncredited photo from The Magnifying Glass.

Only not exactly. As usual. Because the controversial proposals—the revival of traditional punishments like cutting thieves' hands off,  elimination of foreign language instruction [jump]
from schools, denying women the right to initiate divorce, and banning access to Facebook—have all been shot down by the almost-majority MB Freedom and Justice Party (and widely rejected by the actually "Islamist" al-Nour party, where they originated, as well).

But such ideas have proved a headache for leaders within the main Islamist parties who want to portray a more moderate image of their movements.

Amr Darrag [of the Giza branch of Freedom and Justice] is one such leader. "I can assure you, these are not the priorities that we are going to have in terms of legislation or issues to be raised," he says.

Well, yeah. Case closed? Not quite, because

many secular Egyptians believe the Islamist agenda is neither inclusive nor benevolent.
"The only thing they say to placate public opinion is that 'we understand, we are not going to do this suddenly, we will take it step by step,' and beneath this placating language, in my mind, is a huge condescending attitude toward Egyptian society," says Khaled Fahmy, who heads the history department at the American University in Cairo.

He and others say the condescension is evident in the ongoing battle over the panel created by Islamist lawmakers in recent days to draft Egypt's new constitution. Some two-thirds of the panel members are Islamist or allied to them. Only a handful of women and Christians were selected to take part.

What I'm thinking is that the liberals Nelson talks to—not that she doesn't talk to everybody, she's a terrific reporter—have bought into the Friedman Assumption (especially the Christians, who have some rational excuses for being scared, to be fair). They can only see this gigantic mob of people who wouldn't vote for them, or their class, and they won't see that the crowd is made up of individuals of many different kinds of interests and needs.

And it looks like they won't dirty themselves with the politics of taking an interest in village people's needs or any politics at all other than high-minded talk of rights, and assume that the other "side" (i.e., the other 14 or whatever parties) is interested only in taking their rights away.

While in the meantime the MB is itself desperately worried that it cannot prevent the election of a Salafist president! Please, liberals, you do have something in common with these people.