I do not understand your post, DangerGirl. Are you arguing that the Pew Poll says something other than what I said? In the Pew Poll, more than 70 percent of Egyptians favored Sharia penalties for robbery (cutting off limbs) and apostacy (beheading) — hardly an indication of a thirst for democracy as we understand it. What we are seeing are demonstrations by the urban population of Cairo — hardly a representative sample of Egyptians as a whole, a population with three times as many illiterates as college graduates! Or perhaps you are arguing that the Pew survey — hardly a right-wing source — is immaterial. Perhaps you are arguing that this is just a surface Islamism that reallly doesn’t matter, something everyone mouthes, but no one really belives. Which is it? If you are arguing either of the three, I think you are being foolish. The Pew Poll is quoted accurately; its results are not immaterial, which I suspect we shall see in coming days (the Muslim Brotherhood is the parent of Hamas); and it reflect REAL preferences by the Egyptian population. Or perhaps you are arguing that we have no right to impose our conception of democracy on THEIRS (Islamic democracy, the democracy of believers before Allah UNDER a Sharia legal system that ALL must obey), not representative goverment, tolerance, and the emancipation of women, as we understand it). In that case, you are just flat wrong and should not be surprised by what we get. Mubarak is not Saddam Hussein, a butcher on a mass scale whose continued power is intolerable. He IS a dictator, Joe Biden notwithstanding. But he is far preferable to a Muslim Brotherhood government, which will not be an Iranian-style theacracy, but a Hamas-style dictatorship that will be measurably worse for Egypt’s middle class and Coptic Christians.
