John Bolton last night on Greta said something like, “So those who think this is the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’ in Egypt are mistaken.”

I heard a Young Liberal Newscaster (YLN) talking to his pal on some phone that still worked. YLN was having a great time reporting this ‘n that. His friend said, upon sigining off, “We’re glad you’re there on the ground.” YLN replied, “Me, too. It’s really cool.”

BO and HRC might be coaches/owners of that team? That would be devastating. On the other hand, Biden is on the Mubarek-is-not-a-dictator team. Maybe they took down Biden’s internet, too?

Look, I know this is hard for people of the 21st century to accept, but something must be understood: The Muslim world is medieval, and the man in the Muslim street thinks medieval.

In 13th-century Europe, a father whose son had just confessed to disbelieving in God would promptly deliver the demon-possessed boy to the Dominican friars for the next auto-da-fe. By today’s standards this sounds unthinkable; back then, it was the way people were.

Luther didn’t have textual criticism of the Bible in mind when he pinned his theses to the church door, nor did the uprisings against the nobles or the king stem out of a democratic impulse. It would all be anachronistic until the end of the 18th century, and even then the French Revolution ended with the guillotine and Napoleon.

The people in Egypt are protesting against Mubarak’s regime, which, like the Shah’s regime in Iran, no one can deny is a dictatorship. They’re not protesting against Islam. They’re not opposed to shariah law, except for a very thin layer of intellectuals who have to phrase their words carefully unless they want to end up like Naguib Mahfouz. They’re medievals, pure and simple. The Muslim world is pretty much “The Valley The Enlightenment Forgot.”

Forget about true democracy in the Muslim world. The best hope there was for it, the relatively secularized state of Turkey, is now backslidden into the old path. The impulse toward shariah law is not in this politician or that imam–they just put the rubber-stamp on it. It’s in the man in the street. The man in the street has the same thoughts in his head as his ancestor 500 years ago. Crazy as life under shariah law seems to the moderns, it’s an authentic and grassroots desire in the entire Islamic world. The army of Islam is comprised of close to all the 1.6 billion, not just a few who call themselves Al-Qaeda or Taliban.

There’s no way around this harsh truth.

Egyptian army storms museum to protect from looters

One man pleaded with people outside the museum’s gates on Tahrir Square not to loot the building, shouting at the crowd: “We are not like Baghdad.” After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, thieves carted off thousands of artifacts from the National Museum in Baghdad – only a fraction of which have been recovered.

Suddenly other young men – some armed with truncheons taken from the police – formed a human chain outside the main entrance in an attempt to protect the collection inside.

“I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure,” said one of the men, Farid Saad, a 40-year-old engineer.

Another man, 26-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim, 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.”

Finally, four armored vehicles took up posts outside the massive coral-colored building in downtown Cairo. Soldiers surrounded the building and moved inside to protect mummies, monumental stone statues, ornate royal jewelry and other pharaonic artifacts.

If A Liberal And A Tea Partier Had Been Aboard The Titanic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi

There’s a lesson in all that about respecting your people’s pride, giving a crap about their employment opportunities, and not being openly corrupt.

Worse than cities in India? I have no experience to gauge from, but I’ve heard that, upon leaving one of the major cities in India after any extended stay there, one wonders if you’ll ever feel really clean again.

Fjordman: Why Islam Must Be Expelled From The West

In addition to the above, Pajamas Media has this:

In Norway, an Awakening to the Islamist Danger

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In addition, Wolf Howling now has several excellent pieces to provide background on the Egyptian element of this topic:

Egypt’s El Baradie Not An Option

Egypt Update I

A 3AM Phone Call From Egypt

Check back with him regularly — if his coverage of the Iranian riots in 2009 are any indication, he should likely be a good source for background info on this subject as well as a source for the latest information.