How not to be a dumbass about Egypt; aimed at Americans:
“The Twitter Revolutionâ€. No, this is the Revolution of the Egyptian people. Egyptians resisted for decades. They were tortured, jailed and repressed by the Mubarak and Sadat regimes. Twitter and Facebook are tools. They did not stand in front of the water canons, or go to jail for all these years to get the credit. There were demonstrations all summer long and for a several years through out Egypt but they are rarely covered, because we are worried about what Sarah Palin said, or some moronic Imam saying something stupid. Does it sound a bit arrogant to take credit for a people’s struggle?
It’s a bit unfair to blame yer Average American for this sort of misconception, when so much of the mainstream news coverage is hideously stupid, with the commentary even worse. For example, I saw bits of the European Unions’ pronouncements about the revolution and it was so obviously disconnected from the reality on the ground as seen on Twitter, blogs and Al-Jazeera, with its focus on wanting a “peaceful dialogue between government and the people” rather than actually siding directly with the people struggling for democracy. If the news coverage is all slanted towards what powerful people in the west think how Egypt must forward and how the White House should manage the situation and most of the socalled experts shown are deeply compromised through links to the American foreign policy bureaucracies, how easy is it for normal people to understand what’s really going on?