Undiplomtatic Activity in Egypt

I fear that the Egyptian mob actions show that all governments are representative of their peoples, whether they intend to be or not; and that people's theologies matter.

John Adams famously said that the US Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, and would work for none other. The religiosity he understood was that bounded by the Anglican Church on the Right and his own Unitarians (still biblically oriented in his day, rather than the free-form faith we know today) on the Left, with the Reformed (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch and German Reformed) right in the middle; and a few sprinklings of Roman Catholics and Jews. Indeed, he spoke after two centuries of agitation for rule of law and checks on the balances of kings, which, in his Anglophone context, meant the politics of the more thoroughly Reformed persuasion. This stemmed from a deep humility about what human nature was after the Fall of Adam, and a corollary that, rather than have Leviathan grab all power and right to prevent the war of all against all (viz. Hobbes), no set of human hands should ever have too much political power.

In the Muslim lands, it seems that there is a choice only between strongmen and uncontrolled mobs. The strongmen, when they take power, must pander to the supremacism, hatred, and violence of the Muslim street lest they open the way for new strongmen to come and topple them. This is why Sadat was assassinated and why Mubarak prudently allowed the government-controlled media to spew venom.

Islam lacks a doctrine of original sin and holds its followers to be "the best of men". Hence, it can never conceive of Muslims truly wronging the Kufr, and when things go wrong, it causes people to ask "Who did this to us?" rather than "Where did we go wrong?" Add to this, its ethics represent a standard far below that of either Judaism or Christianity; as if fearing the charge of hypocrisy, it sanctified the lust, greed for plunder, and violence of at least the males among its members. Hence, it will sooner or later injure itself and blame another.

It is clear from this incident that the peace between Israel and Egypt, while sincere at the official level when Sadat made it, was sincerely greeted by the populace of only the Israeli side.

I also suspect that after the mob driving out the Israeli embassy, the Obama administration's use of good offices to secure the rescue and evacuation of the last Israeli diplomats will further enrage the Egyptian Muslim street. it may very well decide that it has the power to seize the US Embassy in Cairo, and precipitate a new major crisis between the USA and the Muslim world.

The apologetic tone Obama took towards the Muslim world at Cairo may thus prove repetitive of the Carter administration's stance towards the Pahlavi regime in Iran, and with the same unhappy results.