Tahrir Square is not Egypt

I’m sorry to spoil the party, but I’m troubled by some of the reporting on the
upheaval in Egypt, with the focus essentially on the protesters in Tahrir
Square. The breathless reporting — including by what seems to be every columnist
ever employed by The New York Times —
has neglected what’s been going on in the rest of the country. Al Jazeera’s
wanton exaggeration of the number of people on the square, which I saw with my
own eyes, reflects that channel’s particular agenda.

I’ve been thinking about something I was told when I was in Cairo the day after
hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the square. That night, Mubarak went
on TV for one of his speeches, in which he said he would go, but not until
September. That remains his position, as we saw again in his rambling and
self-deluded address yesterday.

“A hundred thousand people are not 80 million,” a middle-aged professional
Egyptian told me last week. He said that the majority of the people wanted
stability and to get back to work. Although I spoke to students who were
demonstrating alongside their parents, I met others whose parents stayed at
home. For them, Mubarak’s concessions were enough.

It’s wonderful that Egyptians have lost their fear. I was in Cairo during the
abortive “Cairo spring,” after which the pressure-cooker lid was slammed shut
again by the Mubarak regime. But the scale of these demonstrations, which are
clearly a popular uprising, is truly inspiring. One of The New York
Times’s columnists was rejoicing recently
that Egyptians were happy to be quoted with their full names. This is something
that I remember from Tiananmen Square, where for an exhilarating month, we were
happy to write down the full names of protesters who thronged to the square.
Today we have that on our consciences, as we know what happened to many of
them, after we threw caution to the winds.

We still don’t know what will happen in Egypt. We must hope for the best but
prepare for the worst. It would be most significant if the rest of the country
joins the protesters in Cairo in rejecting the pharaoh. Until that happens, we
must be cautious.