Wael Ghonim is thirty years old. Hosni Mubarak’s regime is twenty-nine years old. And this is a decisive moment for each of them. On Tuesday, after being released from government custody and giving a riveting interview to Dream TV—has there been a better example lately of the use of the talk-show interview as political oratory?—Ghonim, a marketing executive for Google, was in Tahrir Square. For the first time, he met the mother of Khaled Said, who died last year after being beaten by police; Ghonim administered the Facebook page set up in his memory, which protesters used as a gathering point. Said would have been twenty-nine two weeks ago, when Tahrir Square was already full of people who knew his name and what had happened to him.
They also know what could happen to them if all this falls apart. “We can’t bear this for a long time,” Omar Suleiman told journalists. “We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.” Well, then don’t. What exactly did he mean by “police tools?” (Jane Mayer’s post on Suleiman’s involvement in the C.I.A.’s extraordinary-rendition program suggests some answers.) Suleiman also said that “a coup” was an option, and that, in Egypt, “the culture of democracy is still far away”—is that an admission that the “elections” of past years have been a sham?
And what has our government meant, in the last few days, by suggesting that Suleiman is the one to manage a transition to democracy? His comments, and Tuesday’s march, with its size and diversity, seem to have challenged that notion: Biden called Suleiman, and said that some real steps had to be made soon; Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, told PBS that this was “not at all” helpful; he was “amazed” by the idea of lifting the emergency law.
Ghonim also gave another interview, this one to CNN. He said that his heroes were Gandhi and Mark Zuckerberg (we can agree about one of those). He talked about the power of the Internet and social media, and reiterated that this was the moment for the regime to step down, rather than to just talk. And:
This is not someone with nothing to lose, or who hasn’t thought about what he is doing. For all the fears—here, rather than there—of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, the most notable organized groups to arrive in the square Tuesday were labor unions. Workers are striking in Suez. The Times had a video from an apartment in Cairo where some of the social-media protest work is being managed. The young Egyptians there look like characters from Paris, 1968, or Prague, 1989, and not from some fantasy of Islamism. Almost all of the women have their heads uncovered; one is smoking a cigarette. There is also a guitar, which can be very helpful. And there are plans for a bigger rally Friday.
Photograph: Wael Ghonim with Khaled Said’s mother. AP Photo/Ahmed Ali.
