Quotes on Egypt and the Middle East

Yesterday I read two poignant pieces regarding Egypt and the Middle East.


The first one was the Monday forum on religion in USA Today. That piece was In Changing Egypt, Where Will Faith Fall? by Stephen Prothero. There Prothero based his piece on the thought of the twentieth century Protestant theologian, Rheinhold Niebuhr.


I give a quote from Prothero that I especially noted and  with which I certainly agree:

My prayer for America in our new age of digital politics — an age in which a tweet is worth far more than a thousand spoken words, and the "Google Guy" Wael Ghonim seems to wield as much power as (or more than) a head of state — is for some combination of modesty, exertion and wisdom.

I hope that our leaders will be modest enough to see how (and how often) what we have done or left undone in the Middle East has backfired on us. We have spent trillions of dollars and spilled untold blood in a seemingly endless effort to bring democracy, American style, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Egyptians — citizens of a nation with more people than Iraq and Afghanistan combined — won the right to write their own future in just 18 days and with little to no U.S. help.

 The second piece yesterday I especially noted was by CODEPINK co-founder, Medea Benjamin who had attended protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt and while in Madison, Wisconsin to discuss her time in Egypt, attended the protest in Madison over collective bargaining rights for public workers. Her piece entitled, "From Cairo to Madison: Hope and Solidarity are Alive" was published in both CODEPINK's blog, PINKtank, and The Huffington Post. Benjamin noted that there was solidarity between the two protests. In Egypt there had been signs in solidarity with the workers in Madison and in Madison there were signs noting the protests in Egypt.  She included this:

Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair, the one whose photo supporting Wisconsin workers went viral, now has thousands of new American Facebook friends. He wrote in his blog that many of his new friends were surprised by his gesture of solidarity, but he was taught that “we live in ONE world and under the same sky.”

“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger,” Muhammad wrote. “We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”