Egypt

These days all eyes are on dear Egypt! I have a classmate from Egypt and he shares most of the news on Facebook. Just like me, two years ago.. And I'm probably the only one in our department who really understands the anxiety/hope/fear/uncertainty that he feels right now. It's a weird feeling, and you will only understand it when you experience it yourself. All these news that you used to watch passively on TV, happening in other countries, on streets that you didn't know, suddenly happen in your own neighborhood, and people shown are your own neighbors and classmates and students.. it's just not describable!

There's two major differences though, between what happened in Iran and what's going on in Egypt now, and I'm not sure how it will play out but the chances of people succeeding will be higher in Egypt compared to Iran. (And needless to say, Egyptians' success will definitely inspire Iranians more too)

So here's what I see as the major differences. (One) Egyptians have one particular focused goal. They want Mubarak and his team out of the next election, by protesting and forcing him to resign. In Iran, we wanted a fair election, and once the election time passed people started getting branched, some wanted a regime change, some wanted the election to still be revised, some wanted the killers of people to be tried. And people only wanted to go through non-violent methods, through diplomacy, because we thought we already overthrew Shaah through chaos and violence and the revolution was stolen, so we didn't want to go through that again in a couple of decades. The movement wasn't as focused as this one, because each group had one solution in mind, and there wasn't a single person to chose one of the solutions.

(Two, and I think this is super important): Egyptian government is not as isolated as the Iranian government. It's backed by USA, possibly Israel likes them(?), and many countries around the world. This support is a double edge sword. On one hand, Mubarak can be assured that whatever he does to protesters (killing, etc.) is not frowned upon, and that he will get military aid for the army and police for many coming weeks/months to suppress the protesters. On the other hand, as soon as this foreign support is stopped, which could easily happen depending on whether USA or other countries suddenly see their interest in having Arab nations' larger support, THEN, without this protection, the courage will leave them and the government will give up and bend to people's demands.. Iranian government, because of its long isolation didn't have this support and had learned to go on without it. Shaah had it, and one of the reasons for the revolution back then to succeed was the withdrawal of this support.. Now Egypt's situation could also change a lot by the foreign governments' actions within the next few days/weeks.

I don't know much more, so I'll just conclude with mentioning that it's so unbelievably inspiring to see a nation getting closer to freedom. I recently watched a video clip by a young Tunisian singer (Amel Mathlouthi) about freedom and it brought tears to my eyes. May all people on earth get to live in fair, free countries soon, and may them all sing the freedom song in their own language.