I wonder if Anderson Cooper is surprised or confused that he was punched in the head ten times by a mob of pro-Mubarak thugs. All in all, it was fairly tame and harmless, but Cooper is a kind of proxy for all Americans. We always seem surprised when we discover that our government is unpopular in many foreign countries. It’s because we have developed a national character that is almost completely incapable of introspection. News outfits like Anderson’s CNN are responsible for this. So, it’s kind of fitting that pissed off Egyptians would punch Cooper in the head. It almost doesn’t matter what side of the dispute the Egyptians are on. Any side would have plenty of reason to want to wail on a corporate American teevee reporter.
In any case, the cable channels are now doing what they almost never do. They are showing us the real Cairo. We can learn for ourselves about the nature of our great friends and allies in the Egyptian government. We can learn what kind of regime we’ve been enabling and coddling so that the peace agreement with Israel would not be second-guessed. We can see what it takes to be the first Arab country to recognize both Israel and Iraq’s new government when your people don’t agree. And we can discover why a man like Mohammed Atta might think our government’s relationship with his government is so heinous that he needs to fly an airplane into the World Trade Center to let us know how he feels about it.
There is another side to this argument. Egypt has been a good friend to our country. They have given Israel a thirty-year window to live in peace and find a resolution to the Palestinian question. They have aided us in combating terrorism. They have been a great customer for our arms industry. They’ve opposed the spread of fundamentalism and political Islam. We have had good reason to be friendly with Mubarak’s regime. But we never hear about the downside of this relationship. And, because we don’t get all the information, we are caught by surprise when a mob grabs us and punches us in the face.