... here is the chart I was using to keep track of who stands where in Egypt's political crisis. Yup, it's a mess. [PDF]

When the uprising began in Egypt and tanks deployed on the streets on January 28, the military was initially welcomed. Perhaps many thought it had carried out a coup against Mubarak (in fact it probably partially has), and many more still cherished the myth of the Egyptian army triumphant in 1973 after the defeat of 1967. Things began to turn last week when the army stood and did nothing while pro-Mubarak thugs attacked the crowd in Tahrir. The protestors issued an ultimatum to the army to pick its side: with them, or with Mubarak. The army has still done nothing. Then, over the weekend, military police (and probably military intelligence) were deployed to beef up security on the streets. It then came out that they have been arresting dozens if not hundreds of people, and began raiding the offices of human rights activists and visiting the homes of people asking to poke around their computers.

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The Guardian's Ian Black has this important tidbit on Syria post-Facebook unbanning:

Syrian users have now been blocked from entering the word "proxy" in any search engine and any page with the word "proxy" in the URL address will not open. Syrians, in short, have lost internet anonymity. "Under the guise of lifting restrictions on the internet, the authorities have in fact tightened their control," warns Malik al-Abdeh of London-based Barada TV. "No sane internet user will enter the now unblocked Facebook and visit a page that contains criticisms of the regime, or, worse still, a page that organises demonstrations as the Egyptians and Tunisians have done. The irony is that Syrian internet users are actually better off under the old system. Unblocking Facebook while cracking down on proxies and https, and maintaining the same censorship apparatus run by the secret police, is totally meaningless." Not much sign, then, of a revival of the short-lived Damascus spring of Bashar al-Assad's early days.

Mubarak, his wife Suzane, Ben Ali and Gaddafi holding a sign saying "bloody hell, who wants to be a ruler anymore? donations in dollar only."

The Guardian's Steve Bell, perhaps the world's most devastating cartoonist.

This tasty chart is from this FT blog post.

Are you kidding me — right-wingers and Israel lobbyists only to explain Egypt and Lebanon to Congress?!?

Washington, D.C.— The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs on Wednesday and Thursday of this week will host a two-part full committee hearing entitled “Recent Developments in Egypt and Lebanon: Implications for U.S. Policy and Allies in the Broader Middle East.”

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For my money there is no better Egyptian analyst of the religious scene than Hossam Tammam — he's a specialist on Islamists, but what he writes here goes for the Coptic Church too.

Any discussion of the status of Islamists in a new Egypt makes little sense if it’s based on the same data that was previously used to study religious movements, and if it ignores the fact that Egypt has witnessed a revolution that destroyed many of the old features of its religious scene.

The revolution was not just directed against the autocratic, repressive and corrupt Egyptian regime, which relied on an alliance of money, power and corruption. It was also directed against the official religious establishment and its discourse that supports this regime, either directly or indirectly.

The Egyptian revolution has completely reconfigured the religious scene and clarified the public’s position towards religious institutions and discourses in the country. The result has been surprising. No one expected that religious Egyptians are capable of overriding the powers of religious institutions and of challenging religious discourses that they suddenly perceived as part of a corrupt and repressive regime.

The official religious establishments--both Islamic and Christian--have been the biggest losers in the revolution.

Personally, I hope this episode gets people to consider their religious leadership and moves them to move to either change church (or for Muslims ignore al-Azhar) and ignoring religious issues when addressing politics.

One of my oldest friends in Cairo, Nabil Shawkat. He's great, listen to him.

And then read his insane book, Breakfast with the infidels.

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Andrew Exum touches on an academic issue here worth mentioning: that the events in Egypt have been poorly predicted by North American academia, perhaps because political science departments largely focus on quantitative analysis. Andrew, as ever (and I blame living in Washington as well as his southern roots for this), is very polite about not bashing the "quants", as he calls them.

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