The Curtain Raiser of Egypt's Democracy

A female journalist was sexually and brutally assaulted by a gang of 200 Egyptians in Tahir Square. What does the terrible personal tragedy of Lara Logan tell us about “modern” Egypt and more broadly about the Arab culture?

The most remarkable thing about the incident is that this was not the making of an infuriated and frustrated crowd, but of liberated, relieved and jubilant men who had just gotten rid of their dictator. How did they choose to usher their newly born democracy? Sexually assault an infidel, preferably blond.

Peaceful (?) protest…

One need not look far and deep to understand a culture. Just look at basic behaviors. How people debate each other, how they mourn, how they drive and, yes, how they celebrate.

Think about the jubilant Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or South Africans when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, or Brazilians when they learned their country is next to host the Olympic Games. Think about yourself when your candidate won the elections or when your favorite team won the Super Bowl. How did you rejoice? Singing? Clapping? Dancing? Hugging a stranger? Opening a bottle of Champagne? Anybody who spent some time in the Middle East is familiar with Arab celebratory practices. Shooting in the air, slaughtering a goat, frantically chanting Allah is great. Hardly acts of peace.

It gets worse. As Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted the thugs yelled “Jew! Jew!” Logan is not Jewish and is far from being pro-Israel in her coverage. But the frantic crowd in Tahir was not able to put aside their deeply engrained anti-Semitism even during what is possibly the happiest moment in their lives. So burning was their hatred for the Jews that they grabbed the closest Jew looking bystander and unleashed their wrath at her.

There is a deeper psychological explanation here. For decades, Arab rulers made sure to feed anti-Israel sentiment to divert public anger from their own wrongdoing to the Jews. This blame-the-Jew-for-every-trouble tactic created a classical conditioning: if you can’t take it out on the regime, go for the Jews. When the regime suddenly collapsed so did the paradigm of unconscious redirection of feelings from the regime to the Jews. At that moment the only way the square mob knew how to resolve this confusion was by resorting to violent anti-Semitism.

It gets even worse. Logan was part of a crew. Many of her colleagues were beaten up, as were dozens of journalists from other networks. But she was the only one that was sexually assaulted. These things happen in a culture that considers un-chaperoned women prey. But if this is how a woman is treated what does this say about the role of women in new Egypt?

Some may be nodding their heads and telling themselves that this repugnant act is the act of a few and is not reflective of the great Arab culture. Just like all acts of violence by Arabs seen in recent years have been the work of a deranged few. But this we are told is a revolution led by a Google employee, followed by an army of millions of “modern” Facebook and Twitter users, not savage rapists. Let’s hope our multicultis are right this time because to me the Logan affair is reflective of what this widely celebrated new Arab democracy might turn out to be: a computer literate cult of violence, anti-Semitism and misogyny.

Logan is a brave journalist who never shied away from putting herself in harm’s way for a good story. In the horror she endured in Cairo may be a deep message for all of us: Culture is destiny, and if the Logan incident is even mildly reflective of Egypt’s culture, it is not only Egypt’s destiny that we should all be concerned about, it is also our own.