From my apartment

photo, not precisely of my apartment, but from a snack table at Dammam Airport after my Taxi had taken me from my apartment to my flight to Paris, August 2, 2013

All other comments shall be from my apartment...after a pleasant drive to the KLM office near the Meridien Hotel and back, I listened to the balanced coverage of the events in Cairo on BBC and CNN. They give too much credence to the Muslim Brotherhood, who have set about attacking government buildings and continuing to get themselves killed instead of reconciling themselves with the exiting times advancing the role of the Egyptian people finding space in politics that was heralded in by the huge, 19 million demonstrations of June 30.

Here is the not so surprising defense of the bad, rather violent and provocative protests the Muslim Brotherhood misguides (and hence sacrifices its followers) into, given by Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan on the BBC TV news tonight  Click here Since this is private on Sound Cloud, I'll just summarize some of the craziness of his argument, which is also typical of the Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen, and most current orientalist scholarship, which is quite openly serious about religion, and still tied into the study of the collapse of the caliphate with the rise of the colonial revolutions.  I believe that the Muslim Bretheren want the return of the authentic caliphate, which makes them, as a consequence, serious study for academics interested in "The Sleeping Giant," which was the Ottoman Empire before and after World War 1.  Anyway, Tariq Ramadan gives the typical complaint about the breakup of the peaceful sit-ins, and chastises Obama for not cutting off military aid to such a country that is "not part of our democratic tradition," with this military "coup."  It is exactly what the spokespeople for the Muslim Bretheren are saying.