Daybreak: Mubarak Boosters Emerge
Plus Friedman and Halevi view it from Israel, and more in the news
February 02, 2011
Now some people like him.(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
• Today, the streets of Cairo took on a new character as pro-Mubarak protesters clashed with the usual crew. (Also, Internet has been restored.) While the military has still not fired on unarmed marchers, it appears to be siding with the embattled Egyptian president. [NYT]
• President Obama sided with the protesters—to an extent. A transition “must begin now,” he said, after Mubarak’s speech, but he did not explicitly call for Mubarak to step down sooner than he had promised (in the fall). [NYT]
• Yemen’s president pulled a Mubarak, pledging not to run in the next elections—in 2013. [WSJ]
• How we didn’t know this was coming. [WSJ]
•Egypt’s lobby gets to work in D.C. [WP]
• Thomas Friedman sees increased urgency to the peace process and calls on President Obama to draw up his own plan and present it to the Israelis and the Palestinians. [NYT]
• Yossi Klein Halevi explains that many Israelis “fear that the [Muslim] Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.” [NYT]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
