Extinction: probably not, but.

A new and provocative study presented to the American Physical Society last week by a trio of mathematicians predicts that organized religion is on its way to extinction in nine countries.  Their work (using census data going back a century) was based on the same mathematical model employed in 2003 by the lead author Daniel Abrams to predict the extinction of little used languages.  What stimulated Abrams interest this time was learning that none is the fastest growing religious group in many countries around the world including here in America.  Moreover, those who have left religion behind represent a significant portion of their populations — already a 60% majority in the Czech Republic.  In a CNN interview, Abrams said that he and his colleagues were not trying to make any commentary about religion or whether people should be religious or not.  Rather they wanted to understand the long-term implications of the growing disaffiliation, particularly in Western-style democracies.  The United States was not included in the study because its census doesn’t ask about religion, but among the countries that do and where the researchers posit religion is likely to become extinct are Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and our neighbor Canada.

The trio developed a model to study competition between religious and irreligious segments of modern secular societies.  Again, as in America, none is the fastest growing group and trending higher.  The model, they write in their conclusion, indicates that in these societies the perceived utility of religious non-affiliation is greater than that of adhering to a religion, and therefore predicts continued growth of non-affiliation, tending toward the disappearance of religion.  Talking to the BBC, co-author Richard Wiener said, the study posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join.

Higher mathematics is far above my pay level, so I have no way of knowing if the trio’s model holds water.  My own sense is that their extinction prediction may be overstated.  That said, there is little doubt that in many countries trends are going against religion not for it.  What intrigues me about this work is that it leans so heavily on social dynamics, which I would argue under the umbrella of community has played a critical role in building and then protecting religion throughout history.  One of the questions with which I have been wrestling in my own work regarding those who have left religion behind is how and if non-religion can be viable without community?  It’s complicated because many people have left religion precisely, sometimes mostly, because they are rejecting community — religion in its organized form.  Lack of community may suit their immediate and personal needs, but their no religion stance may be difficult to carry into future generations.  Also, and hardly inconsequential when the Religious Right is again (Iowa’s Conservative Conference) raising its ugly head, the absence of community translates into having no place at the table.  Simply put, those without community lack political clout.

For that reason alone — there are others — I think some semblance of community engagement may be required.  The question is how, absent creating the very kind of organizational structure that is so anathema to them, can the nones both survive ideologically and protect their rights in the larger society?  When starting to think about this some years back, there was no good answer.  That may have changed in the face of social networking and the emergence of virtual communities.  And that’s exactly what Abrams suggested to CNN.  It's more attractive, he said, to be part of the majority than the minority, so as religious affiliation declines, it becomes more popular not to be a churchgoer than to be one — the majority effect.  People are more likely to switch to groups with more members.  Social networks can have a powerful influence.  Just a few connections to people who are (religiously) unaffiliated is enough to drive the effect. 

I would add that the rise of social networks could potentially accelerate the move from religion for a number of reasons.  First, because it may give voice to people who identify with religion solely because they’ve been told it’s what everyone does or should do.  Through social networking they may discover that the everyone in question is a myth.  Second, social networks often benefit from the viral effect, spreading the word in a way heretofore unknown and doing so instantaneously.  It’s not reading or hearing that some statistic says an amorphous 16% of Americans have moved beyond religion, it is that a someone specific to whom you can relate personally, call it a friend, shares your views.  Finally, social networks can lead to action — old fashion people power — influencing perceptions and conventional wisdom.  Just look at what’s happening in the Middle East where the idea that everyone is loyal to the dictator is being debunked across the landscape.  That no such everyone loyalty exists empowers those who thought themselves to be in the minority but are not — think Abrams’ majority effect.

Community has been essential to the world’s religions and might well be equally so for those who have left religion behind.  It may simply require rethinking what it takes to make and be a community, and clearly that’s no longer restricted to a village.

And now, Mr. "McCing".

I spent some time last week watching Peter King’s controversial hearing.  Okay, I should get a life.  The Long Island Congressman is said to be obsessed with the Muslim menace, ostensibly because he was so traumatized by 9/11.  Standing on a Riverside Park pier that day, Manhattan neighbors and I watched in shock and disbelief the smoke and ash rising into a crystal clear sky over what was left of the Towers downtown.  But horrifying as that brutal invasion of our beloved city was, I haven’t emerged with an obsession about what Joseph McCarthy called Enemies from Within. 

It is the specter of a McCarthy déjà vu that has so aroused Mr. King’s critics and with good reason.  Both the late Senator and this latter-day, shall we call him McCing, share a penchant for seeing exaggerated threats and making unsubstantiated fright-provoking assertions.  Some of King’s fabrications were enumerated in the NY Times editorial before the hearing.  Echoes of old Joe’s 1950s could be heard in Peter’s 2011 Washington with talk of a Muslim conspiracy.  South Carolina’s freshman Jeff Duncan raised the specter of Shariah law, implying it might be imposed on all of us.  To digress a moment — those who want to terrify us with this danger (as he put it) are the very same folks relentlessly seeking to incorporate their particular religious ideology on social issues — abortion, marriage, stem cell research and the like — into our civil law.  Perhaps they don’t call it Shariah, but to me it’s a difference without distinction.

McCartyites persecuted American citizens, particularly on the left, by declaring they were conspiring to turn us into a Communist state.  In the modern version, King asserts that Al Qaeda is actively grooming radicals who are lurking in every single mosque (think every government agency and university in the ‘50s) across America.  Assumably that would be part of the danger posed by the lower Manhattan Islamic Center, which he so vehemently opposes.  Even were we to accept the Committee’s exclusive focus on Muslims — which I don’t — the absence of objective experts or the presentation of hard verifiable data was in itself a glaring indictment.  The only credentialed outside witness was the LA Sheriff put forward by minority Democrats.  King opted to hear from the leader (good American Muslim) of a tiny activist group and (for drama) two individuals from whose anecdotal reports, however distressing, one can’t extrapolate even close to the comprehensive menace that King claims we face.

Speaking of that threat, let’s put all of this in context starting with a realty check.  To hear King and his like-minded committee members you’d think Islam, with its evil intentions, is spreading here ameba-like, infiltrating every city and town. In fact, according to the authoritative Pew Religious Landscape Study, Muslims account for a miniscule .06% of our population (behind Buddhists at .07% and slightly ahead of Hindus at .04%).  That’s important because what strikes me isn’t only the similarities between this wrongheaded hearing and those of the McCarthy years, but how it reflected our continued problem with racism and religious prejudice.  The tipoff is that virtually every speaker — Republicans and Democrats — felt obliged to make the obligatory and often disingenuous some of my best friends or most Muslims are decent law abiding people statement.  As a member of a small religious minority (1.7% qualifies), I am all too familiar with this code; African Americans and Hispanics can likely recite unending variations of it in their sleep.  Add to that the pompous pronouncement that terrorism is a perversion of a great religion uttered by someone, who likely hasn’t a clue about the nature and teachings of Islam but nonetheless feels empowered to make that judgment.  These are all manifestations of that disdain/wariness of the other, the subject of an earlier post.  Nothing typifies this more than the unending suggestions that our President is not native born and a closet Muslim to boot. 

Of course the larger context of King’s hearing is the post 2010 election environment in which a tea soaked Republican Party considers itself mandated (by the American people) to dismantle whatever gains the country may have made recently and revert to the old ways and more.  This smells more like politics than protecting our homeland's security.  It’s a blatant attempt to put up a smoke screen that might distract us from their real agenda.  With it comes the resurgence of people like Abramoff’s pal Ralph Reed and the Lazarus resurrection of the hypocrite serial adulterer and newborn Catholic, Newt Gingrich.  What we’re experiencing is a general retrogression into another déjà vu, the days of the Taliban-like Christian Right.   Make no mistake, what threatens us aren’t terrorist cells in every mosque but the resurgence of people who want to permanently disable government and undermine whatever meager workers rights and social safety net remain. 

Peter King rails against Islamic terrorists, while having built his early career as a vocal cheerleader for the then terrorist IRA.  Those were his people — right color, right religion — who he characterized as the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland and not morally to blame for, among others, 600 civilian deaths.  I remember being in London when some of those wonderful folks detonated a nail bomb in Hyde Park killing four members of the ceremonial Queen’s Guard and seven horses, all obviously oppressors of the Irish.  Mr. King sees no immoral equivalency, and that’s all we really have to know about him and his supporters.  The sad thing is that his prejudice extends far and wide, and that, much like the irrational fear and loathing of Communists in an earlier time.  Ultimately it’s this kind of thinking and what comes out of it that threatens our long-term security.  That’s truly scary.

 

Gandhi rebooted.

Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ranting notwithstanding, what’s going on across the Middle East is not bin Laden but Gandhi.  After decades of us being told with such absolute certainty that Arab youth was both ripe and destined for Islamic radicalization, we discover a generation that has opted for peaceful revolutionary protest not ideological violence.  To be sure, many among them in Egypt and elsewhere are personally religious, but they seem intent on ridding their countries of oppressive and despotic rule not transforming them into new theocracies.  The once proclaimed demoralized Arab Street, a group lacking self-esteem, is in fact a generation proudly engaged in the future, not mired in a self-defeating retrogressive past.  Regardless of the ultimate outcome, which no one can predict with accuracy, there is little doubt that the last weeks have changed everything.

No place does that change have greater impact than upon the State of Israel.  Cairo’s uprising in particular, but hardly alone, has upended its strategic calculus.  That Israel will have to renegotiate relationships in the region is perhaps the least of it.  From its inception, Israel has faced a hostile neighborhood, attacked repeatedly by Arab countries (Egypt among them) from without and later by the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah from within.  That it survived the first onslaught in 1948 speaks partially to an inept and manifestly corrupt group of adversaries — more bluster than knowhow — but also to the dogged determination of a post Holocaust generation to survive.  What decades of conflict have wrought, undoubtedly out of necessity not desire, is a nation that may be better known for the strength of its military, the highly professional and (thanks to the United States) well-equipped IDF, than for any of its other considerable accomplishments.  In a profound sense, Israel’s adversaries have perpetuated this image by provoking predictable and certain violent responses to deadly suicide bombings and cross border rocket fire.  Those have been variously characterized as measured self-defense and, in the case of Lebanon and more so Gaza, as excessive.  What is indisputable is that the Holy Land is engulfed in a culture of violence; a lethal tit for tat resulting in an atmosphere of mutual fear, insecurity and mistrust that undermines negotiated solutions.

That brings me back to bin Laden and Gandhi.  Of course, other than using it to his rhetorical advantage, bin Laden has not been a factor in the Israel/Palestine dispute. Nor so has been the long dead Gandhi. But as tokens for their different approaches, it’s fair to say that where a culture of violence prevails bin Laden has thus far carried the day.  It hasn’t worked for either side.  What might happen if a rebooted Gandhi emerged on this stalemated scene much as he did on the streets of Cairo?  Given the era in which we live and the redefined Arab Street (Palestinian literacy is extremely high), the better question may be, what happens when Gandhi shows his face on the West Bank?

What the military discovered in Egypt was that in an instantaneously connected transparent world, one simply couldn’t fire on or even use much force against an essentially unarmed and often good-natured citizenry on the march.   Speak about the limits of military power; speak about the curtain being lifted on an 82 year old contemporary Wizard of Oz.  Picture for a moment the rebooted Gandhi leading thousands of young Palestinians, all of them having traded guns, bombs and even rocks for placards held high and resolute smiles. That’s what must (or should) be on the minds of Bibi Netanyahu and his colleagues.  If Gandhi works against a totalitarian regime, how much more powerful will it be against a democracy?

I’ve made no secret of my own belief that leaving the West Bank and dismantling of settlements on Palestinian territory is both necessary and right.  So too is an independent Palestinian state.  At the same time, it’s both simplistic and unfair to suggest that Israel’s reliance on military power was not born out of necessity.  The threats to its existence have been both real and ongoing.  The Jewish people have endured often-lethal persecution throughout much of human history.  That the world community acquiesced to a relatively tiny strip of homeland out of collective guilt in the wake of Hitler’s barbarism to which many of its members had averted their eyes is a fact that only the immoral can overlook.  Israel’s situation and stance is more than understandable, but that doesn’t make it less of a tragedy for them and for the Palestinians.

In the light of a rebooted Gandhi, it’s high time for a bold rebooting of the Israel/Palestine stalemate.  Cairo will likely be a tactical wakeup for the Palestinians and should be a seismic wakeup call for the Israeli’s.  A crisis, we’ve been told so often by people like Mayor-elect Emanuel (a lover and supporter of Israel) should not be missed as an opportunity to move forward.  I’m happy for all those young Arabs who have taken their country closer to authentic self-rule.  I’d be happier still if it led Israel and Palestine to overcome whatever obstacles may stand in the way to achieving the peace that both so clearly deserve and desperately need.   As Gandhi taught, as both King and Mandela learned, feeling yourself wronged or obsessing on being right may give you the sense of moral superiority.  It doesn’t solve anything in the long run.  Rebooting and moving on with a sense of non-violent reconciliation, as hard as that may be, changes everything.   To quote the Jewish sage, if not now, when?

Planets apart.

Kathleen Harriman Mortimer died on February 17^th.  A nonagenarian as was her late father W. Averell Harriman at his passing; she was born to great railroad wealth and married to a Standard Oil heir.  As such, she lived a rarified life unimaginable to the still impoverished underclass of which Michael Harrington wrote in his 1960s classic, The Other America, and vastly different from the one experienced by almost everyone else.  Kathy Mortimer never had to meet (much less miss) a home mortgage payment, fret about a child’s college tuition, consider how much gas a car trip might require or live in the fear of some unexpected medical bill.  Perhaps her situation is best summed up in a memorable line from an episode of Masterpiece Theater’s Downton Abby.  Distant relative and working lawyer Mathew Crawly tells the dowager Violet about something he can accomplish over the weekend.  Clueless about the working (real) world, she gives him a puzzled look and asks, what’s a weekend?  What most of us consider normal life is seen, if even noted, by such dowagers past and present as some sort of alien unreality.  They reside, or so they might believe, on some other planet than ours.

All of this is not to suggest that Mortimer lived a useless or uncaring life — in fact it was an interesting and, for someone of her station, at times an unconventional one.  The Times obituary noted that she was part of a tightly knit society in which people were separated by far fewer than six degrees.  But all I could think of in reading of her death and the privileged life she led was how sharply it contrasted with and how far she was separated from the concurrently being reported people gathered on streets and squares across the Middle East.  Perhaps even more so I thought of the potential powder keg upon which we sit in this country.  Despotism is not restricted to harsh and violent dictatorships.  It can be equally repressive, though obviously in a very different way, when the disparity between the very few who have everything and the many who essentially live on rations — dolled out or meagerly earned — is becoming the norm not the exception in our dream deprived America.

Nothing illustrates this disparity more than the much quoted but still shocking statistic that, as of 2009, CEO pay was 263 times that of the company’s employees.  If young people in far away Egypt have been empowered by information and social networking, what makes one think all those deprived or undervalued people unfamiliar to the Kathy Mortimer’s in our own country will forever sit silently by in the face of this glaring disparity.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that our unemployed, underemployed and relatively underpaid, especially the tech savvy young among them, will reach similar conclusions about their own seemingly powerless lives?

While labor protests are hardly new in America, it’s not a stretch to believe that the current demonstrations in Madison Wisconsin may well foretell something more profound and widespread to come.  At the moment, demagogues of the right are trying to play up an alleged unfair disparity between the salaries and benefits of public and private workers.  It’s a divide and conquer strategy that has become standard to their playbook, thus far having succeeded in convincing working folks that, for example, lower taxes for the wealthy are actually to their benefit — perhaps the most blatant illusion pulled off since Houdini.

The Saudi monarchy is terrified about what thoughts the revolutionaries in Cairo might put into the minds of their population.  Our often personally well-healed politician deficit hawks might do well to consider how their proposed cuts in social programming will negatively affect a generation to whom a Google search is second nature and connectivity a way of everyday life.  The watershed civil rights movement and the protests against the Viet Nam War that effectively brought down Lyndon Johnson’s presidency took place without any of the informational or communicative tools that exist today.  When things go terribly wrong, even if in a democracy, the word gets out and change not delivered is taken.

When Warren Buffet and Bill Gates initiated their Giving Pledge, they weren’t simply asking fellow billionaires to follow their example of extreme philanthropy.  Interestingly, meant or not, these especially smart men (each with personal fortunes that dwarf those of the Harriman’s and the Mortimer’s) were acknowledging and sending a not so subtle message to their counterparts that the disparity between the very rich and everyone else could not forever endure in the world that is taking shape.  It’s no wonder Mark Zukerberg (the newbie billionaire) was quick to sign on.  He knows that, while his FaceBookers may originally have been satisfied with knowing which friends were doing what and when across a college campus, the current crowd wants to know what we’re all doing — what is being done for or to us — and, most importantly, why.  That knowledge alone, as recent weeks have shown, has consequences.

The mantra of getting government out of our lives and the focus of those impassioned deficit hawks on social programming translates into policies that largely disadvantage those with less, not more.  To compound the error of an essentially misguided and heartless approach is what seems to be a frontal attack on labor in general and on public employees in particular.  Somehow this group that includes the people doing the grunt work of teaching our children, protecting our domestic peace and cleaning up our trash is being scapegoated, personally responsible for our national debt and problems.  Just break the blood-sucking unions and promote a more business-friendly environment and all will be good.

Aided and abetted by an ideologically right Supreme Court majority, corporations have been given citizen status while real citizens are being shafted by politicians financed by, yes, the very same corporations.   And the companies that benefit most are exactly those whose CEOs are raking in millions while workers salaries are held in check to keep profits high (justifying those unseemly rewards for the top).  Wall Street has recovered, and then some, while bright and able recent college graduates are struggling to find jobs and unemployed 50s are coming to grips with unwanted, very early and untimely retirement. 

There was a disconnect between the life story of Kathy Mortimer and the news from both Cairo and Madison.  It was the gulf between the castle and the street.  Don’t get me wrong, this is not some kind of socialist rant nor is it a call for class warfare.  The rich are not bad because of their wealth and people are not de facto noble just because they have less or little.  To be sure there are value judgments to be made, but that’s not at issue or the point.  Dictatorships can’t stand in the world in which we now live — all are likely to fall or be drastically reformed — but neither can the current economic gulf between citizens in a democracy.  Presidents, governors, mayors and legislators may be narrowly focused on their budgets, but they seem to be missing the real problem.  It’s not even a topic of conversation.  And you thought people like Kathy Mortimer with inherited wealth were out of touch.

Debunking myth.

Beyond all else, what struck me in watching Egypt’s revolution unfold was that it totally surprised  pundits and well-seasoned students of the region alike.  This reminder of how very little we sometimes know and understand should humble us all.  Part of what led us astray was the myth of an invincible Mubarak rule poised to glide into the second generation.  All countries, including our own, have myths that, however powerful, fail to match reality.  For example, the overwhelming number of Americans whose present and future prospects are locked into their miserable status quo belies the mythic idea that anyone of us can make it in this land of opportunity.  Myth making evolves over time often out of the history we chose to remember or from opportunistic ideas and slogans repeated so often that they are no longer challenged.  Even in a democracy, legitimately elected political leaders use repeated myth to advance their careers and to mold public opinion.  That is doubly true for totalitarian regimes.

Look at any dictatorship and you will see the systematic crafting of self-serving national myth. Monarchies, whether found in Arab countries and elsewhere, are constructs of myth — the infallible ruling family that so often is either dysfunctional or corrupt.  Mubarak sustained his regime on the myth that he alone stood in the way of Egypt becoming a theocratic state.  What happened to Iran and perhaps more so that Al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri is Egyptian born and ideologically trained provide testament to this mythic truism.  If that were not enough, the opposition Muslim Brotherhood was painted as a radical Islamic organization bent on ending secular rule.  It was a powerful myth bought for a long time by his own people and by the United States, most especially after 9/11 and the Hamas electoral victories in Palestine.

It is far too early to tell what will become of Egypt’s stunning turn around, but the myth that without Mubarak it is destined for Islamist rule may already have been debunked.  To be sure, among the masses who gathered in Cairo and elsewhere were people of all ages, many among them devoutly religious Muslims.  But this was a young people’s led movement, those who Egyptians began calling the Facebook youth.  Among its identified leaders was Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old Google executive and others like him, well educated and tired of being dehumanized by a repressive archaic regime.  But perhaps more encouraging was Anthony Shadid’s February 15^th NY Times article, suggesting that freedom and a better life, not religion, was on the mind of the revolutionaries.  College graduate Ahmed Mitwallim, is of a different time than his once Islamist and still religious parents.  The last thing youth are thinking about is religion, he told Shadid.  That sounds a lot like the one in four of his American contemporaries who have moved beyond religion of any kind.   Will people like Ghonim and Mitwallim prevail?  Just as Mubarak used the myth of a threatened theocracy to bolster his regime, Egyptians have no further to look than headlines from Iran and its response to protest to see what rule by Ayatollahs and Mullahs might mean to them.

Religion may provide sustenance to much of the world’s population, but it has proved itself terrible and often repressive in governance.  Our Founders were right to erect a wall of separation between church and state, their wisdom reinforced every time those on the far right try to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us.  Even here it remains a continuing struggle, often a depressing one.  The push and pull of religion is bound to play as Egypt seeks to reinvent itself.  But whatever happens, Mubarak’s myths have been debunked and the autocratic system he imposed on his fellow citizens has been discredited.  All that happened without the United States or anyone else imposing shock, awe and destruction on one of those places where civilization as we know it was born.  That in itself is refreshing and hopefully will be a lesson learned.  We owe all those young people our thanks.

Take a stand.

The choice in Egypt, we have been told for years, is between Hosni Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood.   It is a proposition of fear, a myth that plays into our ever-increasing hysteria about Islamism.  I’d hate to think that the choice we will be asked to make in 2012 is between Barack Obama and right wing extremists.  In 2008, after years of compromise, I finally voted for and not against someone.  What’s happening in Cairo may tell us what kind of choice it will be in this country two years hence.

The Obama Administration was dealt a terrible hand when it took office in 2009.  All the adages about the difference between campaigning and governing could not have been brought into sharper relief.  For those caught up in the promise of the former the reality of the latter was destined to be disappointing.  So for many of his supporters, all of the President’s accomplishments — and they were of historic proportions — were viewed not so much for what they produced but what they failed to accomplish.  It wasn’t the passage of landmark healthcare legislation, but the fact that it lacked the essential public option.  I share those disappointments but, knowing the limits of Presidential power in the jungle that is legislative Washington, have remained supportive of Obama.  I still am.

That said, I think the President has thus far failed to meet the challenge of what my last post called a moment of truth.  Diplomacy is an art that often requires nuance and a good bit of dancing — all those frank and useful discussions.  The State Department is good at that and its entrenched ways account not only for Hilary Clinton’s cautions statements but also in large measure for policies that seem so inconsistent with American ideals.  The President is not the Secretary of State.  This is not a time for measured double talk.  It’s time to state the obvious — that Mubarak is done and must go now — and to finally take a stand on the side of those whose ideals we proclaim to share.  At a time like this there is no excuse for not getting and doing it right.   We need  straight and unambiguous talk.  Barack Obama, we're waiting for you and getting impatient.

Moment of truth.

In watching the news unfold in the last days, a persistent image came to mind.  It was George W. Bush walking hand in hand with Saudi King Abdullah.  And it wasn’t the picture or the particular president, but the perfect metaphor for American foreign policy over the years, most especially in the Near East.  Republicans and Democrats alike have happily engaged in a similar embrace.  Of course that photograph (and all the others like it) comes with a caption: hypocrisy.

For longer than any of us can remember, our country — that include its citizens — has beaten its collective breast about democracy for all, while at the same time winking at, or totally averting our eyes from, the dictatorships in the oil patch.  Not only do we business with these friends, we engage in the most reprehensible moral relativism, all with a straight face.  Iran’s Supreme Leader is bad (he has nothing we need); Egypt’s Supreme President is good (Suez).  Democracy is the Holy Grail; the election of Hamas is the ultimate catastrophe.  I sometimes feel the same way about people we elect in this country, but let me not digress.  So now we’re left scrambling, which includes a good measure of wishful thinking.  Mubarak should go, but let’s make it orderly — no rush to the polls.

You can say that what we’ve done over the years is just how it goes in international affairs.  Call it Realpolitik.  After all, how we feel or what principles we may advocate, doesn’t give us license to interfere with another nation’s politics and system.  Right.  Caption that one hypocrisy too.  Not only is this excuse is laughable; it’s contained by a leaky vessel that can no longer hold water. 

Finally, and one wonders (while at the same time knowing) why coming to the moment of truth took so long.  It may not yet be game over but only a fool doubts that Cairo is a fundamental game changer.  We are clearly unnerved by it and, after years of deaf, dumb and blind, not brilliantly prepared.  It is a major test for President Obama who once again is left to clean up the mess others have left behind.  His famous Cairo speech suggests that he comes to it with a better mindset than his predecessors, but only time will tell.  No one knows better than he (or should) that rhetoric is the easy part.

Needless to say, the weakening and potential collapse of the old order in their neighborhood has enormous implications for Israel.  As of a few days ago, their reaction has been to pull inward and harden the line that divides them from peace.  That’s a terrible mistake — in my view, potentially a fatal one.  The Egypt of Sadat and Mubarak have given Israel an unrealistic sense of security, leaving them without what they need most — a sense of urgency.  If now is the time for Mubarak to go, it’s way past now for peace to be negotiated and implemented with the Palestinians.  I hope it’s not too late.