I recorded a commentary for Marketplace on American Public Radio on Bush’s Mideast visit.

Here’s the text:

My family and friends in Egypt tell me they fear an impending explosion.

Egyptians feel squeezed between skyrocketing food prices and stagnant salaries. Young activists there increasingly turn to the Internet to push for reform and to support the poor, often at great risk. Egypt has detained several bloggers and Facebook activists. One blogger was tried and convicted last year.

In Saudi Arabia too, the royal family recently jailed a blogger for more than four months without charge.

Despite their poor democracy records and common distrust of new media, Saudi Arabia and Egypt could not be more different when it comes to the economy.

Saudi Arabia is expected to make $260 billion from its oil export revenues in 2008, six times the annual average throughout the 1990s. Back then, the royal family felt the rumble of discontent from the young and a ripple of opposition from intellectuals.

The fear among democracy activists in the kingdom now is that the flood of cash has softened that sharp elbow of reform.

In Egypt, many activists believe people are simply too exhausted trying to make ends meet to think about reform. The World Food Program estimates household expenditure has doubled since the beginning of the year.

President Hosni Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 26 years. He and his cabinet are seen as increasingly out of touch with Egyptians struggling to feed their families.

But in both flush-with-cash Saudi Arabia and financially anemic Egypt, there is another kind of deficit that activists believe hinders their fight for reform — a democracy deficit in the Bush administration.

President Bush had vowed to end the American tradition of tolerating oppression for the sake of stability. But activitists and many observers believe he ends his term having struck exactly that kind of bargain.

By Mona Eltahawy

BELLEVUE, OH — When a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf tried to place an order at a bakery in Waco, Texas recently, the clerk refused to serve her saying, “We’re at war with your people.” The distraught woman replied she was born and raised in the United States, and appealed to her fellow Americans at the bakery to help her.

Thirteen of them tried — by yelling at the clerk, asking for the manager, or walking out in disgust. Six customers supported the bigoted clerk. Twenty-two just looked away and did absolutely nothing.

The Muslim woman and the bigoted store clerk were actors in a staged segment of the ABC Primetime’s show “What Would You Do?” But the reactions to the ugly scene were real — a snapshot of post- 9/11 America.

Watching such bigotry shatters my heart into a million pieces. The scenario barely begins to convey the complicated picture of life for American Muslims. Not least was the reaction of the father of a soldier who had just returned from duty in Iraq: He was a vociferous defender of the Muslim woman.

For my own chapter of the complicated Muslim life in America, the little town of Bellevue, Ohio (pop. about 8,200) is the setting.

My brother Ehab and his family are the only Muslims in Bellevue, a green and warmly Midwestern town about two hours by plane from my home and its mirror opposite, New York City, a metropolis where I anonymously navigate a tapestry of ethnicities and languages.

Bellevue got its first Muslim family when the town hired my sister-in-law, Abeer, to become its only woman OB/GYN. She is now a local celebrity — featured in the town’s paper and greeted by patients and co-workers alike at the mall, restaurants, and at my niece Danah’s soccer practice, where Abeer points out all the children she has delivered.

Like the Muslim woman in the Primetime segment, Abeer wears a headscarf. It matters little to her patients, who love her and who keep her waiting list as long as my brother’s commute to Toledo, where he is a cardiologist. I like to think that unlike the bigots and the shamefully quiet majority of customers in the ABC segment, Abeer’s patients would speak up if they ever encountered such hatred because they know a Muslim.

Ehab and Abeer moved to the United States from Egypt in 1999. I followed a year later. They were visiting me in Seattle on September 11, 2001. We didn’t leave home for two days because we were worried someone angry at Muslims would try to attack my sister-in-law, more visibly Muslim than I because of her headscarf.

A drunken man did try to set my local mosque on fire. But then residents in the surrounding neighborhood covered the mosque’s entryway with flowers and messages of apology and support. And for almost two months, volunteers stood guard outside the mosque holding signs saying Muslims are Americans.

My memory of that spontaneous support for Muslims from the community is what made the ABC segment so shocking. How could 22 people remain silent before the vilification of an innocent woman?

The ABC segment was just the tip of an iceberg of Muslim-phobia and vilification in America today. Thankfully, there have been no attacks since those on 9/11. But polls show the fears and suspicions are on the rise in America.

Why? A major reason is the use of Muslims and Islam to scare voters. It has become one of the cheapest cards to play in an election campaign: An anemic economy and an unpopular war make it classically requisite for a scapegoat: So, pull out a Muslim punching bag. Barack Obama’s opponents think they can slur him and Muslims with rumors and accusations.

President Bush was commended for visiting a mosque soon after the 9/11 horrors, and saying clearly that Islam was not to blame. But his policies since then have been almost the complete opposite. The Patriot Act has been used to spy and hound inocent Muslims and has ruined plenty of Muslim lives — but led to no terrorist convictions. Guantánamo has become a shameful blight on all that America once represented.

My brother was one of the 8,000 Muslim men interviewed by the FBI in November, 2001. Two years later, he submitted to being fingerprinted and photographed like a common criminal as part of a “Special Registration.” What about him, besides his Muslim faith, warranted such treatment?

During my most recent visit to Bellevue, Abeer told me she wondered if her patients ever thought it was weird they were seeing a Muslim doctor. I told her that her work and her family’s life in Bellevue had undoubtedly humanized Muslims for the town.

My niece Danah and her brother Nour are the first Americans in our family. At the church daycare they attend, the teachers know not to give them any pork. Danah knows that ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ are interchangeable.

We’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of Danah and Nour’s twin brother and sister. Their parents are in heated debate as we speak over Muslim names that work well in English and Arabic. For now, my brother jokingly calls them Tic and Tac.

My hope for the four Eltahawy siblings from Bellevue, OH, is that they grow up in a country where their fellow Americans refuse to be silent witnesses to hatred but will instead fiercely stand up to bigotry.

Distributed by Agence Global.

By Mona Eltahawy

NEW YORK — On any given day, the social networking site Facebook connects long lost friends and allows you to “poke” attractive strangers you wish would be your friends. But in Egypt, Facebook is the stage for the latest twist in the generation gap, playing host to politically hungry young Egyptians eager to take on their aging leader.

On May 4, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak turns 80. To mark the big day for the man who has ruled them for 26 years, Egyptians who have known no other leader and who are increasingly going online to challenge him have urged their compatriots to go on strike, wear black, and write “No” to Mubarak on their money.

I know all of this, not through news stories, but because activists publicized the details and demands of the strike on Facebook. I don’t know most of my 724 “friends” on Facebook, but their messages and their status updates have become invaluable to me — especially my Facebook friends from Egypt.

A group promoting the May 4 strike has almost 74,000 members, up from about 60,000 a month ago. Its demands are a minimum wage, salary raises linked to inflation, and legislation and other measures to control prices. As admirable as those goals are, I am just as in awe of the creativity that pours into Facebook.

One Egyptian posted a rap song in colloquial Arabic that sounded as if it was recorded at a coffee shop — complete with the sound of water pipes and the click-clack of teacups hitting saucers. While the coffee shop patron’s rap lists the country’s woes, pictures of t-shirts illustrate the target of the song and the May 4 strike: A black one tells Mubarak simply “It was a black day when you arrived.”

To understand how rattled Mubarak’s regime is by the increasing popularity of what one young man called the “Political Party of the Internet,” look no further than Egypt’s queen and king of Generation Facebook: Esra Abdel Fattah, 27, and Bilal Diab, 20.

Esra was detained for more than three weeks for forming a Facebook group calling Egyptians to take part in an April 6 general strike. Her group collected more than 60,000 names. She was released after her mother personally appealed to Mubarak and his wife.

What but desperation would inspire a regime with 26 years under its belt to detain a 27-year-old over a Facebook group?

That was essentially what Bilal told Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif when the latter gave a speech at Cairo University urging Egyptian youth to go online to express themselves. The student interrupted the older man to remind Nazif that there were several young Egyptians in jail for doing exactly what the premiere was calling for. Police promptly whisked Bilal off for several hours, and turning him into a hero for the independent media. The state-owned media did their best to ignore him.

No doubt Esra and Bilal’s run-ins with Mubarak’s security forces were meant to teach their online cohorts to swear off the internet. Not likely. We are all Esra became the name of a popular group on Facebook.

Young activists like Esra and Bilal are uniquely positioned to step into the cracks that have widened in Egypt lately: An ageing dictator and his out-of-touch cabinet are rumored to be the richest men in Egypt’s modern history, at a time when spiraling food prices are grinding most Egyptians deeper into misery. Recently, at least 11 people have died while lining up for bread.

Another active Facebooker, Mohammed Abdel Hai, who posted that rap song in support of the May 4 strike, told a television show host recently that he turned to the internet out of sheer frustration. At university he wanted neither of the only two options available — Mubarak’s National Democratic Party or the Muslim Brotherhood, the political Islamist movement that is Egypt’s largest opposition group.

Generation Facebook is the godchild of two important developments that took off over the past three years in Egypt — an increasingly bold blogging movement and street activism.

In 2005, activists breached not just laws against public demonstrations but taboos against protesting against Mubarak himself, with street protests that focused on Egypt and its internal discontents. But that 2005 movement was criticized for being out of touch with the needs of ordinary Egyptians and for failing to rally the masses.

This year’s internet-inspired activism has flipped the script — the needs of the masses have sparked a wave of unprecedented activism among young Egyptians.

When I asked my younger sister Nora, 21, why she joined the April 6 strike in Cairo, she said watching people crying on television because they didn’t have 35 Egyptian pounds (less than $7) to feed their families broke something in her. Two of her friends, also women in their early 20s, were detained for two days for taking part in a downtown Cairo demonstration in support of the strike.

In 2005, the Kefaya protest movement and the Muslim Brotherhood would announce demonstrations and hope ordinary Egyptians would join them. Now both those movements are joining the May 4 strike called by the Facebook activists.

The April 6 strike was sporadic and focused mostly on the Nile Delta town of Mahalla el-Kobra where at least two people were killed and more than 150 injured in two days of rioting. A Facebook group for the May 4 strike consoled Egyptians by reminding them that “God created the world in six days. We can’t change Egypt in one day.”

Egypt’s Generation Facebook, unlike its octogenarian leader, has time on its side.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues.

Copyright ©2008 Mona Eltahawy
Distributed by Agence Global

Bravo to whoever came up with the idea of nominating Bahrain’s first and only Jewish female lawmaker to be the Gulf kingdom’s ambassador to Washington.

Huda Nono’s appointment would make Bahrain the only Arab country to send a Jewish ambassador to the U.S.

Here’s hoping she makes it.

by Mona Eltahawy

The second real Muslim was elected to Congress last month.

I say “real” because Andre Carson, a Democrat who won a special election in Indiana to replace his grandmother who represented the state in Congress for 11 years until her death in December 2007, is not a closet or “stealth” Muslim as right wing commentators and opponents of Barak Obama have tried to make him.

Obama, who continues to lead Hillary Clinton in the race to become the Democratic candidate in presidential elections later this year, has said countless times he is Christian. His Kenyan father was born to a Muslim family but was an atheist. Obama’s opponents have ignored all that and have “accused” him of being a Muslim, as if it were a crime. Such rumor-mongering is a sad indictment of the fear and ignorance of Muslims that sadly exists among too many in the U.S.

Which is where Carson, 33, and the Keith Ellison (D-Minn), 44, the first Muslim congressman, come in.

Both men African-American converts to Islam. Comfortable as both Muslims and Americans, they are proof that not all Muslims in the U.S. are immigrants or newcomers who don’t understand American values.

When he took the oath standing next to his wife and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Carson said he was a “proud Muslim, a proud American and a proud Hoosier”.

Their comfort with both their American and Muslim identities makes them great role models and examples of why more Muslims in the U.S. should enter politics. They show young American Muslims that it is possible to be elected, despite the hateful comments of the right wing. And they are hopefully deterrents to the hateful comments of some of their fellow elected officials, some of whom have urged the bombing of Muslim holy sites while others have tried to paint all Muslims as terrorists.

Despite the fear-mongering surrounding Obama, it was a relief to hear that Carson’s faith was not an issue during his campaign.

A reporter at the ceremonial swearing-in asked Carson if he took the oath on the same Quran that Ellison used when he became the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress in 2005.

Carson held up the book he took the oath on and replied “It’s the U.S. Constitution” and smiled broadly.

It was a brilliant move because it so beautifully connected his election to the democratic principles that the U.S. Constitution defines.

Carson’s move was as wise as Ellison’s move to use for his ceremonial oath a Quran that used to belong to Thomas Jefferson.

After Ellison was elected, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) warned in a letter to a constituent “if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran”.

When I interviewed Ellison last year, he told me that one of his supporters had found out that Jefferson owned a copy of the Quran that was kept at the Library of Congress and suggested he use it for his ceremonial oath as a way of connecting himself to American history that would deflate the accusations of his opponents, like Goode.

“Thomas Jefferson felt there was something he had to learn from the Quran and it was really a joy just looking through the two volumes set,” Ellison told me. “It was a fascinating experience (to look through it). I don’t think most Americans knew that Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran, I didn’t know and so now people know it and know that at the very founding of this society religious tolerance was an important value. So this religious intolerance that we see prevalent today is new and doesn’t go to the roots of the country.”

Carson has just 10 months in Congress as he fills out the remainder of his grandmother’s term. To remain in Congress, he must contest a pre-election in Indiana which will determine who runs in November for the next full two-year term.

Let’s hope he wins so that the two real Muslims remain in the House. Their role is of immense value.

Initially posted at QuicktoListen.