In case some of you don’t keep up on world news, you should know that the Middle East is having quite the political crisis. No, crisis is too light of a description, Middle East governments are crumbling with quite the domino effect. Sorry, this is a bit long, if you’re going to skip it, at least watch the video.

Let’s look at the flow of events:

• Three and a half weeks of protests and crackdowns lead to Tunisia’s president to dissolve the government and flee on January 14.
• Protests spread to Egypt. Protesters are now giving Egypt’s brutal socialist military dictator a Friday deadline to end his 30 year reign.
• Protests spread to Jordan and other places. As a result, Jordan’s Abdullah II, a very benevolent king, dismissed the government and appointed a new prime minister who is more in line with the leftist and military protesters.
• Protests are now spreading to Algeria, Syria, and Yemen. More governments will soon fall.

In the summer of 2007 I spent six weeks in Jordan, mostly in the Amman area. It is a country that is 97% Muslim and half of their 6 million people are refugees or descendants of refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and Kuwait. In the Jordan River Valley there are check points where they check everybody’s ID every five to ten miles. In the rest of the country they have blockades with a Humvee or two every five to ten miles at the ready. They can shut down the country in an emergency in 15 minutes. This is why Jordan is the safest country in the Middle East.

King Abdullah II has absolute power, but he uses it to expand freedom. A few years ago the parliament passed a law to remove women’s right to vote. The king could have simply vetoed it, but he took it a step further and decreed that a certain number of seats in the parliament be reserved for women. That move wasn’t very popular with the people, but at least when I was there, everybody loved their king. I hope he can survive this.

Egypt is a much different situation. They have a sizable Coptic Christian minority that has faced a lot of high profile attacks lately. As a result symbols like this have become popular.

When I was taking Arabic in college I though about doing a graduate program in Islamic studies at some point. Where I was looking at was in Egypt. This is because Egypt has the best universities in the Arab world. The moderate Islamic scholars that have spoken out against jihad over the last decade, at least the ones from Muslim countries, have been from Egypt.

In case you missed the line from around the 0:47 mark, he said:

We will not be silenced, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re a Muslim, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights, and we will have our rights, one way or the other! We will never be silenced!

I hope this thirst for freedom, this demand for the rights of all is shared with many of this man’s fellow protesters.

Here is what I hope to see out of the situation:

1. Mubarak request NATO forces to secure the Suez Canal. If this does not happen then I hope that the UK and France send in Special Ops (they have the best legal right to do so) and if they don’t, then I hope Obama sends US Special Forces in to secure it. The Suez Canal must be kept open and secure.
2. Mubarak should dismiss the government and exile himself no later than Thursday night. If he does not, he will likely be facing millions of people skipping their Friday prayers to storm his palace and other government buildings. If he is still in the country when that happens, I would not be surprised if his body is drug through the streets.
3. Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, form an interim government and draft a constitution based on the values expressed by the man in the above video.

If this happens, there is a chance that Egypt could become a beacon of secularism in the heart of the Middle East and help ensure that the other countries currently going through democratic revolutions on a scale we haven’t seen since the breakup of the Soviet bloc can likewise form democratic governments that enshrine such freedoms as expression and the freedom of and from religion.

I may be too optimistic. However, I can’t bear the thought of revolutionaries demanding freedom instead replacing their autocrats with theocrats.

We will not be silenced, whether you’re a Christian, whether you’re a Muslim, whether you’re an atheist, you will demand your goddamn rights, and we will have our rights, one way or the other! We will never be silenced!

(Video via The Jewmanist)