Is the cradle safe?

Sorry to be posing what sounds like another rhetorical question, but the other day I wrote a post in which I worried about the security of the Sphinx and the Pyramids.

I was somewhat cheered by a comment from Kathy Kinsley:

How I would love to remind them of that! But right now, my concerns over ancient monuments seem almost beside the point. Events have confirmed my fears that Egypt is so unstable that anything could happen. The vicious mob attack — a “brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” — of CBS reporter Lara Logan would be bad enough in itself, but several additional features stand out which ought to concern everyone. 

One is that the protesters have so outdone themselves in pure viciousness that they have lost whatever support they once had here:

…were there even arrests made? And why does CBS’s statement feel compelled to note that the mob had been “whipped into frenzy”? Crowds at all sorts of events get pretty frenzied, but good luck trying that with a judge if you use it as a pretext to join in on a mass sexual assault.

Needless to say, the way journalists cover these events is going to change dramatically. And even more needless to say, America will never see those protests the same way again.

Another thing that stands out is that even with the military in charge of government, there is nothing resembling rule of law or security of any kind:

…after she was assaulted, Logan went back to her hotel, and within two hours — sometime late Friday and into early Saturday — was flown out of Cairo on a chartered network jet, sources said.

She wasn’t taken to a hospital in Egypt because the network didn’t trust local security there, sources said.

And neither CBS nor Logan reported the crime to Egyptian authorities because they felt they couldn’t trust them, either, the sources said. “The way things are there now, they would have ended up arresting her again,” one source said.

They cannot protect anyone or anything.

On top of that, there’s the appallingly obscene response by certain people on the left. One Nir Rosen — a “fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security” who “regularly contributes to leading periodicals, such as Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Review, and Harper’s” — which means he probably considers himself a “journalist” — actually found humor in the attack:

Nir Rosen believed this was the right moment to let the world know that he “ran out of sympathy for her” and that we should “remember her role as a major war monger” and that we “have to find humor in the small things.”

Your move, NYU.

If they think that a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating of a female American journalist is funny, how could anyone expect such vicious post modernists (or their Sharia Law-supporting cohorts in academia) to object to the permanent destruction of the most hallowed monuments in the history of Western civilization?

I’m tempted to say “there went Egypt,” but I guess it’s still there in the physical sense. At least so far.

To say that I am disappointed would be understatement. Right now I am unable consider the attackers or their supporters to be even people, much less representatives of the cradle of Western Civilization.

There is of course a growing, inhuman, chorus which says Ms. Logan was asking for it and deserved it.

And what’s left of Western Civilization cowers in fear….