Egyptian protesters demand Morsi leave office, his proponents gather in support... Update: BBC says it is the largest protest in the history of mankind!

How's that Arab Spring working out?

View from Tahir Square...

Update:

THE BBC ON THE EGYPT MARCHES: “The number of people protesting today is the largest number in a political event in the history of mankind.”Posted at 5:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds     

Hey. 

Meanwhile back in the USA the networks are basically ignoring the story because it is embarassing to the President Obama.  

Defiance

#Egypt LIVE Updates — Army threatens to suspend Constitution http://t.co/8rxvrt6CF7 #June30
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) July 2, 2013

Return of the Revolution?
Wombat's Live at Five: 10 dead, millions in the street.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: A Light Fails In Egypt.

Is Egypt’s revolution falling apart? Clashes between anti-government protestors and Muslim Brotherhood supporters turned deadly yesterday, leaving at least three—including an American college student—dead. These clashes come ahead of massive country-wide demonstrations against President Morsi scheduled for Sunday. The NYT reports that on-the-ground forces are even speaking of a civil war. . . .
It’s hard for the American press to wrap its head around what’s happening in Egypt. The Western media instinctively wants to view the conflict as Islamists vs. secularists or liberals, with the future of democracy at stake. The reality is both darker and more complicated, but at best only a handful journalists have the intellectual chops to make sense of this picture, or the writing ability to help American readers understand a reality so different from our own experience here at home.

Had we pushed democratization back in 2004, when the U.S. had a lot of mana in the region, it might have gone better, but the Bush Administration unaccountably reversed course on that. Or, perhaps, they figured out what would happen and thought better of it, unlike Obama and his Cairo speech. I’ve faulted the Bush folks for their sudden and (to me) inexplicable abandonment of the mideast democracy-promotion agenda, but perhaps they knew more than I realized.
Plus, the wages of a higher education bubble:

Inexperienced 18 years olds who have grown up in corrupt, poorly governed societies, and been educated in trashy schools by incompetent hacks know very well that the status quo is unacceptable. Young people who know they are being ripped off and abused are typically not very patient. Throw in healthy doses of sexual frustration and contempt for an establishment that has lost confidence in its own capacity to lead, and you have a cocktail much more explosive than anything Molotov knew.
Egypt’s university system is particularly destructive. Year after year it turns out people with paper credentials, high expectations, and no real skills or understanding of how the world works. Those who manage to acquire real skills often go work in the Gulf, where Egyptian expats are able to have something approaching an effective professional career. But many Egyptian secondary school and university graduates end up in the worst of all possible worlds: too well-educated to accept the grinding poverty, soul-crushing drudgery and lack of status that so many jobs there entail, but not well-educated enough to build a better future for themselves or to organize effectively to remedy the ills of a society that creates such a dismal trap for youth.

Ugh. Good thing nothing like that could ever happen here.

Posted at 10:29 am by Glenn Reynolds    

Update:

JUNE 30, 2013

SANDMONKEY: Dear World, pay attention: Muslims protesting in the millions against Islamism. This is Historic.
Check out this pic. Wow.
UPDATE: How’s that “smart diplomacy” workin’ out for ya?

The demonstrators maintain Morsi has become a power-hungry autocrat who is intent on making the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt’s permanent ruling party.
They also blame the Obama administration and U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson for propping up Morsi and facilitating the Muslim Brotherhood’s power grab.
“We are very critical of the Obama administration because they have been supporting the Brotherhood like no one has ever supported them,” Shadi Al Ghazali Harb, a 24-year-old member of Egypt’s Revolutionary Youth Coalition, told the Washington Free Beacon on Friday afternoon during a telephone interview from Cairo.
The White House is “the main supporter of the Brotherhood,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the American support this president would have fallen months ago.”
Al Ghazali Harb specifically dubbed Patterson “the first enemy of the revolution,” claiming “she is hated even more than Morsi.”

Ouch. If it’s any consolation, a lot of us aren’t so crazy about her either. . . .

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 4:30 pm

17 million Egyptians protesting the current Muslim Brotherhood government...