candlelight protest

At the Bahraini Embassy in Cairo one block north of me, this very moment: candles, chants, and signs, with a crowd of all young-looking Egyptians, a generation of Arabs that suddenly seems to have a strong human rights vocation.

Bahrain certainly feels harmless enough when you’re there, and thus I was mildly surprised by their recent brutality. And while I’m not convinced that Egypt’s army behaved entirely like angels in the past few weeks, Bahrain does make them look better in retrospect. Some of them may have been involved in a few dirty things, but they were almost certainly pressured to fire openly on the protestors, and obviously they refused.