Hope and Change In Egypt

We wrote here about the first hostile demonstration by Egyptians outside Israel’s embassy in Cairo, and here about the Egyptian government’s erecting a wall around the embassy to protect it from future attacks–claiming, however, that it was acting to protect Egyptian neighbors, not Israelis.

That was only four days ago. It didn’t take long for Egypt’s mob to take matters into its own hands. Today, rioters tore down the wall, invaded the embassy, assaulted Israelis they found inside, and looted the embassy’s contents, all without interference from Cairo’s police:

Egyptian police made no attempt to intervene during the day as crowds of hundreds tore down an embassy security wall with sledgehammers and their bare hands or after nightfall when about 30 protesters stormed into the Nile-side high-rise building where the embassy is located.

Just before midnight, the group of protesters reached a room on one of the embassy’s lower floors at the top of the building and began dumping Hebrew-language documents from the windows….

For the second time in less than a month, protesters were able to get to the top of the building and pull down the Israeli flag.

This photo shows rioters demolishing the wall:

The scene was obviously very dangerous:

The group got into the building through a third-floor window and climbed the stairs to the embassy. They worked for hours to break through three doors to enter the embassy, said the 28-year-old man. They encountered three Israelis and beat one of them.

This was the hellish scene outside the embassy after nightfall:

The peril was such that the Israeli ambassador and his family are fleeing the country:

Egyptian airport officials say the Israeli ambassador is at Cairo’s airport waiting for a military plane to evacuate him from the country after protesters broke into Israel’s Embassy.
The officials say other Israelis were also waiting for the evacuation flight to take them back to Israel early Saturday.

Will something good eventually come from the “Arab spring”? I don’t know. But this sort of descent into barbarism does not bode well.

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