Such grace.

February 4, Saint-Ismier.

The other day I almost wrote "We are all Egyptians" but stopped, balking at the comparison such a phrase would immediately call with such eminent journalists as those from the French venerable daily, Le Monde, who wrote "We are all Americans" after 9/11. Today it was Nicolas Kristoff's privilege to write it in his column from Tahir Square.
He is the best a journalist can be and an honor to our profession; his daily reporting from Cairo has kept me abreast of the situation in Egypt, and added a needed perspective to otherwise confusing reporting.
Exhilaration ceded to anger these past two days as I watched and read about armed thugs that showed many obvious signs of having been sent by the government to attack their brothers, along with journalists of all nationalities trying to do their job and give the world a window into what is really happening on the streets of the Egyptian capital. It is an act of treachery coming from a desperate regime clinging to its power in the face of an overwhelming popular revolt, and I have no doubt that it is the last gasp of a dying beast and for all the barbarity and screeching injustice of its unfolding will only hasten the demise of that regime.
By this last measure of his indignity Mubarak has signed his end, and the Egyptian's population's unfaltering heroism, again and again, as reported by Mr. Kristoff and others, will be remembered all the more fiercely.
I'll keep waiting for his notes from Cairo, the exhilaration I felt already surfacing again in the midst of my dismay - what else in the face of such grace and strength against barbary?