Consider what it going on in Egypt; last Saturday night’s horrific pogrom against Christians which took place not in some godforsaken hick-town but cosmopolitan Cairo. A rumor got started that a Christian woman married to a Muslim had been abducted and was being held against her will in a church in the mixed Muslim-Christian low-income Imbaba neighborhood, and that rumor lit the fuse and sparked a mob of Islamists to march on that church where the Christians inside barricaded themselves.

Shots rang out, believed to come from gunmen on rooftops who shot into the mob; no one knows. Before long the mob was throwing fire bombs into Christian homes and shops, setting fire to the front of the besieged church.

Police showed up with tear gas, and the riot lasted for hours. And when the smoke cleared, 12 people lay dead, 220 had been wounded, two churches damaged.

What we are seeing is what some of us foresaw and feared: the rise of Islam as the dominant political culture there. Egypt experts are now predicting what yours truly considered possible at the outset of the rebellion: the Muslim Brotherhood may not win a majority in the upcoming elections in September for parliament but still could have the controlling plurality.

And look at how the front-runner in the polls Amr Moussa is rising up with and riding the rising tide of Islam. Last week Amr Moussa was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal by their Matt Bradley and that is what he predicted: the rising power of the Islamist, of the Brotherhood.

So Amr Moussa will play the religion card as well by waving the claim he never really as foreign minister fully supported Mubarak’s policy towards Israel. Now, this is a religious, not a political issue, whose policy was 30 years of peace. Indeed, the headline of the Journal piece on Friday was “Egypt front-runner seeks Israel reset.” It is a religious question.

I have watched Amr Moussa for over 30 years and he has always consistently played the antiJew card. When he visited Israel some years ago he contemptuously refused to wear a hat at Yad Vashem in the Hall of Remembrance which is recognized as a synagogue.

He is a nasty piece of antiJew work. I remember back in 2001, you may too, that in Egypt some cab driver got rich by recording a pop tune entitled “I Hate Israel.” A big hit. Well, according to Bradley on Friday (I didn’t know this before) the full title was “I hate Israel (I love Amr Moussa).”

Yesterday in an interview with the Washington Post, Amr Moussa pronounced Hamas not a terrorist organization.

In a better, more honest world, the civilized states that recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization would also brand Egypt a terrorist state, which now is so cozy with Hamas, as much as Syria has been cozy with Hamas. The two of them are terrorist states. Like Pakistan, like Afghanistan, countries whose leaders speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to violent Islam.

In a better, more honest world, Islam itself would be outlawed in civilized countries as a terrorist religion…