Politics, though not as usual

Neil MacFarquhar has an article in The New York Times about prospects for Egypt:

Amr Moussa kicked off his attempt to become Egypt’s first president in a real election with a raucous town-hall-style meeting, taking a few potshots at the previous government, while promising to be the caretaker leader needed to fix the country’s political and other ills.
“No president will say, ‘Oh, I will be here until the last beat of my heart,’” said Mr. Moussa, drawing laughs from several hundred of the mostly young people packed into a popular cultural center. The ousted president, Hosni Mubarak, used the line in one of his last speeches as he attempted to cling to power. “No!” Mr. Moussa said. “It will be: ‘Until the following date.’”
Mr. Moussa, 74, a former foreign minister and longtime secretary general of the Arab League, is considered the front-runner in the presidential race. He has long been popular for his confrontational remarks about Israel and the United States; Mr. Mubarak removed him as foreign minister after a song called I Hate Israel and I Love Amr Moussa became a pop hit in 2001. He took a fairly straightforward approach in answering often-hostile questions for more than three hours, telling the audience that dealing with Israel was a reality, and that good relations with the United States were also important.
At one point, parts of the crowd responded by breaking into chants of No normalization with Israel and one questioner also demanded to know why the Arab League was so impotent. Mr. Moussa sidestepped questions about his own relationship with Mr. Mubarak during the decade that he served as foreign minister, saying he had served Egypt.
Although he has said that, as caretaker president, he would stay only one term, he left murky just how long that might be. At one point, he said that a president would serve just two four-year terms, as specified in proposed constitutional amendments. But, at another point, he said the transition away from a presidential system to a parliamentary one would require ten years.
Under the schedule announced by the military council ruling Egypt, parliamentary elections would be held in June, and the presidential vote would be held in August. But many political figures, including Mr. Moussa, support reversing that to give parties time to organize.
An Egyptian court upheld a decision to freeze the assets of the Mubarak family and bar its members from traveling, rejecting an appeal by the clan.
Meanwhile, in Cairo, the generally peaceful, cooperative, nonsectarian mood of the protests was broken when a group of women who were marching were physically harassed by a mob of men.
Elsewhere, thousands of Coptic Christians staged a string of rallies to protest the burning of a church, with security officials saying that one participant was killed and dozens were wounded. The burning of the church was the result of anger over an affair between a man and a woman across Muslim-Christian lines. Such eruptions are not uncommon in Egypt, but the instability following the collapse of Mr. Mubarak’s government has heightened sectarian tensions and deepened concerns among Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, that they will not be sheltered from prejudice and violence.
Several thousand Christians protested for a second day in front of the state television headquarters in downtown Cairo, holding aloft giant crucifixes and calling for the government to secure their rights.
In Tahrir Square, women’s rights activists attempting to hold a rally to demand a greater role in the political system were set upon by scores of men, who beat and groped them. The rally was staged to mark International Women’s Day, and dedicated to honoring the memory of both women and men killed in clashes with security forces during Egypt’s revolution. The confrontations diminished after the military fired into the air, with some of the soldiers helping women find taxis to flee.
“One man I knew from Tahrir Square told me we were all working for a foreign agenda,” said Dina Abouelsoud, 35. “I said to him: ‘Why are you repeating the same attacks the government made against us when we were in Tahrir Square?”