Mustafa Barghouti, Sloan ’95, writing in . Barghouti is a physician, Palestinian democracy activist, and founder and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.
In comments he wrote for Al-Ahram Weekly, an English language journal published in Cairo, he said:
“What happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt, and what will certainly follow in other places, cannot be produced or fabricated by a political party, movement, or force, domestic or otherwise. The uprisings are the product of a long cumulative evolution, lasting years, decades, or perhaps even centuries in some areas, that eventually erupted into millions-strong grassroots protest movements of a magnitude unprecedented in the modern history of the Arab world, and perhaps in its entire history. … The eruption may produce a newborn, but it cannot guarantee its survival and wellbeing. This is one of the tasks of an organized and aware intellectual vanguard.”
Also on Stanford Knowledgebase:
yes I agree with Barghouti statements that what happened in Tunisia and then in Egypt cannot be produced or fabricated by a political party, movement, or even force