If President Hosni Mubarak is smart, he will take a hard look at the shambles Egypt has become and step down, before he is overthrown or assassinated. An honorable exit might earn him forgiveness for his otherwise disgraceful record.

Egypt had its revolution in 1952, yet it remains a dependency. For example, Egyptian cotton, the highest quality cotton in the world, is marketed in the United States as towels and bed sheets made in Israel, Britain and America. Egypt's only part is to provide the natural resource produced by the sweat and labor of peasants living under substandard conditions. This is how it was for Egypt under British colonialism. If Egypt cannot use its very fine cotton to also make and internationally market towels, after 40 years of the revolution that promised industrialization, and if most of its income comes from Westerners visiting the accomplishments of Egyptians of millennia past, something is fundamentally wrong. And it is not fundamentalism, as the government wishes to believe or portray.

Seeds for Islamic activism, referred to as fundamentalism, were sowed in Egypt after the 1967 aggression on Egypt by Israel. The swift defeat was devastating for the people. As hopelessness and despair set in, Muslims and Christians alike began to report apparitions of the Virgin Mary. There was no productivity. Men escaped the bitter reality of defeat and powerlessness by sitting in coffee houses day and night. It was a nation in depression.

Hope was restored in the 1970s, after the Ramadan crossing of the Suez and the destruction of Israel's front line. The country woke up to find itself immersed in consumerist capitalism, a market for the West at the expense of local production. As consumer goods entered Egypt through the door opened by President Anwar Sadat, unwelcome Westernization in lifestyle and values tried to impose itself on local tradition. Against all of this, Islam, a legitimate source of strength and identity, was the answer.

In the 1980s, the Islamic movement, religious and political, spread throughout Egypt and the Arab world. The decade was bracketed by Israel's brutal response to the Palestinian intifada, supported by the United States, and the humiliating and divisive Gulf war, executed by the United States for the Zionist agenda. These two events dramatized the double standard in U.S. policy--perpetrating atrocities against Arabs and rejecting their human rights while rewarding Israel and its repression with millions in loans and aid. The Islamic movement grew, both as resistance to Israel's occupation and human rights violations and as political opposition to regimes that submit to the West's dominance and brutalize their own people. Where the movement sought to consolidate and participate in the democratic process, as in Algeria, a total arrest of the democratic process was the response.