Let’s be clear. Everyone hopes and prays that Egypt turns into the kind of liberal democratic state that we in the West take for granted. But a liberal democratic state requires a liberal democratic culture to underpin it. When CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan was stripped and repeatedly sexualy assaulted by 200 men screaming “Jew, Jew, Jew” at her in Cairo in February the alarm bells started to ring loudly. I for one remember nothing similar taking place at the mass protests and celebrations that attended the fall of the Berlin Wall. So if eastern Europe 1989 is your reference point of choice, think again.

Now, in even more brutal fashion, it’s the Christians on the receiving end (Lara Logan is not in fact Jewish, but her attackers assaulted her in the belief that she is). According to the latest reports 10 people (mainly Christians) were killed and more than 100 injured yesterday after a protest following the burning of a church south of the Egyptian capital. Over Christmas 23 Egyptian Copts were slaughtered in a suicide bombing and killings of Christians from Iraq to Nigeria are becoming ever more common.

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Isn’t it amazing how our mainstream media outlets have kept our people in a state of unawareness about some basic facets of Arab society? This has been revealed as a byproduct of the obsessive concentration on the State of Israel after the protests and revolutions that are sweeping the Middle East. I have a short piece on the subject on today’s Jewish Chronicle. To read it, click here.

So which is it to be: the end of communism or the rise of the ayatollahs? As we consider the extraordinary wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East there is a certain inevitability about the struggle for an appropriate frame of historical reference against which to judge what is happening. This, after all, makes sense.

Those of us who do not have the habit of consulting fortune tellers to make our political predictions are always on the lookout for familiar structures, recognizable patterns matching events from the past or, if it really comes down to it, something to at least pin our hopes (or fears) on.

Vaclav Havel, one time dissident and former Czech president, is convinced that it’s 1989 all over again: “The authoritarian Arab regimes are the product of the same decades that produced the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It turns out that there are core moral and political standards common to all cultures.”

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In an anti-Semitic slur that would not have looked out of place in Germany in 1935, Iran has launched an official complaint over the logo for the London Olympics in 2012 saying it is racist because it spells the word “Zion”.

Mohammad Aliabadi (read Joseph Goebbels), who is head of the Iranian National Olympic Committee, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying: “The use of the word Zion by the designer of Olympics logo ….in the emblem of the Olympic Games 2012 is a very revolting act.”

The logo says nothing of the sort, of course, but in the deranged minds of Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists the image of the dreaded Jew is everywhere that power and the symbols thereof reside. Of course, for the BBC, which is soft on anti-Semitism (and Holocaust denial) when it emanates from the Muslim world, this was all quite amusing.

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My piece in this week’s Jewish Chronicle looks at the question of whether there is any justification for calling Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal following the Obama administrations recent veto of a UN resolution describing them as such. To read the article, click here.