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Having become a democracy activist in the 1990s, Ibrahim helped make films instructing peasants how to vote. In Egypt’s class-ridden, hierarchical society, the elite around President Hosni Mubarak viewed these activities as seditious.

But Ibrahim’s most serious infraction was to indirectly slam the increasingly obvious moves by Mubarak and his wife Suzanne to install their son, Gamal, as the future president-for-life. In an interview on satellite television, Ibrahim was asked about the tendency toward dynastic rule in the Arab world, with longtime Syrian dictator Hafez Assad ensuring he would be succeeded by his son Bashar. Ibrahim joked that the Arabs had invented a new, heretofore unknown form of government. It joined the republic (in Arabic, jumhuriya) with the monarchy (mamlakiya), creating the ... jumlukiya! We might translate the term as “monarpublicanism.”

Ibrahim was often cited by the neoconservatives who backed the Iraq War, but he did not return their esteem. He denounced them for cynically using the Sept. 11 attacks “to advance hegemonic designs” and complained that the Iraq debacle had turned the world against the U.S., causing the original sympathy generated by the attacks to evaporate.

The number of Syrian refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) already rivals the scale of the displaced in countries like Afghanistan and Somalia, which have endured much longer-running conflicts. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 2.8 million refugees have fled Syria for nearby countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey. 6.5 million remain internally displaced.

Compounding matters for Syria’s refugee women, more than 145,000 of them now run their households alone because their husbands remain in Syria or have lost their lives, according to the UNHCR

The vetting methodology was not disclosed, leaving it unclear how the administration would distinguish between so-called “moderates” and Islamist extremists (who, as Juan Cole has pointed out, are likely to secure many of the arms sent by Washington, regardless of who gets them initially). Neither did the administration explain how adding more weapons to an already militarized conflict would hasten its end.