I don't know what the truth is here, and I clearly can't trust the media to tell me the truth, so this is very difficult to analyze. What is the ‘will of the people’ in Egypt? Do the people on the street represent the will of most, or even the majority of Egyptians? The only way to accurately ascertain that would be with extremely tightly monitored elections, and we clearly are not going to have those.
Historically, there are many examples in history where a group of very motivated and politically organized people have forced change, even when they were the minority. The Bolsheviks were by no means representative of the majority in Russia, but they helped usher in a regime that led to a realignment of the world, and the deaths of 100s of millions.
During Kristalnacht ‘the people’ took to the streets and destroyed the businesses of law abiding and productive members of society who happened to be Jewish. During the Roman empire crowds of ‘the people’ would decide who was put to death just by giving the ‘thumbs down’ sign. In the fundamental Islamist Middle East 'the people' gather in groups and stone people to death. In our modern US society ‘the people’ have often taken to the streets to overturn cars, loot, and destroy property just to exercise their ‘free will’ of celebrating the victory of their local sports team.
The bottom line, as I see it, is that life is a lot more complicated than we sometimes recognize. The only way to ensure that the ‘will of the people’ is given truthful stature is to have frequent elections that are monitored closely by all, and to have an intensely strict policy of term limits that makes it illegal for anyone to make a career out of politics. The only way to ensure that political candidates are motivated by the right things is to make it unprofitable to be elected, and to emphasize in the strongest terms that politicians are not celebrities, but are there to serve.
Maybe 1% of the Egyptian population turned out in these protests. Of course, many of them do want only freedom and not Islamic law, but if there are elections how, the whole population votes. And what they will choose is anyone’s guess. Many of the possibilities are bad.