stefano » Sat Dec 28, 2013 9:35 pm wrote:
Hi Alice, merry Christmas to you and yours. It's good to hear from you, and good to hear your take on things. Thanks for your effort in writing that long post.
Hi and Merry Christmas back, stefano, and it's I who thank you for your response and critique.
stefano wrote:
I disagree almost completely with your take though, and I've spent these past two days thinking about why that is. Of course it's because I'm not Egyptian and haven't been in Egypt for the past year: while I could see that Brotherhood rule was disastrous I never experienced it as personally threatening in the same way as so many Egyptians did. I suppose that, as a Copt and a woman, the MB's project was particularly hostile to you.
I know it's hard to grasp, but what's at stake is much, much bigger than me personally, whether as an Egyptian, a Copt or a woman; it's about Egypt and also about the Arab world as a whole. Even if Egypt is our immediate priority, the past three years have destroyed any illusions we had before, that Egyptians can save their nation without first understanding and addressing the transnational forces that are transforming the region and beyond. It is this leap of perception which Western observers seem to have the greatest difficulty making, possibly because the Western propaganda barrier is primarily designed to prevent it, which it does by neglecting to put events in any but the most self-serving historical or other context, when it provides any context at all.
One way it does this is by conveying (explicitly or implicitly) the image that the Arab world and individual Arab states are a fragile collection of mutually hostile fragments, artificially held together by moribund dictatorships. It is a model that the West has relentlessly tried to impose over the past 50 years or so using a variety of ways, covert and overt, including rather savage military force on many occasions. To be blunt, it is the simplistic and self-serving Zionist imperialist model par excellence, and it is no accident that some of its most ardent propagandists have been prominent Zionist ideologues like Bernard Lewis and many, many others who, especially since the 1950s, have largely shaped Western perceptions through influential think-tanks, prestigious academic pulpits, the global media and through high-level positions in the US State Department and other Western governments. In effect, this is the West expertly speaking to the West in a language carefully calibrated to produce the desired reaction in Western audiences, leaving those on our side of the barrier to either dismiss the Western public as irrelevant (which it largely is, just as we are to them), or to try to find an alternative way to communicate.
Your framing of the issue above, which I found very telling, is a good example of how your point of view has been shaped (almost certainly without your being aware of it) by the barrier I referred to earlier. The barrier seems to operate like a meat grinder -- you put in one big chunk of beef (Egypt) and what comes out the other side is a bunch of separate strings: "personal threats", Coptic interests, women's interests, etc. In fact, the core conflict is between two forces, one which is determined to keep Egypt as one unified nation-state within its historical and internationally-recognized borders, which protects all its citizens equally and defends its sovereignty, and another which is determined to fragment the nation into weak and dependent, mutually hostile and armed, ethnic/sectarian/geographic entities. These forces are the same, whether in Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria or any other targeted country in the region, and to ignore this glaring reality is to deliberately misrepresent what is being done and why. For simplicity's sake, I focus on Egypt not as an isolated but as a representative case which helps to shed light on the rest.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the principal (but by no means the only) instrument for fulfilling the goals of Western/Zionist imperialism, in Egypt and in all other countries in the Middle East (and even elsewhere). It is ideally suited for this purpose: for one thing, in their cult, Egypt's thousands of years of continuous history and culture and civilization are something to be discarded and forgotten; according to them, history is to be traced only as far back to 1928, when Hassan Al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood with the secret financial support of British intelligence. Also, the Muslim Brotherhood does not recognize the legitimacy of the Egyptian nation-state, or any national borders, only the transnational "umma" (which it defines as those Muslims who adhere to their peculiar cult -- all others being "infidels").
The constitution formulated by the Brotherhood and imposed on Egyptians via a rigged referendum gave the president the power to amend Egypt's borders and to issue other decrees violating Egypt's sovereignty with the approval of a two-thirds majority of the parliament (a parliament dominated by the Brotherhood and their Islamist partners, brought by rigged elections and based on electoral laws that violated Egypt's then-current constitution). Thus, although the MB ruled for just one year, during that short time they managed to promise a large and integral piece of Egypt's territory (Halayeb and Shalateen) to Sudan; the Sudanese Foreign Minister spilled the beans after Morsy's visit to Sudan, accompanied by silence from Morsy's government. In lock-step, Al-Jazeera and Western media began to falsely refer to the Egyptian territory as "disputed". Even the BBC News web-site began quietly accompanying its coverage of the region with fraudulent maps in which this Egyptian territory is part of Sudan. Only after a major public outcry and legal measures to charge Morsy with treason did Morsy issue a statement denying it, though the Brotherhood's political party had already published maps of Egypt on their official web-site and in school textbooks that showed the territory as Sudanese.
One of the advantages of the rootlessness and total absence of national loyalty that are induced via the Brotherhood's brainwashing is that they allow the Brotherhood organization to move their minions around like pawns, from one battleground to the next, where they are unleashed to kill without mercy and to die without hesitation, fighting the designated target without knowing why, which has rendered it unnecessary for their handlers to explain to them why these "Muslims" have been assigned to exclusively murder Arab Muslims and Christians, and to attack Arab regimes while avoiding any harm to Israel at all, oddly enough the biggest beneficiary of their "holy war".
The Brotherhood opened Sinai to thousands of battle-hardened terrorists released from Egyptian prisons and invited from Chechnya, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere, and as titular Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Morsy prevented the army from conducting any operations in Sinai to prevent the territory from becoming a huge armed training camp where terrorists led by Mohamed Al-Zawahri (Ayman Al-Zawahri's brother) recruited, trained and carried out operations against the Egyptian army without any restraints. He also pardoned or repatriated experienced drug and arms smugglers, who immediately went to work via Egypt's borders with Libya, Sudan, the Mediterranean and Gaza. Under Morsy's rule, the number and size of tunnels between Gaza and Sinai grew unchecked, with some tunnels large enough for trailer-trucks to use. Huge quantities of weapons, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank and other heavy artillery as well as small arms, were smuggled into Sinai from Libya and on ships in the Mediterranean under the supervision of Muslim Brothers stationed at Egypt's ports and customs offices. At the same time, members of Hamas began buying up huge areas of land in Sinai. The army defied Morsy by issuing military regulations preventing the purchase or sale of any land by non-Egyptians under its administration in Sinai. The plan appears to have been to sever Sinai from Egyptian sovereignty, creating a terrorist-controlled and non-Egyptian populated Islamist "emirate" there, providing a pretext for US or NATO military intervention and occupation, as a prelude to Israeli invasion number three sometime in the future.
Finally, shortly before Morsy's ouster, he unveiled a plan for the "Development of the Suez Canal Territory". The word "territory" caused shock-waves throughout Egyptian society, because of its connotations that the cities along the Canal constitute a single separate entity as opposed to being an integral part of Egypt. The real shock, however, was when we learned details of this plan: the "territory" would not be subject to Egyptian law, but would be administered directly by the president himself using a separate legal and administrative system headed by his appointees. Under this plan, foreign investors (Qatari? Israeli? American? Turkish?) would be invited to buy "bonds" and unlimited shares in businesses and properties surrounding the Suez Canal. As for the Canal itself, and most other assets of the state (including, theoretically, the pyramids and even the Nile!), these would be placed on the auction block under a plan approved by the Brotherhood-dominated parliament, called "Islamic bonds" ("Sukouk Islameya"), in which various public assets would be made available to foreign and domestic "investors"; the plan is riddled with loopholes and 'back-doors' that would permit these investors to eventually own the assets themselves. In order to give a veneer of legitimacy to the plan's label as "Islamic", the law was first referred to the religious authorities at Al-Azhar for approval. Instead, Al-Azhar vehemently opposed the plan, declaring that it violates not only Islamic principles, but Egyptian national sovereignty. Having failed to obtain Al-Azhar's blessing, and in the face of strong and widespread public opposition, the word "Islamic" was removed from the title and the law was rammed through Morsy's Senate, which he illegally vested with legislative powers after the Supreme Court found the Brotherhood-dominated parliament unconstitutional and mandated its dissolution.
Needless to say, the Egyptian army and Al-Azhar have represented major obstacles to be eliminated by the Brotherhood, if their mission is to be accomplished.
But dismantling Egypt into separate geographic and economic and administrative entities was only one part of the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they raced to implement during their few months in power. They also did everything in their power to dismantle Egypt socially by inciting enmity between Copts and Muslims, Sunnis and Shi'ites, between Muslim Brothers and 'regular' Sunnis, between secularists and religious, between Nubians and other Egyptians and between regions, such as Port Said and the rest of Egypt. For example, along with their constant hate-mongering against Christians through their media, their operatives launched sectarian attacks to justify evacuating Christian families from their homes in neighborhoods where they and their Muslim neighbors had deep, intertwined roots, "for their own security". In one infamous incident, Morsy presided over a rally in support of the Syrian rebels, in which one of the Brotherhood's pet demagogues in religious guise ranted on about the Shi'ite "infestation" of Egypt as Morsy and his gang listened approvingly; this was followed within hours by a brutal lynching of a Shi'ite family, who were murdered inside their own home and their bodies dragged through the streets by Morsy's followers. The horrible shootings in Port Said were designed to isolate the people there from the rest of Egypt, and they nearly succeeded, as the people of Port Said declared their independence, in a trend that was soon followed by other governorates. The Nubians in Aswan (along with most Egyptians) were infuriated and shocked by statements by high-level government officials that Nubians are not "real Egyptians". These are just some among many examples of the tactics used by the Muslim Brotherhood to fragment Egypt into pieces.
All this was accompanied by a campaign to destroy all the pillars of the Egyptian state and rule of law. I have mentioned in earlier posts how Morsy appointed his own Prosecutor-General, whose job was to "legally prosecute" only those who opposed the Muslim Brotherhood's own crimes. Morsy's thugs physically threatened and in some instances attacked the judges of the Supreme Court and other judges, even in their homes. Among the laws that Morsy was preparing to sign was one that would force over 3200 senior judges into retirement, and replace them with hand-picked Brotherhood members from among law-school graduates. The Brotherhood tried to transform the Egyptian police into its own private militia, sparking a nation-wide rebellion among police officers, who locked police stations with chains and declared their solidarity with the people, in the months leading up to June 30. In response, the terrorist Gama'a Islameya (infamous for its assassinations and terrorist bombings during the 80s and 90s) paraded through towns in Upper Egypt (including downtown Asyut, a city in Upper Egypt where at least 40% of the population is Christian) and announced that it would replace the national police with its own members, much to our horror.
Furthermore, as we later discovered, the Brotherhood had been importing large amounts of fabric and manufactured uniforms from Turkey and elsewhere to counterfeit Egyptian army uniforms; their operatives had committed crimes against Egyptians disguised as army officers and draftees. In this infamous image, "army officers" are beating and kicking a female protester: few at the time noted the significance of the fact that one of her attackers is wearing running shoes, which no army personnel would ever wear:
The significance of this became clearer when known members of April 6 (the line between the "leftist youth movement" of April 6 and the Muslim Brotherhood has become very blurred) were found to have disguised themselves as military police. Here's the West's latest darling, Ahmed Douma, impersonating a military policeman:
These photos were taken in November 2011, when the public was still reeling from a series of atrocities committed by men in military uniform that had caused most Egyptians to turn against their army for the first time in Egypt's thousands of years of history. The army's denials were dismissed as lies, and their insistence that there was a "third party" of mysterious agents provocateurs committing these crimes became the object of widespread ridicule in the media, on the internet and on the street. I remember one army officer earnestly trying to explain to me -- for over an hour -- that the army is being framed, without success, because what he said made no sense to me given the information available to me at the time.
stefano wrote:
Although I was pleased about the coup, I thought at the time that much further persecution of the MB and locking them out of the constitution-writing process would inevitably increase the terror risk, as has happened.
I've tried to explain that what was at stake was Egypt's very survival. We are not "persecuting" them, we are using legal means to prosecute the members of a violent, fascist criminal organization that is an agency of hostile foreign powers who are providing it with financial, political and logistical support. Do you think we didn't know that we would pay a very high price for saving our country? We knew better than anyone, and we were and are prepared, because this is Egypt we're talking about. Like all Egyptians, I've been heartbroken by the murder of so many innocent people, by the bombs, by the burning of buildings, the destruction of priceless artifacts. The Muslim Brotherhood and their minions have burned and destroyed 86 churches alone, some of them ancient and irreplaceable. Yet the Egyptian Pope spoke for all of us when he said, "We can live in a country without churches, but we cannot live in churches without a country." In yet another slap in the face to the Brotherhood and those who bet on their ability to divide Egypt along sectarian lines, several prominent Muslims issued a statement saying, "If they burn all the churches, the Christians will hold their masses inside the mosques, and if they burn the mosques, Christians and Muslims will pray together in the streets."
Naturally, you're welcome to suggest that the members of a fascist, terrorist cult backed by your country's enemies operate freely and help to re-write your own country's constitution, but the Egyptian people have made it clear that thanks, but no thanks. Their terrorism only strengthens our resolve.
stefano wrote:
At the same time, not being Egyptian gives me the luxury of some objectivity: I haven't been subjected to the same manipulation of national symbols as you, nor to the current pro-Sisi, anti-MB and anti-liberal media barrage in Egyptian media to the same extent. I thought it was interesting that you spent four paragraphs of your post on the commemoration of 1973 - obviously the government's efforts to boost nationalist feeling (and to make you remember Sadat more as the victor of 1973 than as the peacemaker of 1979, which he is to the beardies) has had some effect. And I'm a bit removed from the Sisi personality cult, which doesn't look as ridiculous and ominous in Egypt as it does from the outside. So, while I may well have felt the same as you if I were Egyptian, I'm not, so I don't.
I do think that you enthusiasm for Sisi has led you to take some liberties with the facts and has influenced your interpretation, and that's what this post is about.
As I've tried to say, not being Egyptian does not give you the luxury of objectivity, but it does give you the luxury of making glib judgments from afar. You are free to disagree with my interpretation, but I have taken no liberties with any facts. If you know otherwise, please be more specific. First, unlike many in the West, we do not passively depend on our media to interpret reality for us, because we experience it directly. To illustrate, here's an example of an Al-Jazeera Friday broadcast covering what the voice-over calls "massive demonstrations" by the Brotherhood. They use a split screen to simultaneously cover these "massive demonstrations", LIVE including one which they say is occurring NOW in Sphinx Square in Mohandessin, a suburb of Giza. A viewer whose apartment overlooks Sphinx Square films one continuous shot from the tv screen to the Square itself:
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We've seen it all, and an enormous amount of money and international expertise has been deployed to fool us, but they've all failed miserably, which is why our enemies now resort to bullying, threats and savage terrorism against us, and reserve their media manipulation for audiences in the West, who believe whatever they're told.
Please don't patronize me, or Egyptians. Given how close we came to losing our country to the same fate as too many of our neighbors, it's ok for us to celebrate the unity and strength and courage of our people, who allowed us to thwart the best-laid plans of truly vicious enemies. A few months ago, the big joke in Syria was: "If you missed the Syrian movie, it's being re-run in Egypt." Well, when it ran in Egypt, we changed the ending, and by doing so, we may have changed a few other endings as well. And we couldn't have done it without our army, and without its brave and capable leader, who's earned our trust and respect. That you view our celebration as a "personality cult" suggests that you just don't get it, and perhaps can't.
The Iraqi army is gone, the Syrian army is still fighting for its survival, but the Egyptian army is fighting back and winning. We are joyful and grateful and express this exuberantly to keep their and our spirits up as we struggle against a vicious, bloodthirsty enemy still committed to our destruction. I tried to explain the significance to Egyptians of the October Crossing in 1973, which marks the last time Egyptians united to achieve a major military victory, before we entered the long, dark tunnel of servitude to the US. If you don't understand why it's being celebrated today, then so be it. As for Sadat, whatever I think of him and his politics, his assassination was a horrible crime, and no commemoration of the October War makes sense without acknowledging his role in its planning and execution, let alone one in which his murderers are guests of honor.
stefano wrote:
Firstly about your dark hints that the MB and the liberals are in league with "Arabs' worst enemies": you obviously know that the SCAF has strong ties to the Pentagorn and the US arms industry. That hasn't gone away, and I don't think the temporary chill after John Kerry's State Department suspended some aid in October will last very long: once elections are held the arms dealers' lobbyists will push for normalisation of relations and things will carry on as before. You mentioned what Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy said about diversifying Egypt's sources of procurement - has anything actually happened along those lines? Have there been any deals, or is that just the kind of statement you'd expect to hear from a member of a nationalist government that has just taken power and is experiencing a slight snub from Washington as an insult?
The US government threatened to cut off military aid, and the Egyptian government told them to go ahead. They backed off for reasons I've explained in earlier posts (in a nutshell, because that would hurt them more than it would hurt us). The US/EU and their NATO attack-dog Erdogan, the aspiring "Caliph" of the Brotherhood-controlled New Middle East and their lap-dog Qatar have tried every way possible to tighten the screws against Egypt, including threatening Egypt's access to water through the Nile, hosting meetings of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood where they plot against Egypt, using their media to accuse the Egyptian army of committing massacres and to spread other lies, trying to spread chaos by supplying the terrorists with weapons and money, etc.
Egypt will gladly continue to purchase US-made weapons and equipment, but based on the government's statements, the US will be competing for contracts just like everybody else. We had a high-level Russian military delegation to Egypt last month, which appears to have gone well. I have no idea what went on behind closed doors. We'll see, won't we?
stefano wrote:
Also, you hint darkly at the sources of the MB's and the liberals' funds, but omit to mention that the interim government is only solvent thanks to a massive cash injection from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. Twelve billion dollars! Are they Egypt's friends? What do you think the Saudis think they are buying with that money? Influence for the Salafis, at least - hence the "principles of Islamic sharia" gag in the constitution. What else do you think they want, at your expense? .
There are no "friends" among governments in international relations, but mutual or conflicting interests. For example, in partnership with the US, the EU and Israel's other frontmen, Saudi Arabia has played a very destructive role in Syria in the belief that this would serve its own interest. Then, at some point (lucky for us!) the Saudi authorities changed their mind and decided to stand with Egypt against the US and their other partners, and against the same agents they've been backing in Syria. Maybe this has something to do with that: How 5 Countries Could Become 14. The UAE has been cracking down on Muslim Brotherhood cells in its own jurisdiction, and presumably Kuwait is doing the same, having recognized the danger to any Arab state that hosts them, given what we now know about who they're really working for.
I don't know what you mean by the "'principles of Islamic sharia' gag in the constitution". Egypt's 1923 constitution specified that "Islamic principles" would be among the sources of legislation. In 1971, this was amended to be "the primary source of legislation". The Egyptian Supreme Court defined "Islamic principles" as the values enshrined in Islam upon which there is unanimous agreement among recognized religious authorities. These include supreme values such as justice, equality, human dignity, etc. In the Brotherhood's 2012 constitution, a clause was added that explicitly defined "Islamic principles" to include the views of a wide variety of different scholars and interpretations, which opened the door to the most extreme and bizarre among them. The salafists were adamant that they would not back down in their demand that this clause be retained, but in the end they did.
stefano wrote:
And do you think those countries - hardly non-aligned - gave those funds against the wishes of Washington? Or Israel? I doubt it. The Israeli security establishment must be pleased at least that Egypt is again co-operating enthusiastically in the economic suffocation of Gaza, and more broadly that the boys with whom they've had a functional working relationship since 1979 are again in charge.
You may doubt it, but I don't, not for a minute. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait may wish to maintain their good relations with the US, but not if this means their own destruction at the hands of the US's other "ally", the Muslim Brotherhood. Clearly, that's exactly the choice they faced. Egypt is not "cooperating enthusiastically in the economic suffocation of Gaza". The legitimate borders between Egypt and Gaza are open, but the tunnels were being used to smuggle weapons, other contraband and terrorists and posed a severe danger to Egyptian citizens and military alike.
stefano wrote:
I wonder, incidentally, whether recent events in your country have changed your views on Israel's policy towards the Palestinianrces? Because the mainstream Israeli attitude towards Hamas is pretty much exactly your current view of the MB, and Israelis who condone massacres of innocents do so through the same process of rationalisation that you are showing about Rabaa Al-Adawiya.
Israel's "policy" towards the Palestinians is to steal everything they have of any value, not only all their land and property but also their ancient history and culture, deprive them of all their human, political and civil rights, to keep them captive, and to recruit agents from among them whenever possible to betray each other and their own Arab brothers. In a nut-shell, Gaza is a fish-bowl completely at the mercy of Israel, and Israel used this to create and nurture Hamas as a weapon to destroy the Palestinian resistance from within. In the 1990s, this back-fired temporarily, when Hamas grew into a genuine, grassroots Palestinian resistance movement. But after it was voted into power, and especially during the so-called "Arab Spring", Qatar, Turkey and Israel conspired to bribe those among its leaders who could be bribed, assassinate those who couldn't, and transformed it into a criminal, mercenary enterprise which absorbed other criminal gangs, under the administration of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. As a result, Morsy signed a formal agreement to make Egypt the guarantor of Israel's security, and Hamas signed another agreement in which it pledged to avoid any hostile actions against Israel. Hamas members have become enormously rich, with billions in blood money and Hamas has become the enemy of Palestinians in Gaza, just as the Muslim Brotherhood is the enemy of every Arab among whom it operates, and both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are de facto agents of the Zionists.
stefano wrote:
AlicetheKurious wrote:they are trying to provoke security forces into committing the kind of "massacre" that they falsely claimed occurred during the break-up of their camps
This is what I'm talking about. What do you mean "falsely"? Are you saying several hundred unarmed people didn't die? The Health Ministry itself puts the death toll in the high hundreds. That's a lot of people, higher by a factor of twenty than Maspero. Are you trying to forget Maspero, too, or the fact that the men behind those killings are the same ones who beat the Islamists' kids to death?
Regarding for the fictitious "massacre of innocents" in Rabea, if you'll refer to my first post back in August, you'll understand why your statement is nonsense. Rabea is a traffic intersection in the middle of a crowded cosmopolitan suburb of Cairo, where very poor people were transported by a fascist terrorist organization from their villages and paid a generous daily salary to squat as a pressure tactic to impose a tyrant and his gang upon the vast majority of Egyptians who rejected them. There were prisoners inside this camp, where victims were tortured if they tried to leave; there were women and young girls forced into prostitution; there were small children taken from orphanages and instructed to march in their funeral shrouds with "Martyr In-the-Making" written on them in red. Terrorists periodically marched out of the camp armed with clubs, knives, and guns, and they attacked the residents, who had done nothing wrong to them or anybody else and were sometimes killed for complaining, or for no reason at all. The camp was filthy and posed a public health hazard.
This camp was erected by Egyptian criminals on Egyptian land in violation of Egyptian law and represented an intolerable danger to Egyptian citizens, and the Egyptian authorities enforced the law while doing everything possible to minimize casualties. They asked the people to leave peacefully and most did; others set fires and shot at police. The first casualty was a policeman shot by a sniper from a building under construction overlooking the camp. Other snipers shot police from on top of a nearby gas station and from behind makeshift barriers comprising metal and cement that they got from breaking up the sidewalks and traffic equipment. Out of the estimated 50,000 who had been in the camp, there were 300 or so armed men, and several dozen policemen killed doing their job. Incidentally, several thousand of the armed squatters who were allowed to leave the camp by police went on a vicious and murderous rampage that same and during subsequent days, which left several hundred more civilians dead and countless buildings damaged. Those who are familiar with my values as expressed here at RI over several years of posts should know that I would never condone violence against unarmed (let alone "peaceful") civilians under any circumstances, and also that I'm not an idiot who believes anything without credible evidence. I watched these events in real time on live television, and I also have relatives who live in that area, and I have a friend who lost her brother to the random shooting of the "unarmed" residents of the camp. He was standing inside his own apartment, looking out a window as they marched by. I've heard and seen the reports of independent human rights workers who participated with police in planning the camps' dispersal, to ensure that no international or domestic laws were violated by police. None of the Islamists' kids were beaten to death as you put it; where do you get your information?
As for Maspero, let's just say that a lot of evidence has surfaced during the past two years or so that have caused us to question a lot of what we thought we knew. The file remains open for now.
stefano wrote:
And the new constitution and protest law are definitely not a benign as you try to make them sound. In the constitution, the clause giving the SCAF a veto on the nomination of the Defence Minister removes civilian control over the army, and the clause specifically permitting military trials of civilians is going to be abused in a big way.
After our recent experience, which has left many of our institutions still reeling, we've found that the army is our only national institution that has held up, enough to provide crucial assistance to the rest, at a time when they needed it most to get back on their feet. We have a people's army: disciplined, steeped in nationalist values, and comprised of individuals from every family and every class. In many ways, the army is the back-bone that is holding up the Egyptian nation, a role it has played since the ancient times (or as Egyptians say, "the tent-pole"). It has its own procedures for vetting and advancement, and no way should any future civilian president be allowed to force the army to accept a commander it rejects.
The Muslim Brotherhood's constitution permitted military trials of all civilians who "harm military interests", a vaguely-worded formulation that leaves itself wide open to abuse. This has been amended in the new constitution to permitting military trials of those who physically attack military installations and on-duty military personnel, and who willfully default from military contracts or otherwise try to steal money from the military. The first two cases are self-explanatory, and the third is to prevent military secrets from leaking out in regular trials about contracts involving the construction of military facilities, etc. By the way, military judges are regular judges who have been cleared for security purposes and have served an additional six months of officer training after their legal studies; and all the regular procedures, including appeals, the right to appoint a lawyer, etc., are part of the process in military trials just as they are in civilian courts.
stefano wrote:
The bit about the defence minister, by the way, makes me think Sisi might not run for president - he could prefer to stay in his current post and have another figurehead like Adly Mansour win the presidency. Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabbahi are looking likely. Aboul Foutoh will be easy to nobble in the current environment. I suspect the SCAF has made a deal with the Salafis that'll allow the beardies to do well in the parliamentary election if they stay well away from the presidency and refrain from too much criticism; almost the same deal, in fact, that Tantawi made with Shater back in the day. Except that this time they'll have the presidential election first.
Adly Mansour is a judge, the head of the Supreme Court; given the current choices other than El-Sisi, we could do worse. Mansour has earned a lot of respect with his conscientious and capable handling of the presidency, even though most Egyptians would prefer someone younger and more dynamic, able to make big decisions and get things back on track more quickly. Amr Moussa has already announced he won't run for any future political office. Hamdeen Sabbahi, whom I used to support, has been very disappointing and I doubt he'll garner many votes in the presidential elections. Everything is very different today from the context back in 2011, when Tantawi allied with the Muslim Brotherhood under orders from the US. The Americans have no say anymore, and won't, Egypt's defenses are up, and the salafis don't have anything resembling the resources or foreign backing that the Muslim Brotherhood enjoyed when the SCAF was in power (nor will they be allowed to). Furthermore, the army can't make any "deals" and has no role in political matters, not since Tantawy and Anan were forced to hand the presidency to Morsy even though Shafiq had won, fearing that the Muslim Brotherhood would make good on its threat to "set Egypt on fire" and "cause rivers of blood to run in the streets". Tantawy and Anan were old, and cowardly, and overwhelmed, and they dropped the ball. Things are different now.
stefano wrote:
The moves against the MB might be justified and popular, but those against the liberals are much less so. They're protesting against the same things they were protesting against in 2011, using the same tactics, and they'd then already had the US-sponsored training that you see as delegitimising. You weren't calling them "assholes" then, though, were you? And what about things like the imminent squashing of the case against Khaled Said's killers, or the gentle treatment of Hosni Mubarak? Do you not see clear signals to the NDP's remnants that things are back to normal, minus Hosni Mubarak (and, most irritating to the establishment, his determination to turn a military system into a family system)?
There are no moves against "liberals"; you're referring to corrupt, paid agents of hostile foreign powers who play-acted for a while, before they dropped the mask, and now have more supporters in the West than they do among the Egyptians whom they fooled before. The genuine liberals and leftists and all the spectrum of thinkers and activists are participating in a very concrete way in the rebuilding of Egypt which is proceeding slowly but surely. Just to name a few examples, the veteran Leftist labor activist Kamal Abu-Etta is our current Labor Minister; our Minister for Higher Education is Dr. Hossam Eissa, who was one of founders of the pro-democracy movement of university professors during Mubarak's time, and who helped to organize the anti-SCAF and later anti-Morsy activities that led to their removal. Our most popular talk-shows are hosted by and frequently invite individuals with a solid track-record of fighting political and economic oppression, such as Ibrahim Eissa and Abdel-Halim Qandil, both of whom were very influential in documenting the crimes of the Mubarak, SCAF and Morsy regimes. Egyptians celebrated the announcement that, after nearly 30 years of total domination by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Physicians' Union elected a Coptic woman, Dr. Mona Mina, as its Secretary-General. Dr. Mina has been a tireless activist for doctors' and patients' rights and for a free national health care system for all citizens. She is also a true revolutionary in every sense of the word. Not surprisingly, she has not become a darling of the US and other Western media, nor has she suddenly become rich and been invited to travel first-class all over the world to lecture about how wonderful she is (although she is truly wonderful). The goals of the revolution are still our goals, and they're enshrined in the constitution that I expect will be greeted by record-breaking numbers of voters who will turn out despite all the threats and terrorism.
stefano wrote:
The protest law has already been used against trade unionists objecting to criminally corrupt management by retired officers in army-owned factories, and will be used against all other dissidents in the same way, while anyone showing the Rabaa Al-Adawiya hand sign is persecuted in the most disproportionate way.
Who's next? Doctors doing surgery in free clinics linked to the MB? Teachers in MB primary schools? People in petrol queues, bread queues (those have only been postponed, you know)? How many, and who, will they beat the shit out of before you start having second thoughts?
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Maybe you're thinking about the workers in the Iron and Steel Works, who went on strike and staged a sit-in to protest not receiving their shares of profits that happened to be non-existent, since the factory had indeed been badly mismanaged. The law was not used against them, unless you mean that permission was denied for them to move their protest from the factory grounds to the streets of a quiet residential area near downtown Cairo. In any case, since it is a public sector firm, the government sent negotiators who helped to resolve the problem to everyone's satisfaction.
The protest law, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is identical to those regulating demonstrations in all Western democracies. Under its provisions, organizers need to notify the Interior Ministry in writing at least 72 hours before the planned demonstration of its route, time-table, its organizers, and purpose. If the Interior Ministry accepts in writing, or does not respond, this constitutes approval. If the Interior Ministry does not approve the demonstration, it must provide the reason(s) why in writing, and organizers have the right to appeal to a judge to have this decision reversed. Finally, the law prohibits organizing demonstrations within 300 meters of military, police and other "sensitive" government buildings, and churches and mosques. In the context of the murder and mayhem that accompanies the so-called "demonstrations" of the Brotherhood and their fake "leftist" allies, it makes perfect sense. In any case, the protest law is only effective until a parliament is elected, when it will either be ratified, amended or rejected; this should happen within the next few months after the presidential elections, or before, depending on the schedule being worked out by President Mansour with representatives of civil society and the various political parties.
The four-fingered sign is a symbol of support for the extreme violence and murders and destruction of private and public property that those who raise it have been perpetrating. It's the symbol of a fascist, supremacist cult predicated on the principle that members are required to commit any crime, no matter how horrible, against those who will not submit to their rule. It is the symbol of hate against members of other religions, raised as they deface and desecrate its houses of worship and attack innocent people, even children. Its meaning is identical to that of the Nazi salute. Germany and other countries ban the Nazi salute, maybe you can direct your outrage at them, and leave us to bury our dead and try to rebuild what these monsters are so gleefully destroying, even as we speak (yet another bomb was exploded at Military Intelligence headquarters in the Delta yesterday, and two other bombs were found and defused -- one on a public bus, and another in the playground of a school). Maybe you'd feel differently if you could read the joy and triumph with which every killing or maiming of Egyptians is greeted, by those who proudly raise the salute and use it as their profile picture in social media. Maybe not.
Statistics: Posted by AlicetheKurious — Mon Dec 30, 2013 7:03 am