Most newspaper editors refrained from mockery of Morsi’s predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, during his thirty-year reign, but in the new Egypt, things are different. A law against “insulting” the President remains in the penal code, but illustrators unabashedly lampoon Morsi on a daily basis.
I’ll be asking what I’m doing “watching it with you”, but, for a while, I’ll be watching for videos and tweets on what would seem to be shaping up as a bloody day in Egypt.
As the world turns, Cairo’s about six hours ahead of New York City, so no “all nighter” seems necessary here, and, part of answering my own question, I’m not scoopin’ nobody!
If I’ve two cents to add, it’s going to have to do with analysis and reflection.
A friend called a couple of hours ago to commiserate over reports of another gang-type rape of a journalist in association with Egypt’s violence, but one would expect that to play at the top of reports, and an attempt to access a referenced video link sent by the same party seemed only to block my web connection in general.
Reduced street-to-world time in reporting:“Egypt protests set for showdown, violence feared.” The URL is about two hours old — I think CNN and Reuters are going to “own my eyeballs” as other outfits start begging subscriptions when they really haven’t any monopoly on a large story nor, if narrow casting, all that unique a perspective (but that brings up my motivation too, and it nags me that I might fare better working on much narrowed research by contract).
Lessons yet to be learned:
At 0:32, Hamada Moharram says, “He can’t even rule a village. This isn’t fair. The Muslim Brotherhood as a whole is an organization full of corruption.”
These days, the term “middle east conflict” would seem to refer to conflict and unrest in every state in the region but Israel.
Nonetheless, while Egypt roils and Syria burns and the King of Jordan fends off the seeding of perhaps a new class of secular Palestinian politico*, Qatar’s new head of state, Sheikh Tamim has this to say of the refugees of numerous Arab-led wars since 1948:
One day when our “Blue Dot” of a planet is a little more gathered together — that as opposed to riven with war — we may find common ground in five language principles:
Compassion
Humility
Integrity
Justice
Security
Of the four, the most difficult term and the one most relevant to autocracies seems to me to be “integrity” — just the power to be honest about ourselves and with others.
This is not as easy as it may sound. If it were, we would not have the fairy tale that is “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, which is in essence and for the ages a story about lying and power.
You know the rest of the story: Eve eats the apple, becomes conscious or comprehending, also self-conscious, and, with Adam joining her, possessed of conscience, out of which reaction, perhaps, come the fig leaves, a courtesy, each to the other, and practical too (God, a few sentences later, provides clothing made of skins — one imagines chamois — lending perhaps dignity and protection to their introduction to life as men and women would experience it forever after).
The “Middle East Conflict” — which is never about conflicts in the middle east but only about the creation of the Jews and Israel (or, lost in the Pharaohnic dawn, the gathering together beneath the unrestrained ego and violence of a tyrant)l — seems to me to be always about two things not at ease with one another: 1) the possession of good conscience in light of the knowledge of good and evil; 2) the testing of God for favor when the relationship needs to be the other way around.
*****
Where kings are concerned, I suspect there may be more to the story than meets either eyes or ears.
When God, being God, and with Torah received as divine message, hides the second tree — the Tree of Life that we are told is there but when it counts is not mentioned by the snake and, later, will be barred from access (by cherubim and an eternally revolving sword guarding the Garden left behind) — the sin of omission becomes a virtue: to have eaten of the Tree of Life also would have been too much, for God forbids it, and so protects His children.
*****
To be as gods, lower case that term, with nuclear capabilities, among other extraordinary but still human capacities, one might counsel also a prudent humility.
Carl Sagan’s clip about the “Pale Blue Dot” that is our planet viewed from space, has many renditions on the web — and there’s an entire film available too (somewhere — I’m going to be lazy here) — but this may do for essence.
Even if the conniving Nasrallah, with Iran’s support, holds on as head of his extremist Shiite organization for a long time to come, his principal goal — to become a pan-Arab and Lebanese leader — is now unattainable. The man who for some time was seen as Israel’s main strategic enemy has, with his own hands, buried his accomplishments.
“But regional experts say no one in the struggle has had a greater impact in recent weeks than Iranian-backed Hezbollah. The Lebanese group’s appearance in force on the battlefield has prompted a new direction in a war that had ebbed and flowed and until this spring appeared to be slipping away from the Syrian government.”
“For Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, there is “some good news for his involvement in Syria,” observed Yoram Schweitzer, director the Terrorism and Low Intensity Warfare Project at the Institute for National Security in Tel Aviv.
“Hezbollah is gaining battle experience, but this is smaller in significance than the price Nasrallah’s paying, politically and operationally. There’s an erosion of Hezbollah’s fighting forces and its resources.”
RT, perhaps reverting to old habits, is getting hard to read as it or its contributors (what follows appears to be an op-ed) picks up on an anti-American screed in thick paragraphs. Nonetheless, as long as the world is reading the about itself in English, it’s outlook is as much a part of the global information environment as, say, Voice of America’s.
“Undoubtedly Hezbollah did discuss its intentions to enter the Syrian conflict with its patrons in Tehran and coordinated with Iran and then, to a lesser extent, with Russia through Iranian officials and through consultations with Aleksandr Zasypkin, Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon, and then Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov during his April 2013 visit to Beirut. The involvement of Hezbollah in Syria, however, is purely defensive. Moreover, Hezbollah is one of the last external players to be involved in Syria.”
As mentioned a few times on this blog, Syria is the Black Hole and Dark Star of the Islamic Small Wars: it has been drawing energy and matter, one might say, into itself and burning, and the longer it burns, the more it draws, and that includes some of the energies of two superpowers distinctly not invested in Islamic sectarian concerns except as a part of their distinct security structures.
In the early post-Soviet years, Russia appears to have neglected or sustained (both) arrangements with Syria as they were during the Cold War. There seems perhaps to have been no basis for complaint on the part of those with power: the Assad regime improved its financial standing, the Russians maintained lucrative contracts, and the military had a decent buffer and the core of a useful naval facility (Tartus).
The “Arab Spring” that seems to be giving way to a Burning Islamic Sectarian Summer has played hard on the secular dictatorships in the region and led the theocratic states into a so-far proxy conflict in which Hezbollah today has been spilling blood while spending itself — its intellectual and logistical energies, manpower, and focus.
On the Sunni side, which may be hemmed in or contained by Russian regional interest and military backbone, the fight is as slow as experienced by the Shiite, but its financial and social impacts may be comparatively less devastating.
The absurd ends — my analogy has been “two mad wasps fighting inside a bell jar” — make this form in conflict akin to an unmanageable natural disaster that casualty and displaced person figures underscore (more than 92,000 dead with about four million persons displaced).
The prime minister has repeatedly and constantly defied criticism leveled against the police for brutality against protesters during the Gezi Park unrest, despite the fact that the excessive use of police force during the unrest in the country since May 3 has resulted in the deaths of three protesters and one police officer and the injury of nearly 5,000 people.
While the world should not mistake accommodation, compassion, compromise, and kindness for weakness, the fear that a part of it may would seem to propel the opposite: the want of an iron fist.
Turks who may read about Prime Minister Erdogan in Huriyet have been delivered the impression of an autocrat, and one may expect further amplification and cleaving along that seam. On one side: a dangerous nationalism and the rise of a “strong man” in the too familiar vein, the kind that references “the interest rate lobby” without intending to refer to the Chinese (to whom the world’s largest bank belongs); on the other, a more compassionate, comprehending, and more inclusive humanity, the kind that with Moses and the Jews becomes the “mixed multitude” that leaves Pharaoh and abandons him to his fate.
Turks have grown disgruntled over the headstrong prime minister’s increasingly autocratic leadership and the opaque decision making of a powerful centralized state that is unresponsive to the needs of Turkish citizens, especially those outside Erdogan’s nationalist and Islamic coalition.
What Erdogan may represent is not only Erdogan’s problem.
This comes by way of another front, this one European:
After dark, the respectable mask slipped. While a Jobbik official watched, I was slapped in the head by a reveler annoyed that “Jews” were at his festival. He then poured a beer over my head. Although irritating and sticky, it could have been worse —I was in a forest at night surrounded by thousands of nationalists and stalls selling whips and axes.
For compassionate liberals, no more signal than “Islamist Virtue Party” is needed, for it resonates worldwide today with police units formed around “the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice”. Moreover, in Islamic states, the same signals the room for maneuver given to venal “takfir” — those who accuse others of blasphemy, which in theocracies provides ever the accuser’s gateway to murder, theft, and revenge.
I feel inspired by the video featured on this post — fill in the blanks: “We have an internal problem that is ___________, and an external threat . . . the Jewish invasion . . . We know there is a global Zionist fund controlling the whole world, including the U.S. and the European Union . . . It is thanks to them that ________ has become a mess since ________.”
It would seem the political imposition of purity standards — nationalist, racist, or religious — pernicious and divisive from any perspective.
In the larger politics and its psychology, growing Hungarian and Turkish nationalism would seem to share similar characteristics: deflection of responsibility (blame it on the “interest rate lobby” and similarly convenient foils; craving for a uniform cast and homogeneous society (please, no freethinkers, liberals, or Gypsies); want of power and strength by way of a demonstrated and punishing will altogether lacking in compassion, empathy, and love (such a monstrous character is what is most demonstrated by the arrest of doctors attending wounded at demonstrations).
The Turkish Health Ministry demanded a list of all doctors who had treated injured demonstrators. The Turkish Medical Association (TBB) reported the demand.
“The doctors were only trying to help the protesters by giving them emergency medical aid in the clinic set up inside the Divan Hotel,” one witness told me. “The police marched right into the five-star hotel and arrested these doctors dressed in white lab coats. They were led off with their hand behind them, handcuffed.”
The Turkish government, however, has suggested that the protests are part of a plot against the country, involving foreign governments and financial institutions.
Earlier this month, Hurriyet quoted Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as hinting that Israel was “delighted” with the protests.
Not so surprisingly, I am not the only one latched on to this theme in observation (and, for the record, I am not in touch with anyone else on it either)!
This next represents the ranting — not really, in fact not at all — of a most diplomatic Turkish journalist, Mustafa Akyol:
Foreign leaders and the news media can help by advising Erdogan to focus on reconciliation and restraint. But they should do this sensitively, so as not to further provoke the quintessential Turkish paranoia that there is always a “foreign finger” behind every social turmoil.
When the powerful work “behind the curtain” — in the land o’ winks ‘n’ nods, in the smoke filled back rooms, in the quiet words delivered with a handshake and a palm full of money, that sort of thing — the opacity of that governance inspires speculation in the public mind: anything is possible and just about anything slipped into the information stream — the media — may be treated as credible for being so difficult to challenge.
Effects may not be reserved for the public mind only: the same deceptive and disingenuous practices involving mind and mouth may have effects on their practitioners: if they know themselves to have “bent and twisted it some” on the way through their minds and out of their mouths, who else might be duplicitous?
I’ve coined the term “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS)” (see “Coins and Terms”) to approach the common autocrat’s messianic ambitions, delusions of grandeur, the want of pleasing mirrors (start with the morning’s newspaper or mention on television), the rejection of criticism, and the abject fear of unknown conspiring others.
The uninformed mind cannot wrestle with itself in regard to FBPS, but the informed one may, for the hazy confrontation with imaginary demons devolves back toward a more clear and clarifying confrontation with one’s self.
The cool headed Mustafa Akyol warms again to the theme a little later in the month of June with an article in Al-Monitor:
Erdogan, wondering why his whole nation does not love him unequivocally for all the great things he has done, soon found the real culprit behind the anger in streets: “foreign powers” and their collaborators such as “the interest (loan) lobby.” The more extensively the foreign media, such as CNN International andThe Economist, covered the protests and criticized the government’s heavy-handed response, the more Erdogan and his followers became convinced about an ill-intended “foreign hand” behind the masses.
How long before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees himself accurately mirrored in the dissenting domestic press and the comparatively disinterested professional journalism of Big Media worldwide?
If he is lucky, he will see himself more as he really is, his people more as they truly are and aspire to be, and the world itself more as it really is and may become.
Of course, an adjustment like that — one moving from self-aggrandizement and the mania for control to produce it (most often by pandering and slandering through time itself) toward greater appreciation and respect for others plus accommodation, compassion, fairness, and inclusion — may require exceptional courage and insight.
“The army has tried for months to keep Lebanon away from the problems of Syria, and it ignored repeated requests for it to clamp down on Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir’s group,” the military command said in a statement.
“But what has happened today has gone beyond all expectations. The army was attacked in cold blood in an attempt to light the fuse in Sidon, just as was done in 1975,” it said, referring to the year that Lebanon’s own 15-year civil war began.
Reported yesterday by Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times:
“Every Muslim population must protect their brothers in Syria,” said Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a popular Egyptian-born cleric who lives in Qatar and appears frequently on TV. “The nation is ready for sacrifice and jihad and we must call for jihad to defend religion and God’s law.”
If the superpowers engaged in Sumo wrestling over the fate of Syria think they’re in control of the region, they may have some surprises coming. Syria is a crucible with many holes in it, and, as mentioned, it draws the engines of war into itself, but this week, especially, it has promoted sectarian violence beyond its borders and done so in local ways not likely to recede in the next day or two.
But to the traditional prayers and chants — praising the leaders of Iran and Hezbollah, denouncing Israel and America — the mourners added a new barb, for the gunmen battling the Syrian government who, they said, had killed him: “Death to the Free Army.”
The funeral on Wednesday at once encapsulated Hezbollah’s cohesion and the new uncertainties and anxieties its followers face as it fights a new kind of war, more intimate and ambiguous than the group’s founding conflict with Israel.
Anne Barnard’s intimate coverage of the Syrian conflict developing a Lebanese cast takes the reader through the onset of war. Businesses close; once trusted relationships become suspicious; political arrangements that sufficed for peace and security start to come apart.
The world online is a world, and everything appearing seems encountered fresh and from scratch.
I can’t authenticate the footage; I can’t translate the page. Sometimes the agitprop-minded borrow from other war zones at other times — that’s how we get English “bobbies” arresting protesters in Ankara until one notices, “They’re speakin’ English!”
Clashes re-erupted in the southern city of Sidon on Sunday, as Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s armed partisans attacked a checkpoint for the Lebanese Army in the eastern neighborhood of Abra.
After night fell, his security forces put these words into force. They used bulldozers to clear out Gezi Park, which had become a symbol of the resistance in recent days. They chased protesters and beat them down with clubs, and they shot tear gas into cafes and hotels as the people fled. Doctors who treated the wounded were arrested.
President Erdogan may mount pro-government demonstrations, but he has a way to go with regard to quelling anti-government unrest, and to judge both by the article in Spiegal Online and the balanced footage above, he’s inclined to do it with the heavy hand of a dictator.
The orchestration of his own AKP pro-government demonstration, which included busing fans to the location, while at the same time suppressing Taksim Square activity by clearing the streets with force and closing routes into the city reflects well the autocrat’s want to control without a lot of back and forth in the conference room or negotiating table.
Add:
Deflection of responsibility for his state’s spontaneous demonstrations to foreign influence (of some kind) and the international press;
Detention of lawyers sympathetic with demonstrators and the alleged arrests of doctors — that detail seems to be in the news today — attending those injured by government forces.
If preventing attention to the injured is a part of the governing ethic “over there”, that too speaks of the barbarian within and a reigning mentality not much different than that which has made a mess of Damascus. The process doesn’t change: the greater and more extensive the repression, the more amplified the resentments and, when those surface, the response.
Describing Erdogan’s government as “despotic,” two main union blocs say they plan to march to Istanbul’s Taksim Square, which has been at the heart of more than two weeks of protests. It is the second time unions have called a strike to support the protest movement.
Erdogan inveighed against the international media, blaming the BBC and CNN for distorting the drama of the past three weeks in what he repeatedly alleged was an international plot to divide and diminish Turkey.
“You will make your voice heard so anyone conspiring against Turkey will shiver,” he told the crowd. “Turkey is not a country that international media can play games on.”
Using language that belittled the protesters as disrespectful and irrelevant, Erdogan appeared to point the finger of blame at everyone except himself and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), citing instead the party’s economic triumphs and democratic reforms.
While the title includes the term “video”, when I viewed the piece at about 9:17 a.m. EDT, there was none.
Political cartooning has gotten an update in recent years (or days, considering the pace of media technology development and its broad distribution. I thought this piece catchy (yes, I am chatyping like the old man I’ve become here) and while it doesn’t reflect my thoughts, which are so much more sober, the presentation would seem part of the zeitgeist of a dawning political era.
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