Maspero Youth Union’s Facebook page reports 38 churches burned and looted, 23 attacked and partially damaged, six school burned and looted, seven Coptic buildings burned and looted, six Christians dead, and seven kidnapped.
CAIRO — More violence is expected in Egypt after chaos swept through the country last week, leaving nearly 900 dead in four days of unrest and threatening to stall a political transition.
Some 38 Muslim Brotherhood supporters died in disputed circumstances at a prison yesterday, as the leader of Egypt’s powerful army warned he would not tolerate violence, urging Islamists to change course.
My eyes have read 890 dead in the recent fighting.
My ears have heard 3,500 Muslim Brotherhood supporters arrested.
There’s potential for drawing down the violence in Egypt’s polarized society by dint of one side not having to prove God’s favor on the way to producing a more broad and meaningful round of elections, which I hope will neither be forgotten nor put off more than a year.
The other side has demonstrated its values in the burning and pillaging of properties of the Coptic Church and in general rioting.
The torture process starts once a demonstrator who opposes President Mohammed Morsi is arrested in the clashes or is suspected after the clashes end, and the CSF separate Morsi’s supporters from his opponents. Then, the group members trade off punching, kicking and beating him with a stick on the face and all over his body. They tear off his clothes and take him to the nearest secondary torture chamber, from which CSF personnel, members of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Investigations Services (SSIS) are absent.
At least one protester was incinerated in his tent. Many others were shot in the head or chest, including some who appeared to be in their early teens, including the 17-year-old daughter of a prominent Islamist leader, Mohamed el-Beltagy. At a makeshift morgue in one field hospital on Wednesday morning, the number of bodies grew to 12 from 3 in the space of 15 minutes.
It appears Egypt’s polarized politics knows no language for accommodation, compassion, or compromise, and it may also lack the wherewithal needed to control the amplitude of state violence against constituents on those occasions when riot suppression or the conclusion of a reasonable period of mass protest may be warranted.
* * *
Bishop Anba Suriel, the bishop for the Coptic Orthodox Church in Melbourne, wrote on his Twitter micro blog, “over 20 separate attacks on churches and Christian institutions all over Egypt.”
One correspondent suggested to me this morning that Egypt would follow Syria in its self-destruction, but I’m not so sure considering that Mubarak with his plans to install a dynasty are today long gone (seems like it) and even with the excessive force displayed by Egypt’s military in the latest fighting, the qualities of a Maher al-Assad and his wanton aerial bombing sprees are not in it.
The fascist theocratic ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood have been made plain at every passage since Mubarak’s overthrowing, from lies told to win elections to publicizing the possession and use of the old regime’s torture chambers — a flagrant act of intimidation unsuited completely to the values inherent in the concept of a democratically self-governed and modern state — to, finally, acts of war, of seeming allowance of crime with impunity, against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, not to mention some bold anti-Semitic ranting on the side.
* * *
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Mere mention of “the center will not hold” would summon to the English mind the above poem (in Yeats’s vision, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), but it seems in Egypt at the moment that there is a political center, a broad class of more moderate constituents, i.e., those who turned out by the millions to demand, in essence, Morsi’s resignation or that the army remove him, that seems itself helpless to defend itself against the nefarious methods of the Muslim Brotherhood through other than martial power.
That much is not — indeed, has not been — the fault of the moderate.
However, Karman’s recent comparison of deposed Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi to Nelson Mandela, one of the most influential and inspirational figures of the latter half of the 20th century and whose name is synonymous with courage, struggle and wisdom, is astoundingly wrongheaded. Mandela remains a global moral authority. Morsi is not worthy of such praise — not even close.
I list it here because it conveys what is represented in the pro-Morsi part of Egypt’s turmoil.
Morsi’s infamous November 2012 presidential decree, which established him as above the law and forcefully installed a political ally as prosecutor-general, was ultimately used to ram through a divisive constitution. The bloody clashes that followed and the sequence of events that ensued left Egypt dangerously polarized and the January 2011 revolution in tatters.
First of all, if it’s new behavior, it’s not normal, at least not right away.
🙂
Then too, be careful what you wish for, and one may do that by first asking Mr. Kerry, “What would be the old normal?”
* * *
Published online earlier this month:
The overthrow of elected president Mohamed Morsi has placed the Obama administration in a no-win situation. It does not want to call the military intervention a coup, because current U.S. law would require the suspension of aid to Egypt, including the $1.3 billion going to military. But it cannot avoid calling it a coup without undermining the credibility of its commitment to democracy.
If it could have been done with compromise and reason, it would have been done: Morsi and company would have both set a conservative Islamic tone for Egypt — my noting that is not to endorse it — and otherwise gone about working the levers of a modern society on behalf of a broad Egyptian constituency.
Instead, the same chose to pursue narrow interests and in the usual way: clumsily, with heavy hands, and contemptuously and with an anti-Semitic and ever and ultimately self-defeating spirit.
Instead of winning the high regard of Egypt’s sprawling constituency, it brought the country out in force against its president and, so I call it, the “Muslim Botherhood”.
On the other hand, what’s a vote to mean if a military with its own interest can intervene to depose a standing president, however undemocratic and self-defeating his policies and ambitions?
I could say, “You was robbed!”
I just don’t know to whom I would say it: the modern Egyptians elbowed aside in the considerations of the Muslim Botherhood or old souls depending on faith and an innocent alliance with evil — there really are those who may not know what they do — to secure a better life for themselves.
Marina Ottaway, a former senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, goes on to note in her article, “The military and the Islamists won the first round of the struggle. In the current round, the military and the old elite are prevailing. The so-called revolutionaries, together with a small number of people who appear to truly uphold liberal principles, have been instrumental in the turnovers of power in February 2011 and July 2013. However, they appear unable to influence subsequent developments.”
That may be because the main forces in Egyptian politics operate today by, well, main force.
Compromise: unknown.
Elections: unfamiliar.
Competitive Political Parties: who is on the field? Who can fund and run a decent campaign? How are things going with “free speech” and “right to assembly” or plain old and yet stimulating common political speech? Does the answer depend on to whom one speaks?
Maybe.
* * *
Posted today (8/2/2013), not vetted (not that I can do that. Yet).
“Tahrir Square Fighting from Austin Mackell in Cairo Part 2”, posted by “Yul West”.
It looks authentic.
* * *
Note:
The US embassy in Cairo has announced that it will be closed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, in a statement published on its official website.
Supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi plan to hold 33 marches around Cairo and Giza on Friday under the slogan ‘Egypt against the coup.’
Whether from the Muslim Brotherhood perspective or the latest in secular democratic fashion, Egypt has not been “squared away” merely by its military’s recovery of unwanted administrative power.
Morsi during his authority was not able to ensure security and order on the Sinai Peninsula which the gas pipeline pass from Egypt to Jordan and Israel. As a result, militants systematically arranged explosion on the gas pipeline that deathly affected on country economy.
Today Egypt is dragging into a civil war day by day. The Statements made by General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi directed to the ousted president gives a hope for some citizens towards a brighter future.
Fuad Sahbazov appears to be an undergraduate studying international relations at Baku Slavic University in Azerbaijan, and his note in Strategic Outlook may remind that practically any view of political drama will be one among many in the open conversation of a vastly enlarged multi-state intelligentsia.
I may be alone at my desktop, but “we” are not alone at all, and some portion of political polarity falls away with a crowd of talkers too large and too mixed to sustain it.
There’s no going back to what was, this possibly a recurring theme with today’s inputs from Russia perhaps still dragging the chains of the Soviet empire.
* * *
With Mubarak’s exit, which may be far less about an American arrangement with a military than the forestalling of the establishment of a Mubarak Dynasty (mission accomplished on that), Egypt has been shaken up, and with the Muslim Brothers the first to foam and bubble away from the surface, the state has now to establish its themes as a democracy IF its people in cooperation with the military, rather than subordination by it, prove capable of compromise, practicality, and realism across a broad spectrum in the invention of a truly contemporary Egypt.
* * *
Maya Sarsa & Troupe, July 3, 2013:
– A song that TALKS OPENLY about MARIJUANA breaks SOCIAL TABOOS
– The BREAKING of SOCIAL TABOOS is a CHALLENGE to a ‘HIDING’ society
– The song promotes SECULARISM and undermines RELIGOUS FUNDEMENTALISM
– The song promotes INDIVIDUALITY and TRYING NEW THINGS
– ‘SIGARA BUNI’ pulls the MASK OFF Egyptian Society
* * *
When Tahrir Square quiets down and that preceding becomes safe again, tourism and expanded trade will return — and perhaps a few progressives too may attend to more difficult and pressing combined economic, ecological, and social issues.
For authentic people — good people; prudent, responsible, and responsive politicians; professionals of high integrity, start with journalists and teachers, but much including dancers and other artists who engage their work with beautiful, lively, and soulful connection — a whole society is a “big tent”, a “great salad”, a circus and a fair with room for everyone, some perhaps a little easier to take and to work with than others, but even so, everyone.
But most importantly, the deaths are going to galvanize the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters. Rather than help calm the situation, the incident will almost certainly result in many thousands of Egyptians challenging the military’s authority.
But the military said it was forced to fire when an “armed terrorist group” tried to raid the headquarters. An Interior Ministry statement said two security force members — a lieutenant and a recruit — were shot and killed.
While Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood seeks to restrict the conversation, perhaps to the point where the only voices it hears are the echoes of its own, and the military with its provisional governments seeks to expand the same, so that but a few and manageable voices may come from many, the fight on the street will start to draw in greater energies.
For one thing, we media focus on it.
I could be writing about Egyptian basic services, tourism, history, and food, but benign and charming as those may be, they’re not quite as stimulating: with conflict, we don’t want to see its development, but we do want to watch.
The other question is how to let something go.
A slight is a slight, and one can shrug that off; a light injury may increase the insight but also provide for bragging rights — ask the 1960s kids around here about that; but a death in combat, Republican Guard vs. Pro-Morsi Protesters, may not be seen that way.
*****
“Before they had used any kind of teargas they resorted to live fire.”
Three days ago, BBC reporter Jeremy Bowen seems to have caught a few pellets of “bird shot” as a crowd got rowdy toward the end of a day of demonstrating.
Where were those Republican Guard tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and water canons and such so familiar to other policing forces and spoilers and rioters worldwide?
The answer is that through all the Mubarak years involving the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, the state appears not to have prepared for violent dissent on its streets by the constituents it claimed to represent.
“If a given state lacks the means, the doctrines, and the training for homeland defence and internal security missions, that government is more likely to use lethal means that are disproportionate,” said Steven Adragna of US defence consultancy Arcanum.
Actually, we didn’t clear up anything: how was it possible that so common a policing concern as “riot control” should not have been of concern in this middle east state?
The attenuation of violence or control of a “violence spectrum” may become of interest when a state balances its want of defense against the well being of its internal challengets, i.e., when it doesn’t want to kill those expressing their opposition but rather prefers to stall them in their tracks and channel the same for arrest on the spot or dispersal altogether.
Crowd and riot control would seem arts, specialties, perhaps, within the “art of war”, which in the Islamic Small Wars becomes also the art of managing, for the most part, popular protests and myriad bands of deadly fighters.
This next comes from the earlier anti-Morsi rally days (remember those?):
Near daily, the demonstrations have turned into clashes with police, resulting in the killing of around 70 protesters. Each death has increased public anger against the security forces.
Some protests have turned into stone-throwing attacks on security agency buildings, and many protesters accuse Morsi of giving a green light to police to use excessive force. Their outrage has been further stoked by reports of torture and abduction of some activists by security agents.
Of course, those 70 deaths were attributed to Morsi-backed police!
The devil’s probably grinning.
For sure, I am.
If “deadly force” — a catch-all term for a suite of military technology and lethal methods — is what one has at hand, “dead” are what will be found “down range”.
With riot controlling technologies widely distributed elsewhere around the world, the absence of the same on the roiled Egyptian street may point to a distinct lack of concern for others.
Where was the love when precinct quartermasters were drawing up budgets and wish lists to protect their troops and their public and control the level of violence that might take place — and now has — on the streets around them?
When a phalanx of Ohio National Guardsmen marched shoulder to shoulder up Blanket Hill 40 years ago to break up an antiwar rally at Kent State University, they carried basic battlefield gear and a military mindset.
Their World War II-era M1 rifles were tipped with bayonets and loaded with .30-caliber bullets that could fly nearly two miles.
Compassion leads to “Kevlar vests and plastic shield . . . bean bags and canisters of stinging pepper gas.”
In those attempting an assault on an Egyptian Republican Guard property and those repelling the same with “live fire”, this concern for others — whatever mix of affection, compassion, empathy, and imagination might comprise and express that virtue — would seem to have been missing, and “barbarism”, which is always a conclusion, obscures the story of the evolution or stalling within the language culture and behavior leading up to it.
In consideration of the previous post, the binary choices for Egypt should seem clear.
If the economic benefits and humanism of modernity suit, the medieval complex in self-concept and tyrannical rule will cease; if not, Islam, as “Islamists” would have it, goes so against the grain of humanity that Egypt will suffer as every region has that has hosted, tolerated, or succumbed to this deeply programmed form in political narcissism: from Afghanistan to Somalia, Islamism as Al Shabaab or Boko Haram and others install it serves primarily themselves . . . until it just does not and they are booted by all of the forces they are most accustomed to blaming, this always excluding their own contribution to their own fate (” . . . and do not exceed the limits, surely Allah does not love those who exceed the limits . . . .’).
However I may continue with this blogging, I’m inclined to become increasing informal with it in the interest of becoming more timely and, in some respects, more flexible with these hot summer days.
I am not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or anything. I am just a religious Egyptian woman. I just want to say one thing to the Christians. You are our neighbors. We will set you on fire!
Posted to YouTube July 3, 2013
Posted to YouTube July 7, 2013
At 1:45 in the above:
“I am not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood or anything. I am just a religious Egyptian woman. I just want to say one thing to the Christians. You are our neighbors. We will set you on fire.”
Also note in the second clip the separation in the allocations of responsibility and control and the implacable black-and-white patterns in through expressed. When some analysts and military pitch a case for an economic explanation for hostility, they may be missing a far more prevalent and powerful variable in basic social grammar, i.e., base rules controlling and shaping the generation of expression within a language culture.
****
Obviously, MEMRI videos are selected, translated, and presented to leave an impression. However, even so, the compilers seems to have no problem coming up with recordings of authentic recent and relevant hate speech.
President Barack Obama has been reluctant to meddle, but the White House reported he told Morsi on Monday that “democracy is about more than elections.”
One might suggest it’s also about living in a world with fewer communication and trade boundaries and, at the same time, with either more dangerous (nuclear) or more fragile (solar panel) essential civilian and military technologies that demand of the earth’s human cargo greater overall cooperation and security.
Basically, democracy, which is reliant on the development of conversations as broad, inclusive, and open as possible, is about (I’m unbelievably about to borrow from the Chinese on this one) “harmonious relations”.
🙂
That’s what democracy — but also, heavily, modernity — is about, and however I / you / we create the next advanced political ecology that attends to improvements in “Qualities of Living” (physically, psychologically, spiritually) in defined areas and regions of interest, we may not have as much choice as we think, and certainly today not the choice of contributing to empires built around the grandiose delusions and narcissistic excesses of a very few individuals absolutely full of themselves and convinced they can do no wrong.
Those have reached the end of a certain part of their script, but as perhaps signaled by the British Monarchy and others, people are not going to stand for being flattened out Soviet style either — that course in human affairs lost its luster some decades ago.
****
I myself live inside a mansion tucked inside a cabin outfitted within an apartment of approximately one-thousand square feet, including the balcony: well equipped also with “champagne tastes and beer money”, I’ve done what Walter Mitty could not and crammed into the space a theater, library, news desk, production facility, bar, grille, and motel.
(One may do a lot with a little given imagination).
It would seem comfort attends a prince — who isn’t a prince and knows it — however poor he may be (will work for compensation while attempting to maintain life and work style).
Some months ago, I watched a video of punishment meted out to you—a lawfully mandated public whipping that I understand is not uncommon in your country. I have seen many instances of human brutality, but this one was particularly harrowing.
In the midst of my revulsion, certain thoughts surfaced.
This next, a BBC clip, also more up to date (July 3, 2013), is about the Al Qaeda types contributing to revolutionary forces in Syria:
Aside: I have no idea what Qatar or the United States government are doing even remotely associating themselves with the above in Syria. If such represent proxy forces on the front of a potential Islamic democracy in Syria, the same need to be regarded as the first enemy of it and curtailed with finality.
*****
Egyptians, by seeing through the deposing of a dictator in early development, have walked past the gates of hell (as perhaps featured in the above clip) and if taking one step backwards to military rule may well go on to take two forward into the more dignified grace of a a more civil, honest, inclusive, and productive democracy.
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