The military’s disdain for Gamal and his generation of casually corrupt businessmen was well known, as was their desire not to see him crowned, and the January uprising provided a perfect opportunity to abort the Mubarak family dynasty . . . . The only suitable dancing partner was the Muslim Brotherhood, an institution whose organizational, bureaucratic and service-providing experience was deeper than even that of the post-1956 militarized government itself.
My standard, which I may define soon in some academic way, involves the term “Qualities of Living” and dimensions indicated by the adverbs “physically, psychologically, and spiritually.” Go to work on that standard any which way — the economics of physical comfort and security; perceived degrees of freedom in common constituent life; freedom and security in thought and worship — Morsi’s first year in power has been a disaster, itself the single greatest cause of incitement in Egypt this day.
Ahmed Nader (@ANaderGretly): “Egyptians, no matter what happens today, we shall be one hand, one voice, and one spirit. Don’t let the beards get you down.”
Aysha (@aysha_nur): “Dear international media! Move your dirty hands from #Egypt! Protesters won’t achieve their goal by creating anarchy!!”
Our total common web communications toolkit would seem to me to have bumped up a big notch today. A few minutes before catching the above on Twitter, I / we — if we were watching live streaming — saw a brief Tahrir Square flyover by helicopters while the crowd cheered beneath them.
What I’m hearing from the live feed: hypnotic in techno disco peak experience rhythm.
We know this crowd is going to move, and watching the live feed (Ustream), the Twitter feed, our Facebook walls, and all of that, whatever world is watching is going to move with it.
The “Second Row Seat to History” has just morphed into its own front-row position, albeit yet removed from the heat and sweat, the smell of the crowd, and, later — because it would have to be a miracle if shouting and stamping and making noise would suffice for the outer boundary of the energy of the event — the running, the battle, the blood, and the tears.
AP’s caption: “Thousands of opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and outside the presidential palace on Sunday morning ahead of planned mass protests aimed at forcing the president out of office. (June 30)”
The previous post remains “live” — I’m updating it as I get around the web with various hash tags and search terms, a most up-to-date experience this one, considering how revolutionary watching Vietnam footage on television’s evening news was about 50 years ago (gasp! I cannot be that old).
Today, five satellite channels are being threatened by an Egyptian communications commission with closure when they refused to attend a meeting about how they are supposed to cover the protests according to a “code of honor.”
Note: There’s another reference section toward the bottom of this post.
Post Started: June 29, 2013 at 8:20 p.m. / Post Ended: June 30, 2013 at 8:45 a.m.
Now that I can watch events live, follow look-sees and sentiments on Twitter, and chit-chat on Facebook, I’m ready to let go of the logging of the news of the news.
***** (Earlier)
I may add on to this page in reverse chronological order for a while.
“The longest day,” headlined government newspaper Al-Gomhuriya above pictures of two rival camps in Cairo. One was of Islamist supporters of President Mohamed Mursi, the other of protesters in Tahrir Square who said they wanted him out by day’s end or they would sit there until he goes, like Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
6:30a Al-Masry Al-Youm is reporting that an explosion has gone off in an apartment in Bassatine, in old city Cairo, where homemade explosives were being made.
5:58a This El Watan news report (Arabic) says that authorities have recovered 142 grenades and 440 rockets from apartments near Tahrir Square.
It’s nice seeing someone else bashing away at this outrageous online news feed.
130630-0647EDT
The streets are eerily empty in Cairo. It’s the first day of the working week in Egypt, which would usually mean traffic jams aplenty. But today there are barely any cars – perhaps a symptom both of the protests, and the fuel shortage that has seen Egyptians queue for hours for petrol in recent days. Many of those cars still on the road are draped in Egyptian tricolors.
Mursi’s critics see him as a cunning Brotherhood apparatchik who is seeking to extend sharia (Islamic law) and return to an authoritarian regime rather than put Egypt on the path to democracy and economic progress.
On his frequent visits abroad, Mursi seeks to integrate Egypt with leading emerging nations such as China and Brazil, while maintaining ties with the West and specifically the United States, reassuring them he will uphold a 1979 peace agreement with Israel.
Turning to the streets in such a way and calling for a rebellion against the legitimately elected government is the antithesis of democracy. The rallies we are witnessing in Egypt these days aim to destroy – not coexist.
Friday’s demonstrations gave the impression that the country is in a state of civil war between citizens who possess the same cultural identity.
Since the 2011 revolution the Egyptian economy has gone from bad to worse. Unemployment is up, so is the budget deficit, job creation is virtually non-existent and the Egyptian pound has lost much of its value. And matters are made even worse by the general lack of security in the country. As part of her series of reports looking at the challenges facing Egypt today Shaimaa Khalil focuses on the Egyptian economy.
Active in a Jewish student group at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he would have been junior in the fall, Pochter traveled to Egypt this summer on an internship to teach English to Egyptian 7- and 8-year-olds. He also hoped to improve his Arabic. He planned to spend the spring in Jordan, according to a family statement and a close friend.
Related from JewishNewsOne (posted to YouTube June 29, 2013):
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).
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.”
“While the protests in Cairo remained peaceful, deadly clashes erupted in the port city of Alexandria, where protesters set fire to the Brotherhood’s headquarters. Security officials said that one victim was a United States citizen, a man who was stabbed to death near the headquarters.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/29/world/middleeast/egypt-tensions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
A more recently published (mid-June) glimpse of Egypt’s economic scenario: “Moreover, the same plan states that 21.4 percent of the 27.3 million strong workforce are temporary workers, and at least 46.5 percent of those employees work in the unofficial sector without contracts. Furthermore, 67 percent has no health insurance. No wonder – rising employment, widespread poverty (with 25 percent living under the poverty line), and poor working conditions were all factors behind the January 2011 revolution that toppled the Mubarak regime.” http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/06/2013615122844106819.html
Mohamed Morsi: These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion. Yet some Palestinians, who erroneously believe that their enemies might give them something… This [Palestinian] Authority was created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.
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