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).
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.”
“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
To teach well or learn, one asks not for flattery but rather to hear the worst from one’s critics.
I’ve quoted myself recasting an ancient commonplace, but not that I’m stuck on myself: there’s plenty to be quoted from others in relation to the above trope.
With friends like Melanie Phillips, who needs enemies? Articulate and useless.
Melanie Phillips writes in her latest column, entitled The British government’s jihad against free thought, “I do not support the approach taken by either Geller or Spencer to the problem of Islamic extremism. Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic.”
PVV: England once again pleases Islam by silencing its critics
The British government shows itself once again to be made up of Islamophiles by objecting to speech by critics of Islam. It shows the weak knees it showed in 2009 when turning down Geert Wilders for entry into England; this time, the U.S. critics of Islam Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are banned.
Indeed, the British nanny state seems quite unconcerned with stepping in to “protect” its children’s ears and minds from comprehending a broad and complete argument.
One understands this process.
Maybe.
In deference to my Muslim friends on Facebook, I have judiciously (but not consistently with others) restrained myself from sending a friend request to Tom Trento, thereby forestalling my endorsement of his Christian agenda. Nonetheless, he’s a well studied critic of Islam armed with points difficult to dislodge and impervious to ad hominem attack.
* * *
So let’s recap: Geller and Spencer banned for blogging critically about Islam. Al-Suleiman and Al-Arifi given free passage despite actively fomenting sectarian divisions and endorsing terrorism.
Considering the conclusion drawn by “Media Hawk”, one might find the backstabbing dismissals preceding it both absurd and compromising, as from the top, Hawk states, “Let me clarify something from the outset of this blog, so you are not confused by what I am about to say. I am no fan of Pamela Geller (Sorry Pam).”
Indeed, Melanie Phillips does the same thing when she too rises above it all with, as quoted above by Geller, “Both have endorsed groups such as the EDL and others which at best do not deal with the thuggish elements in their ranks and at worst are truly racist or xenophobic” (Phillips, Melanie, “The British government’s jihad against free thought,” blog, June 27, 2013).
* * *
For the record, I endorse both Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer for their possession of a great ethical and moral center and vision in relation to their critiques of Islam. Where I differ involves the political topology involved, and the significance of the presence of my Muslim friends who repudiate Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban and all similar others, as they often do and with passion.
When the same promote out of their own soulful existence a contemporary Islamic humanism, I believe them.
The want to trim away “extremist elements” all around, whether those bloodying the Ummah with anti-western swagger and sectarian violence, or those espousing an absolute stance in the west (by typing a few hours about Islamic extremism and, perhaps, going out for lunch afterward) runs headlong into the absurdity just implied (in the preceding parenthesis) on three counts: 1) the “extremist” critics have something of merit to discuss, 2) do not incite or promote violence — neither Geller nor Spencer should be backward-linked to yobs who brings themselves to political movements of every kind — and 3) they might be right.
Fear of the argument — fear of criticism — produces the muzzling that has today degraded British expectations about what may be said and discussed in public.
Hezbollah sources told the paper that Nasrallah requested full financial and military backing for the fighting in Syria in a meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The above may be news recently released, but given the pace of the combat in Syria and the spillover into Lebanon, it’s old news predating the battle for al-Qusayr.
However, one may take as signal Russia’s decision implemented today to retrieve its military from the naval base at Tartus.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia has withdrawn all military personnel from its naval base in Syria and replaced them with civilian workers, the Defense Ministry said Thursday.
The ministry did not say when the switch at the base at Tartus took place or how many personnel were deployed there. The minor facility is Russia’s only naval outpost outside the former Soviet Union. It consists of several barracks and depots used to service Russian navy ships in the Mediterranean.
“We have neither servicemen nor civilians in Syria anymore. Or Russian military instructors assigned to units of the Syrian regular Army, for that matter,” a Russian defense ministry spokesperson is quoted as telling the Moscow business daily Vedomosti yesterday.”
Fred Weir points to Cyprus as an alternative achieving similar ends for Russian naval power and regional influence.
Put that together with this Euronews video from January this year (tipped by a CSM article):
While according to RT, “Russia’s Defense Ministry . . . blasted media reports about total evacuation as “extremely incorrect,” it’s difficult accepting the statement while looking at today’s breaking news and January apparent exodus of civilians by jet (RT, “Russian Defense Ministry refutes reports of Syria evacuation,” June 27, 2013). In fact, RT goes on to actually emphasize aspects of the surface or top story.
Putin’s interests, whether defined financially for the long term or in terms of impact on his reputation in history, which I think more important to him than casually acknowledged, are not with “Islamists” — not in Chechnya with the rebels of the Kavkaz Center variety, not with Iran with Ayatollah Khamenei and his nuclear ambitions that would be used to threaten Russia every bit as much — more — as NATO.
For Putin, the restoration of Russian grandeur and strength, plus strength in national and heroic self-concept, may involve navigating the balance between “bad boy” bravado and action with, actually (gasp!) even greater laudable strategy.
Whatever Putin does, he will be regarded as the bridge between the conniving, defunct, invasive police state that by the merit of the Russian People themselves had come to define the Soviet Union and this New Russian Federation that’s not about to take orders from Washington but might succeed in doing great right things on its own authority.
Most certainly, modern Russians will not want to be remembered for — or long associated with either — with the ravages of Maher al-Assad’s military, and while “the west” can take no pride in backing the kind of warrior that would cut out the liver out of his enemy and eat it, the Russian position, which appears to be decoupling from Syria, sails clear of the taint of that barbarism, albeit later than sooner with regard to the casualties and refugees of the war to date.
The problem with Syria, at the moment, and one of many problems within the Islamic Ummah, is that along the sectarian axis, neither side knows how to stop and both continue to walk toward a fire built on and sustained by their own unrestrained and unreasoning energies.
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.
LONDON — An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria’s widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far more casualties than rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, while civilians accounted for more than one-third of the overall fatalities, the biggest single category.
Perhaps the old days were better after all: assemble the armies on an open plain, send the warriors into it, and leave the noncombatants of both sides for the spoils of the winner.
Just kidding.
*****
“As always, numbers like these gloss over the many people who have been so grievously wounded, physically or psychologically, that they will never again live productive lives. What the latter figure amounts to in Syria is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that it’s even larger than the death toll.”
Rajan Menon’s report on the suffering goes on to note 1.7 million refugees on top of 4 million Internally Displaced Persons, or 5.7 million displaced souls altogether, about 25 percent of Syria’s total population before the onset of serious hostilities (but I’m not sure I’m getting consistent numbers from any source published within the past two years).
*****
“In one trailer we meet 13-year-old Najwa. She curls back in the corner next to her husband, 19-year-old Khaled, and her mother, hardly saying a word.
Najwa is the youngest of three, her two older sisters in their late teens are also recently married.”
Evidently, grim statistics don’t tell a whole story, or not much of whatever is to be told at all.
*****
“The head of the International Terrorism Observatory think tank, Roland Jacquard, told Reuters Television the group appeared to be sending fighters abroad, likely to Syria.”
“Special informed sources from London revealed to the Palestinian al-Manar newspaper that the British security forces arrested early June a group of 11 terrorists in London who had come back from Syria where they were involved in the fighting there.”
While Israel’s cardinal military defense rule seems to remain, “Do not intervene; do not interfere” (DM Yaalon), Israel’s first virtue would seem to remain compassion to the extent that it may provide that.
“The two boys, 9 and 15 years old, were transferred to Ziv Hospital in Safed for treatment. The 9-year-old suffered moderate injuries from shrapnel wounds across his body and lost his right eye, according to a report by Maariv. The 15-year-old was listed in serious condition, according to the report.”
Every wounded Syrian is guarded by either an IDF soldier or by a civilian security guard in an attempt to isolate them from speaking with anyone unauthorized to do so who might photograph them or pass on their information to Syria, potentially harming them or their families upon their eventual return to Syria.
As stated, more than a 100 wounded Syrians have crossed the border in recent months. Some 70 of them have been taken to Israeli hospitals, and two have passed away as a result of their injuries.
After 2,000 years or so, Hillel’s negatively stated dictum seems to hold. “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another” — and certainly, the choice between enabling or denying access to hospital services related well to that.
*****
“The request came in a letter handed to Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Harel Locker at a meeting with Druze leaders on the Golan Heights Thursday. The letter included an unprecedented request for Israel to take in Druze students who had left the Golan and settled in Syria, Maariv reported.”
Druze along the Golan have served both in the IDF and in Syria’s defense forces according to their decisions about citizenship and location, and with the fighting as I’ve described — “Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — Israeli Druze are seeking sanctuary for their relatives.
God knows God would seem to give Jews the toughest ethical and survival challenges.
Both.
At the same time.
Providing infirmary to wounded to be turned back into the field — and who want to be returned to their land — is one thing.
Affording sanctuary to those endangered by this war that only loosely respects boundaries and seems absent of compassion and conscience both in relation to innocents, noncombatants, neutral parties, and so on makes for a more difficult decision.
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