18 Friday Oct 2013
The Egyptian society is currently at a point of rupture of the historical cycle during which it had been de-politicized through imposed top-down policies. It is undergoing a process of re-politicization and it is gradually realizing its rights and power; and thus the refusal of the masses to accept the governance of a Muslim Brotherhood that did not meet their demands.
A Note on the Socio-Political Importance of Events in Egypt – Strategic Outlook – 10/18/2013.
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19 Monday Aug 2013
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Islamic militants ambushed two minibuses carrying off-duty policemen in the northern region of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Monday, killing 25 of them execution-style in a brazen daylight attack.
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I’ve started using the phrase “the humanity of humanity”, and with that in mind, here’s reference to a progressive piece by Ali Al Sharnoby published online with the Canada Free Press:
There were hundreds of Egyptians of all ages. All of them made it clear they were willing to kill Brotherhood members if they turned up again. About half of them were Muslims. A few Salafists, too came to be with us as they live in the same neighborhood and refuse to attack the church. I heard a lot of dialogues between Christians and Muslims. I felt the warmth of real cohesion and unity against the new danger, and knew that there is no difference between our needs and destiny because everyone was there to protect the House of God.
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On June 30, when millions of Egyptians took to the streets to protest against now ousted President Mohamed Morsi, residents of Al Nazla marked Christian homes and shops with red graffiti, vowing to protect Morsi’s electoral legitimacy with “blood.”
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Even the $12 billion or so in aid from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait is unlikely to get Egypt through the current turmoil.
“This can’t support Egypt’s transitional period for more than five or six months – maybe a year. It can’t be counted on as the Brotherhood counted on money from Qatar during Morsi’s time,” said Adly.
Given the level of violence projected by Muslim Brotherhood enthusiasts against Egypt’s Coptic Christian community and the non-aligned state’s police, my estimation of Al Jazeera‘s balance and integrity in journalism has dropped a few notches. The Qatar-backed enterprise should be at the forefront reporting the arson and bloodshed facilitated by the ragtag shock troops of conservative Islamic enterprise.
Watchers of the Islamic Small Wars as expressed in Egypt went through this about two months ago.
The Qatari-owned media company Al-Jazeera saw 22 members of its staff in Egypt resign on Monday over what they allege was “biased coverage” of the events that unfolded in Cairo last week.
Al-Jazeera correspondent Haggag Salama was among those who resigned, accusing the station of “airing lies and misleading viewers,” Gulf News reported Monday.
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RIYADH—Saudi King Abdullah is turning out to be the most prominent foreign supporter of Egypt’s military generals in their armed push against Egypt’s Islamic movement, sending field hospitals and words of support over the weekend for what he called Egypt’s fight against “terrorism and extremism.”
The western anti-Jihad and the post-communist communist 🙂 hardliners make the Kavkaz case for a “crusader west” out to destroy Islam in its totality by referencing atrocious directives in the Qurran like Sura 9:29 that can neither be dismissed (under the rules, so to speak), reconciled with contemporary multiculturalism — much less nature’s inclination as regards invention and variety everywhere, including human cultures — or, really, contextualized into a neutral (or neutered) state, but, no worry, Islam has reached this point riven with fractures and separating seams that are not healing and that language keeps from convergence.
Implied by the above cited piece, Qatar’s backing of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has not been equally engaged, so I will understate the state of affairs, by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the “Brothers” are viewed as rivals to Saudi Wahhabism (see, for example, Walter Russel Mead’s “Useful Reminder: Saudis and Muslim Brotherhood Do Not Get Along,” The American Interest, May 17, 2013).
Garfinkle, Adam. “Al-Sisi’s Hammer, Obama’s Nine-Iron?” The American Interest, August 15, 2013.
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18 Sunday Aug 2013
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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15 Thursday Aug 2013
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Al Aribya. “Egypt police say will use live ammunition to repel attacks.” August 15, 2013.
Al Aribya. “Egypt’s Brotherhood vows to bring down ‘military coup’.” August 15, 2013.
JTA. “Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood tops anti-Semitic rhetoric list.” Haaretz, December 28, 2012.
Sabra, Hani and Bassem Sabry. “Morsi is Not Arab World’s Mandela.” Al Monitor, August 12, 2013. This article deals with a serious snit as well as a serious issue involving either perception or integration or both:
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.
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05 Monday Aug 2013
Posted in Fast News Share, Religion
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“I am one of those who gave Morsi my vote and I supported him. I even celebrated for him in the streets of Alexandria upon the announcement of his appointment as the President. Indeed, it was a historic moment to witness the first elected President in the history of modern Egypt.”
http://www.strategicoutlook.org/africa/news-a-voice-from-egypt-why-people-turned-against-morsi.html
Also appearing recently in the media:
“… There are some who advocate for democracy only when they’re out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.”
Those are old words from President Obama.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/07/arab-spring-detached-democracy.html
From PressTV today (only six views when I looked at it):
From RT today:
VICE has released this afternoon a 42-minute analysis: “New Wave of Violence with Michael Hanna: VICE Podcast.” YouTube, August 5, 2013.
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22 Monday Jul 2013
Maya Sarsa Dance Troupe, Cairo, 2010:
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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.
Sahbazov, Fuad T. “Overthrown Morsi: Civil War or Solidarity.” Strategic Outlook, July 22, 2013.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Still recent: CNN. “Fighting reported in Egypt’s Tahrir Square.” July 22, 2013.
Maya Sarsa Dance Troupe (web site in French)
08 Monday Jul 2013
As the death toll rises in clashes between Egypt’s army and pro-Morsi protesters, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Gaza terrorists are infiltrating the Sinai to attack Egyptian army outposts.
Ya’ar, Chana. “Gaza Terrorists Stream into Sinai.” Arutz Sheva, July 8, 2013.
Mahmoud added that the management used to instruct each staff member to favour the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sharaf, Ayman. “Al Jazeera staff resign after ‘biased coverage’.” Gulf News, July 8, 2013.
We know the big story of the day (“Army Kills 51, Deepening Crisis in Egypt” – NYT blog by David C. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim, July 8) overshadows all, but Egypt’s twisting narrative includes sideshows not to be overlooked.
The Mubasher Misr staff resignations, 22 of them, may have a recent back story in the arrest of station chief Ayman Gaballah (“Head of Al-Jazeera Mubasher Misr released on bail,” Ahram Online, July 5, 2013) as well as something to do with being kicked out of military press conference this morning (RT. “Al-Jazeera journalists kicked outof Egyptian military press-conference.” July 8, 2013).
Egypt’s stock exchange would seem about as upset as the state itself. On July 5, headlines screamed of a 7 percent rise (BBC, “Egypt analysts optimistic for post-Morsi economy”) and today: “Shares plunge after Egypt violence,” The National, July 9, 2013).
Egyptian airport officials said the new measures followed reports that a large number of Syrians in Egypt were backing the Muslim Brotherhood and took part in violence after the ousting of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
AP. “Egypt Interim President Sets Election Timetable.” Time, July 8, 2013.
Black, Ian. “Reconciliation hopes fade in Egypt after Cairo killings.” The Guardian, July 8, 2013.
Marcus, Jonathan. “Egypt’s political unrest causes regional concern.” BBC, July 8, 2013.
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08 Monday Jul 2013
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.
Moran, Rick. “At least 43 dead as Egyptian army fires at protestors.” American Thinker, July 8, 2013.
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.
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“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.
AFP. “Experts urge Arab nations to train forces in crowd control.” February 22, 2013.
“A group of soldiers are preparing for their deployment to Egypt with riot training on post.”
KCEN. “Riot Control Training.” Video included. June 20, 2013.
Glad we go that cleared up.
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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.
AP. “Frustrated Egyptian police protest riot-control duties.” Azstarnet, March 9, 2013.
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.
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