Egypt’s “Muslim Brotherhood is done,” stated the native Egyptian Copt and Hudson Institute Islamism expert Samuel Tadros on November 2 at McLean, Virginia’s Westminster Institute. Yet his presentation “The Future of Islamism in Egypt” before an audience of about 30 ominously examined how the dangerous ideology of Islamism would continue to outlive repeated failures by the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations.
Tadros noted that the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists to hold power in various Arab nations following the misnamed 2011 “Arab Spring” popular overthrow of Arab dictators. Accordingly, “people were happy to talk about the end of Islamism,” a “phenomenon that the Arabic-speaking world had suffered from for generations.” Particularly in Egypt, following the July 3, 2013 military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government, state repression facing the Muslim Brotherhood “today is much larger than anything they have faced in the past,” with thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members either jailed or exiled.
U.A.E.’s list seems to be driven by something closer to home, however: The very first name included is the U.A.E. Muslim Brotherhood, and a significant number of the more surprising inclusions on the list appear to have ties to the transnational Sunni Islamist group: The Muslim American Society, for instance, was founded by Muslim Brotherhood members in the 1990s. Rumors about links to the Muslim Brotherhood have also dogged CAIR.
I generally exit out with “Shimmer” and plead also for pride in legacy if not the retention of aspects of legacy that have plainly outrun their permit: what “BadDaddy’s Islamic Hate” is doing in Iraq and Syria has no place on earth but that which it is temporarily occupying beneath its evil banner — it may be the “real deal”, the old, the authentic, how-it-was Islam, but whether or not so, it’s over: it only feels like it’s living Out There.
This with established organizations in the U.S. involves some complex thinking about advocacy organizations that play in the gray areas short of evident crimes: if it doesn’t commit crimes, why shut it down?
Take it further: what constitutes “incitement”? “Sedition”? “Conspiracy”?
The separation of talk from walk may keep some unsavory rhetoricians in business (until a crime traces directly back to them).
As much has been stated in this blog several times, and yet, the world from which Islam has come, and the Muslim leadership of it in various parts, understands how the program may be made to work — and work against themselves as much as anyone else. Quite rightly, the UAE’s criteria for threat appears to differ but focus on intellectual legacy, an aspect of “credentialism”, and in their opinion, and in their geopolitical space, the presence of CAIR and MAS must be barred.
Yours Truly: Obama has given MB plenty of room for operating and for being observed. As he is not a President for Life, the stronger elements that comprise our government will survive him and probably be able to use the knowledge gained during his tenure. I would fear as much a flip toward the extreme Right in America. We really need a central, progressive, and prudent politics, and the zealots in politics have really skewed the conversation away from the middle ranks. That needs fixing, so I am becoming a Passionate Moderate Liberal.
Correspondent: Unfortunately, your fears aren’t baseless. After the communist revolution in Russia in 1917 and many other countries 1919, 1920 where it failed, extreme right came to power, including Nazis in most devastated Germany. That’s why from the very beginning the idea of European Union was not to go separate ways, to keep together, thereby not allowing a fascist regime to surface in a singly taken country. Still, fascists raise their head in Hungary, Greece… I think drastic economic changes bring drastic political changes and false expectations… Only the ability to realistically analyze them, or rather inability, can bring extreme regimes into power. Once installed they cannot be peacefully removed, that has to be remembered. The main lesson of WWII perhaps should be that many countries that could do something to prevent the appetites of the Nazi Germany did simply nothing for wanting to be left in peace. Want to be left in peace, from many lazy western countries, isn’t that what helps bring all sort of criminals to power nowadays? If the progressive world media would together denounce Hamas and ISIS, what chance of survival would they have? Close to none, I think.
The Muslim Brotherhood, who took power in Egypt following the Arab Spring, were recently ousted by the Egyptian military and declared a terrorist organization.
Even still, they have been embraced by President Obama, invited into his administration, placed on a “hands off” list protecting them, and are even setting up their own official political party here in the United States.
I leave room for the Obama Administration to have been adventurous, curious, experimental, observing in attempting to integrate into the democratic process such as Mohamed Elibiary, who has been enjoying this week his share of “right-side” press for tweeting remarks about the inevitability of the global Islamic caliphate, for example:
Mohamed Elibiary was until last week a senior member of DHS’ Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC). After years of controversy about his status at DHS, Elibiary announced his final day with the department on Twitter earlier this month and said he would remain close to the agency.
Media outlets have raised questions about the circumstances surrounding his departure, speculating that his provocative comments about the “inevitable” return of the Muslim “caliphate” may have played a role.
Although organizing Arab support in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria may amount to showbiz with an Administration and within an international political environment deeply invested in image — the wars for detectives and poets may turn out one day to have been wars for psychologists too, lol — the institutional memory Elibiary will leave behind will also inform this and successive governments in regard to the al-Qaeda-type assortment of Islamist challengers bent on acquiring power beneath the banners of Islam and with themselves conflated — by themselves — with God Almighty.
The United States has provided economic and military aid, respectively, to Jordan since 1951 and 1957. Total U.S. aid to Jordan through FY2013 amounted to approximately $13.83 billion. Levels of aid have fluctuated, increasing in response to threats faced by Jordan and decreasing during periods featuring political differences or reductions of aid worldwide. On September 22, 2008, the U.S. and Jordanian governments reached an agreement whereby the United States agreed to provide a total of $660 million in annual foreign assistance to Jordan over a five-year period, ending with FY2014. In the year ahead, both parties may try to reach a new five-year aid deal.
Under President Barack Obama-who seeks to expand PA paramilitary units-the United States has pledged to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars a year into Abbas’ coffers, with large sums dedicated to the security forces. This is despite objections from Congress and appeals by Palestinian human rights organizations. Obama has exercised waivers to continue to fund the PA security forces.
The unspoken truth is that the Palestinians, the country’s largest ethnic group, have developed a profound hatred of the regime and view the Hashemites as occupiers of eastern Palestine—intruders rather than legitimate rulers. This, in turn, makes a regime change in Jordan more likely than ever. Such a change, however, would not only be confined to the toppling of yet another Arab despot but would also open the door to the only viable peace solution—and one that has effectively existed for quite some time: a Palestinian state in Jordan.
That’s not America, not Egypt (God willing), not democracy, not compassion, not justice.
* * *
The mass sentencing underscored the severity of an ongoing campaign by Egypt’s military-backed leaders to silence opposition, eight months after a military coup ousted Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader.
This blog is not about to promote the Muslim Brotherhood.
Moreover, given the violence attending Egypt’s post-Mubarak turmoil and the Brotherhood designs that have necessitated the initiation of military intervention in Egyptian politics on behalf of tens of millions of brotherhood-disappointed Egyptians, this is not to rail against strong measures.
However, the mass sentencing signals a backwardness similar to the Brotherhood’s, albeit one more suited to the Napoleonic Era than the Dark Ages, but still merciless and barbaric in concept.
Come forward, Egypt.
Arrest, charge, and try; perhaps imprison in the Guantanamo way until I / you / we know a little more than we do today about psycholinguistics, belief, self-concept, and both political and social pathology.
______
Yesterday in Israel’s Arutz Sheva, a headline ran, “U.S. Warns Egypt Against Executing Brotherhood Supporters” and went on to quote State Department official Marie Hart as saying, “The imposition of the death penalty for 529 defendants after a two-day summary proceeding cannot be reconciled with Egypt’s obligations under international human rights law, and its implementation of these sentences, as I said, would be unconscionable.”
True.
It is understood here that criminality lives in the heart before it expresses itself in the streets, and that the political criminality promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood, which cloaked in religion deals itself such levers and sticks as it believes provided to them for acquiring wealth and sadistic power over others, calls for preventive measures (a Jew does not have to make such a case where modern Egyptians have so well stated their own position disfavoring the Brotherhood’s ugly agenda for all but itself).
As long as the United States maintains Guantanamo, it hasn’t much call for demanding Egypt afford decisive trials for all suspects; however, again, the same makes a case for long-term political detention involving those who indeed have been strongly associated with the harboring of murderous ambitions.
Nix the plus-500 death sentences, maintain the warrants, and perhaps as Jacob wrestled with God, wrestle with Islam until common decency, goodness, and conscience prevail — and if that fails, let’s just move on but have greater faith, greater investment, in ideals and virtues attending the better humanity of humanity.
The Egyptian army will help secure a January referendum on an amended version of the country’s 2012 constitution, a military spokesman said Tuesday . . . . Several Islamist groups, who denounce Morsi’s removal by the army as an unconstitutional military coup, have already announced their intention to boycott the poll.
It appears Egypt’s Armed Forces have committed themselves to marching into the future.
* * *
CAIRO—Egyptian authorities charged ousted President Mohammed Morsi with treason, espionage, and sponsoring terrorism, alleging he collaborated with Iran and allied militant groups to destabilize the country.
Former Egyptian President may talk back to power, but he is out of power, and it’s doubtful that Egypt’s army will ever again roll over when confronted by Islamic militancy.
* * *
Unlike Arab states that lack a well-established historical identity, Egypt has long been the bellwether of the Arab and Islamic world, and observing where it goes from here could provide a possible framework for where things could go elsewhere.
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.
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.
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