Egyptian Crowds Reject Mubarak Speech, Pledge Massive Friday Protests

Posted on 02/11/2011 by Juan

The roller coaster media ride on Thursday centered on stories coming out of unnamed, highly placed Egyptian sources that President Hosni Mubarak would give a speech that evening in which he stepped down. When the time came, and Mubarak finally spoke, he did no such thing. He remained president, and only said that he was transferring some unspecified powers, at some unspecified time, to his vice president, Omar Suleiman, a former head of military intelligence allegedly implicated in torture. Most likely, Mubarak interpreted what he planned to do in his own mind as a kind of stepping down, and gave sufficiently ambiguous indications that those around him misunderstood his intentions.

The danger is that by raising expectations and then dashing them, Mubarak may have created an even more volatile revolutionary situation, which could easily deteriorate into violence and a spiral of violence.

In 1992 the Algerian generals held parliamentary elections and allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), the Muslim fundamentalist party, to compete. FIS unexpectedly won more than two-thirds of seats in parliament, which would have allowed them to amend the constitution. The generals were suddenly stricken with fear at what might happen, and they abruptly declared the election null and void. Millions of FIS supporters were outraged, feeling their victory had been stolen from them. The situation deteriorated into a civil war between fundamentalists and secularists that ultimately killed perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 persons over the succeeding decade, and left Algeria to this day in a fragile political condition.

Basically, the rule in politics is that you don’t raise people’s hopes if you aren’t prepared to follow through on your pledges.

After the crowd at Tahrir Square absorbed the news that Mubarak was still president and that his gestures to them were mostly vague or symbolic, they were from all accounts angry. Some took off their shoes and showed the soles, a sign of disrespect. To their credit, the protesters mostly quietly dispersed in order to get some rest for Friday, when they were already calling for major protests.

But, some were so exercised that 3,000 headed toward the presidential palace, where they staged a demonstration. Another 10,000 headed toward the television station, which they surrounded. The symbology here was dire, since the first thing a coup-maker in the Arab world does is to send tanks to surround the television station.

In the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, the crowds were enraged by the speech, according to Aljazeera. correspondent. Some chanted, “Hosni Mubarak, shame, shame; you want Egypt engulfed in flame!” They planned for a big procession on Friday after prayers, and smaller neighborhood rallies.

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Amr: Memo from Egypt: We Shall Not Be Moved

Posted on 02/11/2011 by Juan

Ahmed Amr writes from Cairo in a guest column for Informed Comment

Memo from Egypt: We Shall Not Be Moved

With every passing day, the Egyptian uprising gathers strength as more citizens rally to the cause and demand the immediate resignation of Hosni Mubarak. The regime’s pillars are crumbling. Yesterday, the demonstrators surged out of Tahrir Square and marched towards the National Assembly and the building that houses the Ministry of Interior. But perhaps the most important development was the smaller demonstrations held in front of government owned media outlets and the resignations of a number of prominent journalists on the regime’s payroll.

The defection of journalists and TV personalities means that the regime has lost its ability to control the message. Until Monday, the coverage of the uprising by the government owned press has been scandalous. Now, the change in tone coming from the regime’s very own megaphone suggests that even state paid propagandists have read the writing on the wall and decided that the demonstrators have gained the upper hand.

One prominent headline in Wednesday’s issue of Al-Ahram, the official megaphone of the regime, demonstrated the dramatic tilt in coverage. “Fi Al Tahrir Hata al Raheel” translates into “We’ll Occupy Tahrir Square until Mubarak steps down” or in other words “We shall not be moved.” That would have been unthinkable a week ago.

What’s more astonishing about these developments is that a day earlier, Omar Suleiman, held a two hour meeting with the management of major government daily papers and privately owned opposition papers. I guess whatever message he was trying to deliver just didn’t sink in. It appears that even disreputable government employed journalists have bailed out on Mubarak because they understand the liability of being too closely identified with the dictatorial regime.

Every journalist in the country is suddenly howling about the mind boggling corruption of Mubarak’s government. The former minister of interior, Habib Adly, apparently amassed a fortune of $1.3 billion dollars. Not bad for a government employee. Other former ministers have amassed similar fortunes. According to Al-Ahram, the former Minister of Tourism, The former Minister of Housing and the former Minister of Health are all billionaires and the attorney general has already issued orders freezing their assets and barring them from leaving the country. In a country where the minimum wage was only recently raised to the equivalent of $70 a month, even a million dollars is considered surreal wealth. So you can only imagine how these revelations sit with the man on the street especially when they are confirmed by the government’s own media establishment.

Of course, the net worth of the Mubarak clan is still a taboo subject. There is speculation in the foreign press that the president is one of the richest men in the world with a fortune estimated at $40 billion. Al-Ahram won’t go there – not yet anyhow. But the disturbing news of the first family’s fabulous wealth has already reached Tahrir Square and it helps explain why the demonstrations are gaining strength.

With the sudden change in the sentiments of the scribes of the government press, all eyes are now focused on the army. So far, the army has maintained a neutral stance. The common wisdom in the western press is that the army will eventually tilt towards the regime because its senior officers are beneficiaries of many perks. That might be true but they’re still Egyptians and they won’t easily give up their status as the single most respected institution in the country. While the generals are often handsomely rewarded by the regime for their loyalty, the vast majority of officers are middle class and their compensation has taken a downward dive even as Mubarak targeted his largess towards the police and the Republican Guards. Anybody who knows anything about Egypt understands that the junior officers in the military will abandon their posts before accepting orders to abort a popular uprising. The military establishment has two choices – they can play a meaningful and constructive role in the Post-Mubarak era or they can prop up the faltering regime for a few months at the expense of losing the trust of their people.

As the uprising gains momentum, college professors, professional associations and trade unions are joining the fray. They know which way the tide is turning and so does the army’s rank and file.

The young people who led this uprising have a spirit and a love of country that no Egyptian can ignore. There is a surge of patriotism in the country that transcends anything seen since the 1973 war. Egypt has not experienced a popular uprising of this magnitude since 1919 when Egyptians became the first third world people to secure nominal independence from the British Empire. Those kids in Tahrir Square know their history and have seen three hundred of their finest shed their blood for freedom. They will honor their sacrifices by standing tall against any force that attempts to abort their uprising. A word to the wise – listen carefully to what these young men and women are saying – “we shall not be moved.”

Ahmed Amr is an Egyptian American and the former editor of NileMedia.com

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Wael Ghonim vs. Barack Obama: Change we Can Believe in, Yes we Can

Posted on 02/10/2011 by Juan

Ooops, somehow an older draft got auto-published. This is the actual posting.

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Wael Ghonim vs. Barack Obama: Change we Can Believe in, Yes we Can

Posted on 02/10/2011 by Juan

It is no secret that President Barack Obama has been in some regards a profound disappointment to the American Left, and his erratic and often disgraceful performance on the Egypt crisis exemplifies his faults in this regard. (Tom Engelhardt puts it best regarding the administration: “It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.”) Obama just seems to lack empathy with the little people and is unwilling to buck the rich and powerful, even though they all opposed his run for the presidency. As Iran’s speaker of the house put it, the Obama administration, faced with a choice of supporting the youth revolution or the camels unleashed on it, has chosen the camels. It makes a person think there should be rule that no one can run for the presidency who didn’t have a proper father figure in his or her life (Bill Clinton, W., Obama), since apparently once they get into office they start thinking the billionaires are their long-lost parent, whom they have to bend over backward to please.

Obama dealt with the Wall Street crisis by rewarding with more billions the corrupt and/or grossly incompetent financiers who threw millions of Americans out of work and out of their homes, and by appointing persons to deal with the crisis who had been among its instigators. He declined to end the abuses against the Bill of Rights of the Orwellian-named ‘PATRIOT Act,’ even though he had a Democratic House and Senate. Indeed, the Left was put in the humiliating position of being grateful to Michelle Bachman for helping do what Obama would not, when she and other Tea Party Republicans joined the principled Democrats in the House to decline to extend the human rights abuses embedded in that infamous Act.

“National Security Letters” under the act allowed the FBI to snoop on people with no court warrant and no evidence of wrongdoing, even spying on their library records. Librarians from whom the records were demanded were put under an unconstitutional gag order that prevented them from revealing what was going on. You could discover that the FBI had tossed your apartment with no warrant and for no reason, and then be forbidden from even publicly complaining about it! This is not America, it is North Korea. Obama has actually expanded the Surveillance State, violating our Fourth Amendment rights in a thoroughgoing way. He is enamored of pulling the trigger on people he doesn’t like through covert operations rocket and missile strikes, operating outside any rule of law (the missiles are fired into places with which the US is not at war, killing people who have been convicted of no crime; in short, Obama is simply assassinating people, and would do so to Americans, something that even past Republican presidents agreed was illegal. Because he charged the CIA with the drone strikes, they are classified operations and citizens and their representatives cannot even question administration officials about them in public!

Obama has coddled his administration colleagues who support Mubarak, want him to stay, and support VP Omar Suleiman.

Unlike Obama, Wael Ghonim, the 28-year-old Google executive who helped instigate the Egyptian uprising, wants genuine change.

He wants long-serving autocrat Hosni Mubarak to step down. Unlike VP Joe Biden, Ghonim has no doubts that Mubarak is a dictator.

Ghonim wants an end to the “Emergency Laws,” more Draconian than the PATRIOT Act, whereby the Egyptian state sets aside any slight civil liberties mentioned in the constitution.

He wants an end to Egypt’s crony capitalist state, which allowed Hosni Mubarak to accumulate a fortune of $70 billion while 40 percent of Egyptians live on $2 a day or a little over that. Ghonim told CNN, “The plan was to get everyone on the street. The plan was number one we’re going to start from poor areas. Our demands are going to be all about what touches people’s daily life. And by the way we honestly meant it. One of the very famous videos we used all the time to promote this was a guy eating from the trash.”

He added, ‘we truly believe in these demands. Like the minimum wage. Like talking about the end of, the end of unemployment…reducing unemployment or at least giving people some sort of compensation to make living.’

Ghonim’s emphasis on labor demands came about because the uprising in Egypt is largely a labor uprising. It is an alliance of blue collar workers with white collar workers, all of them supported by a progressive youth movement and college students. It is therefore not actually a surprise that some 200,000 working class people joined in the protests on Wednesday, striking, encouraging strikes, and demanding a proper minimum wage.

“Muhit” reports that as the revolutionary movement entered its third week, thousands of workers in a number of factories and establishments launched sit-ins, strikes demanding better pay and better working conditions.

A few workers at the Suez Canal joined in, which threw everyone in the West for a loop — though their work stoppage was not aimed at disrupting canal traffic. 7.5 percent of all world trade goes through that artery, and 10% of all petroleum. Given tight supplies for the former, a Suez work stoppage that actually closed the canal temporarily would be a further blow to Western economies. (The small labor actions of Wednesday did not threaten such a thing, but the longer the uprising festers and Mubarak refuses to step down, the more the danger grows). In Port Said, poor slum dwellers set the governor’s mansion ablaze.

On Wednesday, 1500 workers in the official government telecom company struck, and in Damanhour, 2000 electricity workers ceased work. In the Delta town of Kafr Ziyat, 1500 hospital workers stopped work. Additionally, thousands of protesters on Wednesday cut the road and rail link of the southern city of Asyut with Cairo.

The broad commitment of the working class to the revolution has been apparent all along, but it turned dramatic on Wednesday because of the size and variety of unions who declared for read change.

Change we can believe in.

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Egyptian Protests Swell in Response to Ghonim

Posted on 02/09/2011 by Juan

The crowds in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo were again very large on Tuesday, and new networks of people joined in them, showing that the protest movement is expanding. Many newcomers appear to have been impressed by the DreamTv interview with Wael Ghonim (scroll down), which ended with him sobbing over the deaths of some 300 protesters while he was arbitrarily locked up in an Egyptian prison cell. Ghonim is among Egypt’s foremost internet technology specialists. He clearly regrets the killing of some 300 protesters by state security forces in the past two parliamentary contests. but says that those lives lost are a reason for the organizers to continue to demonstrate until victory. The central demand of the protesters is the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

Demonstrators broke new ground, spilling into arteries around Tahrir Square and taking up positions across from the parliament building. They also advanced toward the building where the cabinet meets.

Meanwhile, newly appointed vice president Omar Suleiman, former head of military intelligence, said that calls for the departure of president Hosni Mubarak were disrespectful, and warned the demonstrators that Egypt could not go on with big rallies every day. Although he affirmed that president Hosni Mubarak had undertaken not to arrest or interfere with the protesters, he said that one possible outcome of continued turmoil would be a military coup. Suleiman seems not to have noticed that Hosni Mubarak is an Air Force marshal, and that key cabinet posts are already filled by military officers.

Suleiman’s attempt to split the opposition by drawing part of it into talks was dealt a blow on Tuesday as the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood said it would decline to be part of any transitional or interim government.

In what might be a demonstration of independence from the regime, the Nilesat satellite television service restored the broadcasts of Aljazeera, which had been banned last week by the government.

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Anzalone: The Muslim Brotherhood Myth

Posted on 02/09/2011 by Juan

Christopher Anzalone writes in a guest column for Informed Comment:

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood & the Demonstrations: Fact vs. Fiction

Since the start of mass popular protests by Egyptians against their country’s autocratic government, headed by the aging president Hosni Mubarak and his new vice president, Omar Suleiman, a great deal of attention has been paid to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun). Attention on the opposition movement has been particularly heavy and skewed in the United States where pundits from both the left and the right breathlessly claim that the Brotherhood is poised to take over Egypt in a repeat of what happened in 1979-1980 in Iran and erroneously tie the Egyptian movement to Usama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda Central. Much of this analysis is based on fallacies and conjecture rather than fact.

The claim that al-Qaeda emerged seamlessly from the Brotherhood is the most egregious claim that has been made. Pundits who make this claim point to former members of the movement such as al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Salam Faraj who founded militant jihadi-takfiri groups that declared Muslims with whom they disagreed to be apostates. A fact that it usually left out is that these individuals left the Brotherhood after it swore off the use of violence to achieve its ends. Al-Zawahiri, who had been an Brotherhood activist at age 14, was particularly bitter about the movement’s “betrayal” of “Islamic principles” and in the 1990s he wrote a lengthy monograph harshly criticizing it entitled The Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood in 60 Years. For its part, the Brotherhood frequently condemns al-Qaeda in its public statements and positions.

The ghost of Sayyid Qutb, perhaps the Brotherhood’s most well-known member, is another recurring connection used to paint the movement as inherently militant and radical. The Egyptian litterateur-turned-Islamist revolutionary ideologue was imprisoned for a decade by Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s government and eventually executed by it in 1966. Journalists and pundits looking for an easy answer to the “root causes” of jihadi-takfiri groups such as al-Qaeda frequently point to Qutb and the medieval Hanbali Sunni jurist Ibn Taymiyya. Although Qutb was clearly a revolutionary and radical thinker and the Brotherhood’s position toward him has been ambiguous in many ways, past analysis of Qutb and his thought have been based on, at best, a shallow reading of a fraction of his many writings.

John Calvert, a professor of Middle East history, has written what will become the standard scholarly study of Qutb, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. Rather than study only one segment of Qutb’s life and thought, Calvert examines his entire life and tracks the evolution of his thought. Calvert points to the ambiguity of much of Qutb’s writings as one of the causes for their use by extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and Egypt’s al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), the latter of which has since renounced violence. Far from being an apologia for Qutb, Calvert’s book takes a holistic approach to examining Qutb’s life and thought. He and other scholars also point out that Hasan al-Hudaybi, the “general guide” of the Brotherhood during Qutb’s lifetime, wrote an influential book entitled Preachers, Not Judges in which he was critical of many of Qutb’s ideas. Ultimately, though Qutb was certainly a radical, revolutionary Islamist thinker his ideas alone did not create al-Qaeda and like-minded groups. As Calvert shows, many of these groups actually take positions that are contradictory to what Qutb was arguing. Al-Qaeda is instead best seen as a group that has taken selectively from a myriad of different sources, including Qutb and Ibn Taymiyya, and combined them with positions espoused by ideologues such as al-Zawahiri to create a new, hybrid ideology.

Longtime scholars of the Brotherhood have cast doubts on exaggerated claims that the movement will be swept into power in a post-Mubarak/post-authoritarian Egypt. In fact, many doubt that the movement has the power to take over the entire country even if it wanted to. The Brotherhood, though the oldest and arguably best organized opposition group in the country, currently suffers from a number of ills. First, it is beset with a generation gap between the older generation of leaders, such as the current general guide Muhammad Badi‘a, and a younger generation that has sought to change the movement’s policies on a host of issues including the role of women in leadership positions and Coptic Christians. The Brotherhood is in fact no longer the dominant force that it was in the past. As a movement it has lost a lot of credibility in recent years after allowing itself to be co-opted by the Mubarak government says Khalid Medani, a professor of political science and Islamic studies at McGill University who has conducted extensive field work in Egypt including interviews with the movement’s members representing various veins of thought within it. Despite remaining the country’s largest formally organized opposition group the Brotherhood is failing to attract many new members, he says.

Although it eventually decided to participate in the January 25 demonstrations in Egypt the Brotherhood only announced its decision two days before. Its endorsement was also far from enthusiastic. Following the unprecedented size and staying power of the mass popular demonstrations against the Mubarak’s authoritarian government, the Brotherhood took a much more proactive approach in supporting the demonstrators. To date it has released eight official statements, including three signed by Badi‘a. In them the movement has been careful to not claim leadership of the demonstrations and instead says that it is simply one party among many that make up the opposition. Observers on the ground have noted that the Brotherhood is not the most visible or powerful voice represented among the hundreds of thousands to millions of demonstrators who have defied government curfews and violence to continue calling for their civil and human rights.

The Brotherhood has joined other opposition groups and demonstrators in calling for the resignation of Mubarak, the abolition of the “emergency law” that has been in place since 1981 when Mubarak came to power, the holding of new elections that are actually free and fair, the release of all political prisoners, substantial amendment of the constitution, and the prosecution of government officials who have ordered the use of violence against the demonstrators. The movement has also been careful to explain its decision to enter into cautious talks with the government, which is increasingly under the public direction of Vice President Suleiman. Thus far, the Brotherhood remains unconvinced by the government’s claims that it is trying to address the popular will of the Egyptian people.

Although it is far from being a force for social or political liberalism, certainly of the kind that is desired by progressives in the U.S. and Europe, the Brotherhood is also not the all-powerful Islamist bogeyman and twin sister of al-Qaeda that it is often portrayed as. Facing its own internal divisions and problems of legitimacy among the Egyptian public, the Brotherhood is unlikely to be able to “seize control” of the country even if it wanted to. Its internal problems are recognized by no one more clearly than by the Brotherhood itself, which has been careful not to further alienate the Egyptian people who have collectively led the popular uprising against authoritarianism that continues to defy an aging autocrat’s decrees even in the face of extreme state violence.

Christopher Anzalone is a doctoral student in the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University.

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Cole on Egypt at Virtually Speaking

Posted on 02/08/2011 by Juan

Here is part of an interview I did Monday evening with Susie Madrak via Virtually Speaking’s Blogtalk Radio:

The full interview is here:

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio
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Egypt’s Google Gandhi Released, Interviewed

Posted on 02/08/2011 by Juan

The Egyptian military government, which is still running the country in accordance with martial law “emergency rules,” on Monday released from custody Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who played a role in organizing the January 25 demonstrations that kicked off Egypt’s current crisis.

He was interviewed on the “10:00 PM” program of Egypt’s DreamTV channel. The video has been posted to YouTube with subtitles.:

This is the meaty Part 2 of his post-release interview (click on “cc” at the bottom if you don’t see English subtitles, and they will appear).

and Part 3:

Ghonim consistently called for non-violent methods, becoming Egypt’s Google Gandhi (an epithet he would hate, since he urged that he not be lionized and that people think instead about the some 300 protesters shot dead by the regime in the past week). His grief over those deaths drove him to end the interview in tears.

Ghonim’s assertion that the deaths were not his or the protest movement’s fault is certainly correct.

I advise against watching this cold-blooded execution by armed and armored police of an unarmed, non-threatening protester, but it does show the kind of vicious brutality that the protesters are up against.

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