a friend sent this piece, indicting american foreign policy in egypt, and in general over the years. i found it very powerful and persuasive, and wonder how others feel
ken
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/18/new_york_times_complicit_in_the_destruction_of_egyptian_democracy/
We finish a tragic, fateful week in Egypt. There seems no turning back from its flows of blood and its political reversals, and in the short run this is almost certainly so. There is more to come, as every hour's news proves.
But either one accepts the triumph of lawlessness and cruelty over justice and humanity — or one expects another turning. It will require more blood, more arrests and jail terms and point-blank shootings and destroyed families, but Egyptians will get there — get beyond the long reigns of dictators, even their new one. Aspiration never quite dies. And America will once again have stood on the wrong side of history, complicit in subverting the very advances it incessantly claims to desire.
Over just a few days we have watched the deliberate sabotaging of the first elected government in Egyptian history. There is now no chance of restoring the government of President Mohamed Morsi: The savagery of the army and police as they act against Morsi's supporters is intended to destroy any such prospect, and it has. It is likely we have also witnessed the end of the Arab Spring, the two-year-old movement that brought the promise of representative government to the Middle East. Egypt's next story will be a new story, and the events of 2011 will take their place as a prelude, a shard of history.
Even as Egypt's death toll since Wednesday climbs toward a thousand, a larger moment passed this week, it seems to me. America has reached the limit of its capacity to accommodate a new era, one requiring new thinking and new perspectives and lively imaginations. It simply cannot manage it. Washington's business through all the Cold War...
read more at url above
Cornelius,
As I have said before, I have always found your style of presentation, well, unique. One has to wade through much to get to a point. It's my fault for not understanding you mode of citation, so we wont got there. But I would certainly defer to Tariq Ramadan, a subtle and profound thinker whose work I like a lot, so thanks for the reference.
Who knows? However, remember Morsi was elected to just over a quarter of the vote, which in and of itself does not justify a coup, but his support on all accounts was dramatically dwindling, whatever sources you draw upon, both in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the appalling attempt at constitutional reform through a referendum, which basically only the brotherhood turned out for (I believe about 19% of the electorate) . This was arguably the tripping point for the multiple consistences that were against him, including the military, of course, as well as the external influences from the Gulf and the Saudis-- they do not want more political Islam.
Hi Ken,
Sorry not to have responded sooner, but we want to see La Pirogue, and got back late. For those who haven't sen it, go.
I didn't mean to be mean spirited, and apologise for the one-line jibes. I think, however, our different takes on the Libyan situation spread out over positions that we took, and much of the other stuff often appeared to be epiphenomenal--for another time and conversation perhaps.
I don't think she is asking for unqualified support-- who can? Her claim is, or was, we should have some a barometer of the political ideal about whom one supports. Perhaps she has pulled back a little since the bloodshed. I do not support the ideal in the face of the realpolitik; and of figuring out of consequences,. which of course we cannot know until it all plays put by multiple degrees I'm personally usually very skeptical of the merits of intervention by the military are, who have their entrenched interests that, despite what she says, are independent of the "people". However, I do not think that the swell that allowed them to come to power will not allow them to stay--the forces that saw the coup against Morsi will not stand for the all or nothing, and there are voices for compromise, just as there were, by the way, Ken in Libya.
I suppose there are lessons for all of us who write in the heat of the moment, for even nuance is also open to misunderstanding as plain language is, no?
Pablo
On 2013-08-17 6:52 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
--Re- "A People's Revolution and Not a Crisis or Coup" (Nawal El Saadawi).
Some more criticism of Egypt's trigger-happy military:
The Muslim Brotherhood's Silent Martyrs Lie Soaked In Blood
Apart from being arrested once in Alexandria, I only have pleasant memories of my half year in Egypt, fond memories of the faithful at Abul Abbas Mosque in Alexandria and the al-Rifai mosque in Cairo...fond memories of the late Abu Wafa al-Taftazani, Professor of Philosophy at of the University of Cairo a Rifai Sheikh and head of the Sufi Council of Egypt...
I should hope that in this rumination, selective as I am, I am not out cycling in the dark or cycling blindfolded just because I read someplace that "love is blind".
The focus is on the on-going carnage in Egypt and what el Saadawi, arguably not the great grandmother or the grand old lady of Modern Egyptian or African Literature opined in her "A people's Revolution and Not a Crisis or Coup".
For a real discussion or debate, I should like to pit Tariq Ramadan against el-Saadawi a vocal spokesperson for women's rights in Egypt and a committed anti/FGM activist - so it would be man against equal rights woman, and leave them to iron it out, see who comes out on top, which would be left standing.
Writers have a special high standing in Egypt – Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature - although this forum tends to ignore him when talking about African Literature - perhaps because he wrote in his mother tongue Arabic (same language as the Quran) whilst people in this forum mostly focus on those who write in other tongues. When I started my study of Islam and enquired from my closest Muslim friends about Mahfouz's "Children of Gebelawi" in which Moses, Jesus and Muhammad hang out in the same Cairo Ghetto - I was told that Mahfouz was "an evil man" and that I should stay away from him. I got the same answer when I asked another friend - Sheikh Sadiq, a Professor of Islam from Najaf about Nader Shah who organised that debate between the Shia and the Sunni in 1746 - he told me the same thing that Nader Shah was "an evil man."
Evil men. I wonder what the same people would say about el-Sisi. Maybe that he's going to go to hell?One of the problems is that African writers (including those made in Egypt, which is in Africa) are often approached as if on the basis of their fiction or fantasy poetry alone, they deserved to be reckoned as prophets or consulted like the oracle of Delphi or a priest or priestess of Ifa Divination and their every word highly regarded as prophetic when talking about or diagnosing or sooth-saying about their countries or world events as in this case about what's happening in Egypt right now; and sometimes as in the case of el-Saadawi, talking some sense but admixtured with a great deal of nonsense because although she has said elsewhere that "Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies", some of what she has said here is far, far from anything that could be called "truth" - at least not the kind of truth that is equateable with what she read in the Quran.Since her article was first published on the 5th of July 2013 and probably penned on the 4th of July when we were celebrating the 237th anniversary America's Independence,we can safely conclude that as optimistic as she was when she wrote that article she was not gifted with the requisite kind of prophetic insight to have foreseen the military's killing sprees since she penned that article. Apparently she did not anticipate the military's massacre of the 5th of July or the massacre of the 27th of July and the subsequent massacres of August 13th -14th and the ongoing massacres of the well-equipped Egyptian military's war being waged on the democratically elected president Morsi's' supporters and other anti- coup sympathisers.So, I find myself concurring with Professor Harrow and with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention:In Egypt one side is saying:"WE are the other people"
And the other side is also raging, a chorus of voices and street and mosque protests:
"WE are the other people too!"
If only el Saadawi could talk about the Egyptian people, the way that Victor Jara sang about the Chilean people then she would be talking with a more human heart. It's not that her side should slaughter all the guys on the other side in the name of justice, Human Rights and equality and win a revolution of the beeble ...
Just heard Hamdi Hassan explaining on SwedishTV4 news that one of the reasons why it's difficult to estimate the accurate death toll at the hands of the trigger-happy military is that Muslims prefer to bury their dead as quickly as possible within twenty four hours – they don't want their dead to be tampered with, dragged to the morgue etc – and so those numbers disappear from the daily count.
Human Rights Watch Egypt and indeed the whole world is very concerned about the escalating number of Egyptians that have been shot in the head and chest. Ammar Badie the son of Mohamed Badie the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood currently detained by El-Sisi's military, was shot dead earlier today.
What we see on a world wide scale is the world's Muslim population being systematically reduced - decimated every step of the way by all these wars - terrorism and war - and first and foremost it's some of the most able-bodied and zealous Muslim youths that are the cannon fodder in Egypt, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, in Syria and not so long ago in Algeria and Somalia, Tunisia, Libya not to forget the doings of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Right now it looks like at the top of El-Sisi's agenda is the annihilation of the Muslim Brotherhood – to reduce them in number and influence as a political force and social grassroots organisation in Egypt and in this he seems to have the whole-hearted support of the Egyptian Copts who do not want to abide by Jesus' gospel advice:
" But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,"
but instead would like to see the last of the Muslim Brotherhood far from their neighbourhoods. Good news for them: El-Sisi says that the Egyptian state is going to re-build their burned down churches. It's a great pity that El-Sisi & the Egyptian military are not going to bring back to life all the pro-Morsi Egyptians that they have killed these past few days, in cold blood.
El-Sisi and his military men are nonplussed and unfazed by the president of the United States dangling the $1.5 billion aid carrot under their greedy military noses and threatening to withhold all of it if El-Sisi and his trigger-happy and unelected interim government do not behave themselves and stop murdering the Egyptian people. However, at this stage, for El Sisi and the military's economic empire, $1.5 billion is but a pittance in the bucket when the combined might of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are offering their anti -Muslim Brotherhood brothers-in-distress a whopping $12 billion to eradicate the al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen.El Sisi is in effect saying that he can do without the US's $1.5 – although the cancellation of the joint military exercise is a serious blow to the Egyptian Military's prestige.Still on the Egyptian army, Ok so the Egyptian Army has its own vast economic interest to take care of - to defend and protect – but how united is the Egyptian army? Don't the soldiers in that army have relatives in the Muslim Brotherhood or among the many anti-military coup demonstrators and who are being so mercilessly slaughtered? Are there any Copts in the Egyptian military?
Naguib Sawiris one of Egypt's richest men - a Copt – was asked on CNN whether he was financing el-Sisi's interim govt. He replied that he wasn't doing that and that it was the govt's duty to maintain law and order, omitting to add "by any means possible" and as I listened to him I thought, "And you've got someone like him, to be your god!"In my view, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus should all be protesting about the Egyptian army's excessive killings...You guess is as good as mine, but I have a feeling that the West wouldn't mind if it was the Copts in power in Egypt. _ in which case they would both be speaking the same language – the language of "the holy trinity"...
Some anti-Muslim Brotherhood voices:
Israel of course - from the Israeli point of view (Israel is Egypt's next door neighbour – only the Sinai separates them and they been to war several times, the last time in 1973 – which the Egyptian army is still telling the Egyptian people that they won) worse than the Muslim Brotherhood re-gaining power in Egypt would be Hamas ( an ideological affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Egypt) gaining power and ruling in Gaza, Judea and Samaria – that would be a nightmare...Let us pray
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