EGYPT: Egypt's re-revolution going viral

Though Mohammed Morsi was a flawed President, he was democratically elected. Photo / AP

Muslims around the globe are joining protests on streets and on social media against military takeover.

Protests have spontaneously erupted in cities across the Muslim world, from Istanbul to Lahore to Jakarta. Apart from some clashes with police, mostly the protests have been peaceful and matched by parallel protests on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media.

Meanwhile, photos of the dead and the living in Egypt's nascent democracy are going viral. There is a photo of Habiba Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a multimedia volunteer for the Muslim Brotherhood standing in the crowd holding a camera on small stand. Next to this is a photo of her lifeless face in a white shroud. But it isn't just ordinary Egyptians being murdered by a military that each year receives millions in military aid from the US. Soon news spreads across cyberspace that an Egyptian athlete who won bronze at the London Olympics is among the dead. The 17-year-old daughter of a Brotherhood leader is filmed being cut down by a sniper.

Indeed, Egypt's counter-revolution is being televised to those who care to watch. Egyptian protests are making international headlines while their parallel international equivalents are being ignored by our allegedly honest independent Western media outlets. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation and perhaps Asia's most vibrant democracy, has close spiritual ties to Egypt, home to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, perhaps the most Sunni Muslim seminary in the world. Large numbers of Indonesian religious scholars are Al-Azhar graduates. Egyptian religious culture is regarded as reflective of the epitome of orthodoxy in many parts of the archipelago. Hence Indonesians have hit the streets following the 3 July coup.

The United States prefers not to use nasty terms like "coup" to describe the military removal of a democratically elected government followed by a massacre of its citizens. To do so would threaten its ongoing $1.5 billion military aid package to the Egyptian military which underpins the Camp David Peace Accord with Israel. Protecting the security needs of the only democracy in the Middle East is far more important than supporting nascent democracies in other Middle Eastern nations.

The United States and Israel have a firm ally in the democratic moderate secular nation of Saudi Arabia. The last thing Saudi's absolutist absolute monarchy would want is a host of Arab springs in its own backyard. At first, Saudi Arabia's role in Egypt's democracy was to act as puppet master for the Salafist faction.

Saudi Arabia has now directed its Salafist allies in Egypt to back the Egyptian generals. It is also using its influence in the Arab media to flex its muscle.

In Kuwait, well-known preacher Tareq el-Swaidan has been sacked as director of a Saudi religious channel due to his Brotherhood links. The Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal wrote on Twitter that Mr Swaidan had been dismissed

... for admitting he belongs to the Brotherhood terrorist movement. 

The Saudi dictatorship has pledged $5 billion to the military junta.

The mastermind behind the military takeover and massacre is hardly a staunch secularist. General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi was appointed by former President Morsi in August 2002 to head the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Sisi was trained in Egypt, the UK and the United States. Unlike other SCAF members, Sisi is a deeply devout man. Despite the support it is receiving from the US, Sisi's military rulers are flooding the country with anti-American propaganda, claiming that the US Government and media are supporting the protesters. Successive military regimes have used this kind of paranoia to deflect attention.

Egypt is moving forward headlong into the past when elected presidents won polls with 99 per cent of the vote. The Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi wasn't perfect, but he was Egypt's first elected President. Egyptian media were free to lampoon him without risking imprisonment and torture.

We now have no idea where Morsi is being held. On the other hand, former military strongman Hosni Mubarak, the man overthrown in Egypt's revolution who faces trial, has been released. In the long term, Morsi's opponents have little option but to rally not only around the army but possibly their original nemesis.

Egypt's anti-Brotherhood liberals have proven to be democracy's worst enemy and the army's best ally. As an electoral force, they proved disorganised, unable to agree on a presidential candidate to oppose the Brotherhood. They seem only able to unite against a power, not for a cause. In Egypt, liberals have given up on liberal democracy.

First published in the NZ Herald on 27 August 2013.

OPINION: Egypt's re-revolution going viral

Muslims around the globe are joining protests on streets and on social media against military takeover.

Protests have spontaneously erupted in cities across the Muslim world, from Istanbul to Lahore to Jakarta. Apart from some clashes with police, mostly the protests have been peaceful and matched by parallel protests on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media.

Meanwhile, photos of the dead and the living in Egypt's nascent democracy are going viral. There is a photo of Habiba Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a multimedia volunteer for the Muslim Brotherhood standing in the crowd holding a camera on small stand. Next to this is a photo of her lifeless face in a white shroud. But it isn't just ordinary Egyptians being murdered by a military that each year receives millions in military aid from the US. Soon news spreads across cyberspace that an Egyptian athlete who won bronze at the London Olympics is among the dead. The 17-year-old daughter of a Brotherhood leader is filmed being cut down by a sniper. 

Indeed, Egypt's counter-revolution is being televised to those who care to watch. Egyptian protests are making international headlines while their parallel international equivalents are being ignored by our allegedly honest independent Western media outlets. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation and perhaps Asia's most vibrant democracy, has close spiritual ties to Egypt, home to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, perhaps the most Sunni Muslim seminary in the world.

Large numbers of Indonesian religious scholars are Al-Azhar graduates. Egyptian religious culture is regarded as reflective of the epitome of orthodoxy in many parts of the archipelago. Hence Indonesians have hit the streets following the 3 July coup.

The United States prefers not to use nasty terms like "coup" to describe the military removal of a democratically elected government followed by a massacre of its citizens. To do so would threaten its ongoing $1.5 billion military aid package to the Egyptian military which underpins the Camp David Peace Accord with Israel. Protecting the security needs of the only democracy in the Middle East is far more important than supporting nascent democracies in other Middle Eastern nations. Or to quote the Israeli ambassador to Cairo: "Al-Sisi is not a national hero for Egypt, but for all Jews in Israel and around the globe."

The United States and Israel have a firm ally in the democratic moderate secular nation of Saudi Arabia. The last thing Saudi's absolutist absolute monarchy would want is a host of Arab springs in its own backyard. At first, Saudi Arabia's role in Egypt's democracy was to act as puppet master for the Salafist faction.

Saudi Arabia has now directed its Salafist allies in Egypt to back the Egyptian generals. It is also using its influence in the Arab media to flex its muscle. In Kuwait, well-known preacher Tareq el-Swaidan has been sacked as director of a Saudi religious channel due to his Brotherhood links.

The Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal wrote on Twitter that Mr Swaidan had been dismissed "for admitting he belongs to the Brotherhood terrorist movement". The Saudi dictatorship has pledged $5 billion to the military junta.

The mastermind behind the military takeover and massacre is hardly a staunch secularist. General Abdul Fattah el-Sisi was appointed by former President Morsi in August 2002 to head the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Sisi was trained in Egypt, the UK and the United States. Unlike other SCAF members, Sisi is a deeply devout man. Despite the support it is receiving from the US, Sisi's military rulers are flooding the country with anti-American propaganda, claiming that the US Government and media are supporting the protesters. Successive military regimes have used this kind of paranoia to deflect attention. 

Egypt is moving forward headlong into the past when elected presidents won polls with 99 per cent of the vote. The Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi wasn't perfect, but he was Egypt's first elected President. Egyptian media were free to lampoon him without risking imprisonment and torture.

We now have no idea where Morsi is being held. On the other hand, former military strongman Hosni Mubarak, the man overthrown in Egypt's revolution who faces trial, has been released. In the long term, Morsi's opponents have little option but to rally not only around the army but possibly their original nemesis. 

Egypt's anti-Brotherhood liberals have proven to be democracy's worst enemy and the army's best ally. As an electoral force, they proved disorganised, unable to agree on a presidential candidate to oppose the Brotherhood. They seem only able to unite against a power, not for a cause. In Egypt, liberals have given up on liberal democracy.

First published in the New Zealand Herald on Tuesday August 27 2013.

Words © 2013 Irfan Yusuf

EGYPT: Trying to understand how liberals could support a military coup

[01] The Egyptian army has moved in, suspending the constitution and removing the democratically elected government of President Mohamad Morsi. The opposition, consisting of a hotch-potch of supporters of the former dictator, some opposition parties and allegedly liberal opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood party (to which Morsi belonged), are cheering the end of democratic rule.

[02] Few Western news channels have broadcast the speech given by Morsi after the army announced he was being deposed. A partial English translation can be read here. 

[03] The elections which elected Morsi were largely regarded as free and fair. Many of those supportying Morsi's ouster were also supporting dictator Hosni Mubarak's ouster which took place when he resigned in February 2011. Jonathan Steele from The Guardian argues these points further here.

[04] Morsi and his aides have been taken into military custody. The Army has issued arrest warrants for some 300 members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Are we now back in the days of President Gamal Abdel Nasser when the MB would be mercilessly hunted down and tortured? Will we be seeing military tribunals set up to try and hang MB members as took place under Hosni Mubarak?

"In the space of one night we are back 60 years," said Amr Darrag, a senior Muslim Brotherhood member and former minister for international co-operation. "All of our leaders are being arrested in the middle of the night. Their houses are being stormed. Their children are being scared. All of our remaining leaders are banned from travel and this is just the start. "Yesterday we were part of the government doing what we thought was best for Egypt. Even if you don't agree with us, this has gone too far." 

[05] In his book Nasser The Last Arab, Palestinian journalist and Arab nationalist Said K Aburish writes about Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser's paranoia about the MB. Aburish further alleges that the MB received support from the United States, who prevailed upon Saudi Arabia to bankroll the MB not just in Egypt but across the Arab world. This was apparently confirmed by the son of Said Ramadan, one of the MB's senior leaders. Jordan's King Hussein provided MB leaders with diplomatic passports, and millions were directly transferred into Said Ramadan's Swiss bank account.

[06] "This is a celebration of the end of democracy" were the words of Channel 4 newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy. One protester he later interviewed had these words:

We feel excited. We feel so happy. We don't believe it. We don't believe it. We can do this everytime we have a president that who ignore us, that who doesn't see us, we will not just throw him away but we will kill him.

Liberal sentiments indeed.

[07] And what do the Yanks reckon? David Weigel writes in Slate that the Obama Administration is probably very happy with the outcome.

So we're back to a simulacrum of the 2011 situation. Power hasn't been taken from a secular autocrat. It's been taken from an increasingly religious and autocratic politician, someone who'd won an election but might have lost to a unified opposition ... No, despite years of "congratulations to Egypt!"-style pablum, this is probably the outcome the administration prefers. It's a mess that removes an unpredictable force right next to Israel, and replaces it with a reliable, undemocratic force.

[08] A New York Times report of 3 July 2013 seeks to explain why the military at first accepted the MB and then why their patience with Morsi wore thin.

Although many in the military distrusted Mr. Morsi’s Islamist background — the Brotherhood had been outlawed before the revolution — they welcomed his inauguration in June 2012 as an exit from the accountability of governing. Mr. Morsi also granted two key demands: squashing the possibility of postrevolutionary prosecutions of military officials for Mubarak-era crimes and passing a Constitution that excused the military budget from parliamentary oversight. That, plus the perception that Brotherhood members were at least competent and disciplined managers, appeared to give the military confidence that the Islamist group would be a worthy partner.

Apparently the army became upset with the economic stagnation and then protests in the streets. I'm not sure if an army is equipped to enforce desirable economic policy.

[09] The same NYT report ends with this perceptive remark:

... analysts said the opposition was naïve in cheering the military’s return to power as a step in the postrevolutionary transition to democracy. “The liberals and the revolutionaries are too quick to hop into bed with the military — it is not their friend,” said Mr. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The most important thing from the military’s perspective is preserving its place as the locus of power and influence in the system.”

To be continued ...

EGYPT: Terror myth clouds reality of Egypt revolution

What a terrible waste. One of the few moderate Arab nations has been rocked by a revolution. Beady-eyed hairy-faced Islamo-fascists poised to take over, determined to drive Israel seaward and smother what remains of the Middle East under one giant burqa.

This is the Egyptian scenario painted by influential and allegedly conservative pundits. They insist Hosni Mubarak was a moderate, and that the millions gathered at Tahrir Square and elsewhere across Egypt were agents of, or being manipulated by, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

Yes, Mubarak preserved Egypt's peace with Israel and toed the American line in his foreign policy. But there is nothing moderate about a leader amassing a multibillion-dollar personal fortune while half his country lives on US$2 ($2.60) a day or less.

Millions of Egyptians live in overcrowded hovels and hundreds of neighbourhoods characterise hopelessness, unemployment and disease. One quarter of Egyptian adults of working age are out of a job. Egypt has no middle class worth noticing.

The United States provides US$1.3 billion in military aid and about US$800 million annually in economic assistance since 1979. Economist and Egypt's former minister for development and planning, Ismail Sabry Abdallah, negotiated the first package with USAid in 1974.

In 2004 he told the Christian Science Monitor that the aid was

... distributed by the Egyptian government in an anarchic way, through personal contacts and political influence.

There is also nothing moderate about a government instituting a system of torture against political dissidents. Former Egyptian Vice-President Omar Suleiman, who announced Mubarak's resignation on Egyptian state television, was also Egypt's feared security chief.

Suleiman managed the regime's role in its joint extraordinary rendition programme with the US, in which terror suspects were kidnapped and brought to Egypt. Among them was Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, who spent six months in Suleiman's torture chambers.

Habib alleges Suleiman himself managed Habib's torture, which included being subjected to electric shocks, beaten and drugged. Habib was then transported to Guantanamo Bay where he was held until 2005 before being released without charge.

Mubarak maintained his grip on power for three decades with the full support of the allegedly civilised and democratic world.

His mantra was that without him Egypt would be overrun by al-Qaeda's allies in the form of the MB. Mubarak used post-9/11 paranoia about Islamist terror to manufacture a mythology about the MB in order to maintain his corrupt regime.

Yet the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and Mubarak's regime and its Western sponsors on the other is quite complex. The MB has been a fixture in Egyptian politics and society since it was founded by school teacher Hasan al-Banna in 1928.

Conservative commentators never tire of claiming that Islamist groups such as the MB are allied with Western leftists. Ironically in Egypt, the political wing of the MB is considered socially conservative and laissez faire capitalist. Historically, the MB has always been anti-communist and anti-socialist.

In his 2004 biography, Nasser: The Last Arab, Palestinian journalist Said Aburish writes about Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser's problems with the MB during his rule from 1956 until his death in 1970.

Despite being a devout Muslim, Nasser believed in the strict separation of religion from politics. His crypto-socialist economic and land-reform policies were rejected by the MB, one of whose number tried to assassinate him. Nasser then mercilessly repressed the MB, whose leaders and cadres were detained and tortured in what Aburish describes as concentration camps. Britain and the US, which were largely opposed to Nasser, supported the MB.

The MB is not a monolithic organisation. Dr Israel Elad Altman, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, Israel, is no friend of political Islam. In a 2006 paper entitled Democracy, Elections and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, delivered at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute, Altman notes:

For almost two decades, two distinctive age groups within the MB have been waging an internal ideological struggle. The first group - the 'old guard' - was formed during the harsh experience of the MB's repression under the former Egyptian ruler Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser ... By contrast, the second or middle generation is made up largely of the student leaders of the 1970s, when Anwar al-Sadat allowed the MB to take over the university campuses ... [showing] interest in building alliances with other political organisations.

Furthermore, the MB has deep links with Egyptian society through an impressive network of social service institutions - schools, hospitals and orphanages. They claim to control one-fifth of Egypt's active non-government organisations. One of its organisations, known as Gami'a Shar'ia, manages 4000 mosques and has two million members.

The Mubarak regime, while officially banning the MB, allowed the organisation to manage these services. The MB's social network has been described by some observers as a state within the Egyptian state.

With such a strong grassroots base, it's little wonder that in the 2005 elections MB candidates won more than 60 per cent of the seats they contested. Now they are represented on a 10-man constitutional amendment committee, though their representative, Mohamed Morsi, told al-Masri al-Youm magazine recently that they had no intention of running a presidential candidate.

By now, some readers will be shaking in their shoes at the prospect of an Iran on the Nile. They should calm down.

No protesters were seen at Tahrir Square in Cairo holding posters of Khomeini, let alone bin Laden or Zawahiri.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist. This article was first published in the New Zealand Herald on Tuesday 22 February 2010.

COMMENT: Things I learned about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) over the years

There's this scary creature in Egypt that has spread its testi ... woops ... tentacles across the world. It's a huge conspiracy that wants to transform each and every part of the planet into one huge bearded caliphate. Soon each nation will covered in a massive black burqa. At this time, no man will be allowed to lodge a develop application at their local council unless it makes provisions for a huge dome and at least 5 minarets surrounding each building.

Okay, now that I got that Murdochian bullshit out of my system, here are some things I've learned recently about Egypt's largest and most organised opposition movement:

[01] Here are some excerpts of what one Israeli neo-Con writes about the MB. I think he is surprisingly accurate in his assessment. Then again, I cannot read the original Arabic sources on the MB.

[02] One of the main ideologues of the MB during the 1950's was Syed Qutb. He was imprisoned by the military regime led by Neguib and then Nasser. Qutb was not a trained religious scholar but rather more of an intellectual. In prison he underwent severe forms of torture and was eventually executed. Qutb was one of numerous MB figures imprisoned by Nasser after the latter just dodged an assassination in Alexandria by an MB person. Nasser was a rather paranoid chap who assumed the entire MB was involved in some huge conspiracy to kill him. Believe it or not, Qutb did go to the United States, but found the experience extremely troubling.

[03] Qutb's books are widely available in the West and have been since the 1970's when the Saudis started spending petrodollars on spreading various forms of Islam they found friendly. The Saudis have always been big sponsors of MB.

[04] Among the most popular works of Qutb is his commentary of the Qur'an which has been translated as In the Shade of the Qur'an. Its English translation is widely available in bookshops across the Western world. Also widely available are other Qutb books such as Milestones which is also easily available on the internet.

[05] Qutb's works became especially popular during Ronald Reagan's Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. MB activists took an active role in that conflict, and their literature was widely available.

[06] It is commonly claimed that Qutb was the founder of, if not the inspiration for, al-Qaida and other like-minded violent terror outfits. In a sense this is true. Bin Ladin and his colleagues do refer to Qutb. However, many peaceful political Muslim movements also make reference to Qutb.

[07] It is also claimed that Qutb is a founder or ideologue of the Salafi sect. I'm not sure what denomination of Sunni Islam Qutb belonged to or whether he subscribed to some form of Salafi/Wahhabi thinking. But I do know that many Wahhabis have attacked him for being akin to a Marxist.

[08] The MB have been active in Egypt since the 1950's. They gained a large following and infiltrated the Egyptian army. They were known to be a conservative rightwing party and were supported by both the Saudis and the British due to their strong anti-Communist stance.

COMMENT: The neo-Con fantasy comes unstuck

Here’s an example of the kind of fruitloop reasoning that makes so many American conservatives such a laughing stock:

Are the Arabs capable of democracy? And if so, can Americans be the agents of their transformation? The answer, of course, is that no one knows. The lack of a single democratic Arab government gives grounds for skepticism. The claim that something in Arab culture makes it resistant to democracy cannot be refuted until the first Arab democracy comes into being. (Joshua Muravchik, former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute)

Here's a simple bullshit-free translation: Sorry, sand-niggers. Your raghead culture is inferior to ours. You can’t have democracy unless we become the agents of your change. Without us, you won’t get anywhere. In the meantime, we'll blame your culture for shoving down your throats dictators that you hate but that guarantee us access to cheap oil.

Ordinary Egyptians took a mere 18 days to show what a load of crap this thinking was. And who opposed their peaceful uprising? Why none other than a large number of the same American conservatives. Funny that.

UPDATE I: Here's a few choice words from an Australian of Egyptian heritage as reported in the Sun-Herald today:

... Nour Eldin Tarraf, a 35-year-old orthodontist who moved to Sydney from Cairo five years ago, said the real threat to Egypt's prosperity was not religion. ''I'm a Muslim who grew up in a building that was half-Muslim, half-Christian - no one cared,'' said Mr Tarraf, of the Sydney Egyptian Revolution Solidarity Committee.



''The real problem is corruption. It infiltrated every rank of Egyptian society, and changing that will not be easy.''

UPDATE II: Even those who sold Mubarak to the nation are suddenly trying to reinvent themselves. The Washington Post recently published a piece about the editor of a pro-Mubarak (as in state-owned) newspaper:

For now, Osama Saraya is still editor in chief of al-Ahram, the state-run Egyptian newspaper that has long been a deferential mouthpiece for the president and his ruling party. 

But his main preoccupation seems to be reinvention. 

Portraits of Hosni Mubarak no longer adorn his office walls (one is stashed under the television, others behind a curtain). Photographs of Saraya with top government officials have been turned upside down. 

It was only last week that Saraya was denouncing the chaos caused by pro-democracy demonstrators. His editorial in al-Ahram on Sunday carried a very different tune. 

"A salutation to the revolution and respect to its youth," Saraya wrote. "The corrupt in Egypt were only a few that led to the destruction of the country, and their era is gone now.''

Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf


Joe Jackson - Right And Wrong



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VIDEO: 30 years of dictatorship ended in 34 seconds ...

... and after 18 days of protests across the country in which hundreds were murdered using US-supplied bullets by thugs under the employ of the dictator's regime.



UPDATE I: Here's a tweet from Wael Ghonim (@Ghonim):

Dear Western Governments, You've been silent for 30 years supporting the regime that was oppressing us. Please don't get involved now

Fair call.

UPDATE II: Egyptian protesters all seem to be singing with the same voice. Either that, or they mime much better than Bollywood stars.



Below is what I presume is a translation of this song sourced from the Afro-Europe International Blog:

"I went down and I said I am not coming back, and I wrote on every street wall that I am not coming back. 

"All barriers have been broken down, our weapon was our dream, and the future is crystal clear to us, we have been waiting for a long time, we are still searching for our place, we keep searching for a place we belong too, in every corner in our country. 

"The sound of freedom is calling, in every street corner in our country, the sound of freedom is calling.. 

"We will re-write history, if you are one of us, join us and don't stop us from fulfilling our dream.

UPDATE III: Interim military rulers declare peace treaty with Israel will stay in place. Makes sense.

UPDATE IV: Even members of the animal kingdom are celebrating the resignation of Mubarak. Check out this cool cat.



UPDATE V: Palestinian journalist Said K Aburish's 2004 biography Nasser The Last Arab talks about a dictator as being someone with two characteristics::

... a brooding secretive psychopath, or one who thrive[s] on conflict.

Mubarak had shades of both. He used conflict against his opponents even to the last days of his regime when he unleashed his secret police on protesters His use of torture made him a complete psychopath..


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VIDEO: How Omar Suleiman made a mickey of the United States

The Americans and Israelis are very close to Egypt's long serving intelligence chief and recently appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman. And what has Suleiman offered in return? Watch this video from CNN's Parker Spitzer show to find out.



UPDATE I: Suleiman has also been personally linked to the torture of an Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib. I wrote something about this in Crikey back in 2008. Natalie O'Brien writes more about this for the Sun Herald here.

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COMMENT: Angela Shanahan and Lebanese fertility ...

Angela Shanahan, a columnist for The Australian, has every reason to be concerned about the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt, who are regularly the subject of discrimination by the Mubarak regime, not to mention threats from a minority of Muslim wackos.

Though in defending the Copts, she might consider her targets as well as the old adage about people in glass houses.

In a recent column, she makes these remarks:

As for the international reaction to the New Year's massacre, it was condemned by many heads of state and foreign ministers, although in the past few have bothered with the fate of the Copts, including our own Kevin Rudd, who was singled out by the Australian Coptic movement representing our own 80,000 Australian Coptic Christians of Egyptian origin.


Referring to Rudd's December visit to Cairo, the movement observed that although he was in Egypt for three days, and met Mubarak, "he failed to convey . . . concern over the ongoing persecution of Egypt's indigenous population".


According to Day, ignoring the Copts on this occasion was partly driven by timorousness from Rudd in the face of Australia's own large and possibly strategically significant Muslim population. In an interview with the Cairo daily Al-Ahram he estimated that population at "a million", about 4.4 per cent of the population -- a startling figure compared with the 2006 census figure of about 340,000 or 1.7 per cent.


However, the Islamisation in many urban areas of Australia, such as Sydney's southwest, is slowly proceeding.


Lebanese Muslims in particular have a fertility rate four times the average.

What the ...? What do Lebanese Muslims in Lakemba or Bankstown or Arncliffe have to do with Kevin Rudd's failure to mention Coptic persecution during a recent visit to Cairo?

And what does Lebanese fertility have to do with the price of bread or eggs that poor Angela fed to her own nine children?

How many English and/or Australian women give birth to nine children? And do Catholics having lots of kids have any impact on our foreign policy? Why bring this up in the first place?

Surely Angela should know what kind of nonsensical prejudice was used in England and Australia about Catholics over-breeding and having lots of kiddies to take over the nation. Monty Python had enormous fun with such prejudices in this skit ...



... and this one ...



Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf



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EGYPT: An Israeli view of the Muslim Brotherhood

In 2006, Dr Israel Elad Altman wrote a paper for the Hudson Institute, a neo-Conservative thinktank, on the subject of Democracy, Elections & the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Dr Altman is a Senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy, at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. he holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from UCLA. Here are some excerpts from that paper ...

Western governments, including the government of the United States, are considering the MB and other “moderate Islamist” groups as potential partners in helping to advance democracy in their countries, and perhaps also in eradicating Islamist terrorism ...

Altman writes about a generational shift in thinking within the MB. He doesn't view the organisation as an ideological monolith.

For almost two decades, two distinctive age groups within the MB have been waging an internal ideological struggle. The first group—the “old guard”—was formed during the harsh experience of the MB’s repression under the former Egyptian ruler Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser ... are generally more zealous, conservative, and committed primarily to long-term religious missionary work (dawa) and to preserving the movement’s unity.


By contrast, the second or middle generation is made up largely of the student leaders of the 1970s, when Anwar al-Sadat allowed the MB to take over the university campuses. Several of its representatives are more open to change. They assign greater importance to the political work of the MB, rather than its missionary activities. The also see Egypt—rather than the Muslim world — as the MB’s real frame of reference, and show interest in building alliances with other political organizations. The old guard, meanwhile, remains deeply suspicious of other political groups and unforgiving toward such former political rivals as the Nasserists, Arab-Nationalists and Marxists.

The MB has been the subject of an ideological and political split out of which a new party formed.

The dominance of the old guard in the MB leadership caused some second-generation members to leave the movement and form the al-Wasat Party, often described as the “Center Party,” in 1995. But others stayed, including ‘Abd al-Mun’im Abu al-Futuh, one of the most dynamic and articulate spokesmen of the second-generation reformist faction and a member of the MB’s supreme decision-making body, the Guidance Bureau (Maktab al-Irshad). He asserts that Islamic discourse is not holy; rather, it is based on human judgment (ijtihad) and can be revised and updated. The Islamists’ arguments are therefore the products of their human understanding, not of Islam. And unlike traditional Islamists, Abu al-Futuh sees democracy as more than just an unavoidable means of reaching power: It is a unique fruit of human experience that has intrinsic value. He rejects, moreover, the religious component of democracy. To him, democracy simply means rule by the people, not “the people ruling by Allah’s law.”

So who is this Abu al-Futuh? And what does he believe in?

Abu al-Futuh considers the Caliphate to be a purely political, nonreligious matter. In modern times it is akin to other types of political unity, such as the European Union ...


... Abu al-Futuh and his allies advocate true political pluralism, equal citizenship for all the country’s nationals, regardless of religion, and rotation of power in accord with the people’s choice. It would even be acceptable to them if a Christian were elected to power in a Muslim-majority country. Abu al-Futuh seeks, furthermore, to eliminate the MB in its present form and to terminate all its covert and external activities, including its involvement with the International Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. He wants it to become instead an Egyptian political party, fully open to public scrutiny. Abu al-Futuh asserts that resistance to this change comes not only from the MB’s old guard, but also from the regime itself. He also claims that government repression of MB activists has been directed primarily against potential reformers, suggesting that the regime is colluding with MB hardliners to block the movement’s evolution in a more democratic direction ...

The MB did organise some rallies in 2005. For some reason, these collapsed after a deal was allegedly struck with the Mubarak regime.

... On March 27, 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood organized a street demonstration in Cairo to call for political reforms. It was the first demonstration on domestic issues since President Mubarak came to power, and it triggered a series of other protests in both Cairo and the countryside that led to the arrest of as many as 1500 MB members, including senior ones. This development broke a long-standing informal truce between the regime and the MB — a truce that allowed the movement to practice its missionary or dawa activities as long as it refrained from challenging the regime in the political arena. The demonstrations indicated to many that the MB was abandoning its traditional strategy of avoiding outright confrontation with the state.


Yet by the summer of 2005, the MB demonstrations were over.

Here is a nice succinct summary of the Emergency Laws.

... the Emergency Laws (which were implemented in 1967, lifted in 1980, and re-imposed in 1981, following Anwar al-Sadat’s assassination. These laws grant authorities power to detain people considered a threat to national security without charge and practically indefinitely, to try people before military tribunals, and to ban public demonstrations).

The MB, according to Altman, isn't sure about exactly where it stands ideologically and politically. In this sense, it could probably enter into a workable coalition with the Parliamentary wing of the Liberal Party of Australia.

... the movement’s continuing oscillation between two competing orientations: its political orientation that led it, at least temporarily, to join other opposition groups in an attempt to force political change; and its dawa orientation that makes it unwilling to risk the long-term endeavor of Islamizing society for short-term political gains.


... Nervous about sliding into a fatal confrontation with the regime, the old-guard leaders have undercut repeated attempts by second-generation leaders and their impatient younger supporters to confront the regime directly. In securing the movement’s survival, the MB’s missionary endeavor and its commitment to the Islamic state and implementation of sharia take preference.

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CRIKEY: Al Jazeera English’s Cairo performance: it’s the new CNN

Last night, ABC24’s coverage turned from cyclone Yasi to Egypt at about 7.45. ABC correspondent Ben Knight was interviewed as he stood in his hotel room. He said words to this effect: “It’s too dangerous to venture outside my hotel room. In fact, it’s too dangerous for any journalist to be out there.” The real and serious journos were forced to seek safety in their hotel rooms.


At that very moment, I switched over to Al Jazeera English (AJE). On the screen were live scenes of night-time crowds chanting and throwing petrol bombs in Tahrir Square. And there was the familiar voice of the AJE correspondent among the crowd speaking in flawless English in an American accent and translating people’s slogans from Arabic. In the background was the sound of rocks and small explosions and shouting.


I’d been watching the coverage in Egypt of AJE for the previous few days. AJE had at least three correspondents among the crowd in Tahrir Square in Cairo where more than 1 million people had gathered to protest against Hosni Mubarak. They also interviewed people in the crowd and in other parts of Cairo. All this despite the fact that their Cairo bureau had been closed by the authorities and at least one of their camera crews detained by security forces.


No one should criticise Ben Knight or any other foreign journalist for staying in their hotel rooms. Heck, it seems anyone not from Egyptian state media is being attacked by pro-Mubarak thugs. But the bravery of AJE reporters risking their lives by continuously embedding themselves amongst volatile crowds must surely be earning them a cult following.


During the Gaza conflict in 2009, the best English language reporting came from AJE reporters Shirene Tadros and Ayman Mohyeldin. These two were the undisputed media stars of that war, embedding themselves among the embattled Palestinians of Gaza. Their language skills and understanding of political and cultural sensitivities made them ideal correspondents.


Now they’re embedded in the Cairo crowds. At  8.27pm Sydney time, Mohyeldin sent this tweet from his blackberry: “received threats yesterday but that will not stop AJE from showing the world what’s happening here. i’m now tweeting personally”.


If the first Iraq War in 1991 made CNN’s reputation, surely its ongoing coverage of the Egypt uprising should cement AJE’s reputation as a world-class broadcaster. Just accept it.


First published in Crikey on Friday 4 February 2011.


Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf



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POLITICS: Egyptian intifada

It's times like these that speaking and reading Arabic would come in handy. Still, we'll make do with English-language sources and translations.

[01] The Washington Post describes one Egyptian revolutionary.

IN CAIRO Abdel Zaher Dandarwi does not look like a revolutionary. At 53, his hair is graying at the temples and his eyes betray more fatigue than fury.


But it was fatigue - with the daily corruption, the detached ruling clique and the rot permeating this once-proud nation at the heart of the Arab world - that drove him to the streets this week to voice a revolutionary thought: "Down with Mubarak!"


... "There's a suffocating atmosphere in Egypt, and I'm tired of it," said Dandarwi, a lawyer dressed impeccably in a dark blue pinstriped suit, who quietly sipped coffee Thursday afternoon as he waited for the next protest to begin. "The elections are fraudulent. The people in power monopolize all the resources. There are no jobs. There's no health care. And I can't afford good schools for my children."

Why do people like this join a protest march?

The protesters in Egypt have been largely middle class - lawyers, doctors, university students and professors. They have something to lose if this nation of 86 million descends into anarchy, but they also say they may not have much left if Egypt does not shift course.

[02] Thanks to SC for pointing out this lengthy and relatively frequently updated blogpost from the left-leaning Mother Jones website. Some good links.

[03] Watch live AlJazeera English streaming with brave reporters as well as eyewitnesses on the ground.

[04] Police left streets of Alexandria, now patrolled by ordinary citizens protecting their neighbourhoods. Apparently advice like this is being spread among them.

[05] AlJazeera English (AJE) reporting on protests after Friday prayers (around 12am, 05 Feb). In Alexandria, Christian groups set up a cordon around Muslim worshippers performing their Friday congregational prayers.. For more details from Tahrir Square in Cairo, follow Shirene Tadros' tweets.

[06] One of my fans has recently posted this item on his blog. Here is an excerpt from the comment posted by one of his regular readers:

I would like to invite the islamic community to explain why we should not exterminate it.

Lovely.

COMMENT: Religious minorities ...

In Egypt, following the bombing of a Coptic Church in Alexandria, Christians and Muslims marched in the streets in protest. Christians and Muslims called on the government to end discrimination against Coptic Christians. Muslims offered protection to Christian churches. Muslims even attended Christmas services in Coptic churches, acting as human shields.

That's what is happening in Egypt. So what about Australia? This is what we read in The Australian:

Father Gabriel Yassa, of Archangel & St Bishoy Church, at Mt Druitt, in Sydney's west - one of the targeted churches - told The Weekend Australian that the nation's Islamic leaders needed to speak out against the threats.

"I just hope that the leaders in the Islamic community take their responsibilities well and crush out any of those elements in their community," Father Yassa said.

"The important thing is that all of us take this matter seriously and look out for one another."

Father Yassa said he did not know the exact wording of the threat, but said the terrorist group was "just throwing out a message to the Islamic community to hurt Coptic Christians and I suppose they then just wait to see whoever picks up on it and who goes with it".

What unnecessary and ridiculous comments to make at this time. Does Father Yassa honestly think that terrorist groups put out feelers to get ordinary Muslims to bomb churches?

Instead of inviting Muslims to a common platform, Father Yassa seems more interested in alienating them. He must be getting PR tips by watching clips of Shaykh Hilaly's past verbal indiscretions.

Seriously, how ridiculous. No doubt many Aussie Copts will be extremely embarrassed.

Perhaps someone should remind Father Yassa that when anti-Muslim prejudice rises in Australia, among the first targets are Arab churches that resemble mosques. Like the Egyptian Coptic church shown below while under construction.



On the other hand, Muslims need to do much more than speak out. We need to pressure embassies and governments of Muslim-majority states to ensure that the rights of religious minorities are protected.

UPDATE I: Very interesting discussion on the Riz Khan show below.



UPDATE II: A really disturbing report from Iraq.




Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf

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VIDEO: "Inside Story" on Coptic clashes in Egypt

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REVIEW: Correspondent's ugly truth

Fit to Print: Misrepresenting the Middle East
Joris Luyendijk
Scribe, 243pp, $29.95

The Pope had just delivered his Regensburg address. The entire Islamic world (whatever that means) was up in arms. Churches were ablaze, nuns shot, flags and effigies in flames. Or so we in the West were told.

One such article reached my attention. It was accompanied by a photo taking up a quarter of the tabloid page and showing angry men in Basra burning effigies of the Pope and former President Bush. The caption read: “Muslims in Basra hold massive protest against Pope’s recent lecture”. The headline was “Muslim fury against Pope”.

It wasn’t until the 9th paragraph that the article noted that some 300 people had gathered at the protest. Basra is a city of some 3 million. As Americans would say: “Do the math”. This was no massive protest.

My attempt at critiquing the work of the foreign correspondent reporting this story could be dismissed as the rant of a Crikey-reading (and in my case, writing) amateur. We know what good foreign correspondents do. As Joris Luyendijk notes, the occupants of editorial ivory towers want average punters like me to believe that

... [j]ournalists know what’s going on in the world … the news gives an overview of these events, and it is possible to keep that overview objective.

Journalists are the gatekeepers of truth and perspective on world events.

Luyendijk also shared this common person’s perspective when he was an Arabic-speaking anthropology graduate employed by a major Dutch newspaper and broadcaster to be their Middle Eastern correspondent in 1998. After 5 years, Luyendijk through in the towel just as American troops foolishly threw an American flag over the falling statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad after temporarily winning the war in Iraq. You’d think that would be the worst time for Luyendijk to leave the fray, just as all the uncivilised action was starting in the cradle of civilisation.

Here’s how Luyendijk describes CNN’s version:

We saw the colossal statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down in Firdos (Paradise) Square in Baghdad . Jubiland Iraqis screamed into the camera lens and struck the icon with their shoes. ‘Thank you, Mister Bush!’ The presenter solemnly described it as an ‘historic moment’ – the war was over. They could put the nightmare of Saddam Hussein behind them. Baghdad was celebrating its liberation …

And what about al-Jazeera? Luyendijk writes:

They were showing Firdos Square, too, but their montage offered a different slant. In the same square, we saw American soldiers triumphantly throwing an American flag over the statue of Saddam. Then we were shown feverish discussions and the American soldiers rushing to remove the flag. Al-Jazeera went on to show the jubilant Iraqis from CNN, only they were shot from a longer range: you could see how few there were actually standing in the square, and that most of the people were watching from a safe distance.

Joris Luyendijk provides a highly accessible, irreverent and light-hearted account of the realities of life as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. This is more a book about than of journalism. He describes the secrets, shortcuts and tricks of the trade used by foreign correspondents for both print, radio and television audiences. This includes regurgitating the content of wire service reports in a manner that, if done in an academic context, would almost certainly be considered plagiarism. Luyendijk’s news agenda about events in Baghdad or Ramallah would not be set in Baghdad or Ramallah but rather by a foreign editor in Amsterdam who had probably never been to Baghdad or Ramallah.

Luyendijk soon learns that

... the basic task of being a correspondent is not that difficult. The editor … called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I’d retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspapers.

Occasionally the correspondent would make use of the list of “talking heads” – diplomats (always Western ones), academics, UN workers and human rights activists on the payroll of Western countries - for obtaining “on the ground” perspectives. Otherwise, the role of a correspondent was merely to be the person at the end of the news assembly line.

Foreign correspondents and editors who take themselves too seriously may not enjoy reading Luyendijk’s descriptions about the insensitivity they show when checking into five star hotels whilst on assignment in impoverished war zones, or of their responses to the commencement of American bombing in Iraq in 2003:

... a wave of suppressed relief swept over the correspondents … No bombing would have meant no work, after money had already been spent on coming to Amman.

Or how about this hilarious description of Western journalists in the office of the Iraqi Consul trying to secure a visa to Iraq on the eve of the invasion:

We jostled [the Consul] like children clustering around a dubious-looking man with candy … I saw grown men in tears by the embassy gates when they discovered they’d be reduced to peering through the fence.

Luyendijk discovered that as he travelled to different hotspots and spoke to ordinary people, there were so many stories far more interesting and enlightening to tell than just which agreements were reached between what leaders and what accusations they made against each other when the deals inevitably became unstuck.

As a correspondent, I could tell different stories about the same situation. The media could only choose one, and it was often the story that confirmed a commonly held notion …

So the impact of conventional media processes was to confirm pre-existing stereotypes. Luyendikj’s book cleverly dispels not just our (generally negative) stereotypes about Arabs, Israelis and Muslims but also our (both positive and negative) stereotypes about journalists. A highlight of the book is the regular sprinkling of Arab jokes about dictators and secret police and even Israeli jokes about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. People don’t just weep and burn flags in this part of the world.

This book was first published in Dutch as Het zijn net mensen (roughly “People Like Us”). A veteran correspondent who had seen his best friend had died in the Iraq-Iran war gave Luyendijk this piece of advice:

If you want to write a book about the Middle East, you’d better do it in your first week. The longer you hang around here, the less you understand.

After finishing this book, readers will be glad Luyendijk didn’t take this advice. This is an outstanding book on the limitations of reportage in the world’s perennial trouble spot. Or as Luyendijk repeatedly reminds us, in the Middle East

... good journalism is a contradiction in terms.

Irfan Yusuf is the author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist. An edited version of this review was first published in The Australian on 3 October 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

Apologies for the corny retro music in this video!




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VIDEO: Media and government responses in EU to the murder of an Egyptian woman in Germany ...

The following discussion on the al Jazeera Inside Story program concerns media and government responses in Germany and wider Europe to the murder of an Egyptian woman in a courtroom in Dresden, Germany. The video along with its accompanying text is reproduced below. Notice the cautious comment made by the German Muslim representative.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf

Inside story discusses the motivation behind the killing of Marwa al-sherbini.
An Egyptian Muslim woman was killed in a German courtroom by a man convicted of insulting her religion.

The brutal killing of the pregnant Marwa Al Sherbini, 32, raised a lot of questions about the rise of right wing fanatics in Europe.

Al Sherbini was stabbed 18 times by a German man of Russian descent, formally identified only as Axel W, last week as she was about to give evidence against him as he appealled against his conviction for calling her a "terrorist" for her wearing the headscarf (hijab).

While the German authorities focus on court security, we ask, what about the underlying problem - the motivation behind the attack.

Inside Story discusses with guests: Maleiha Malik, a professor of law at King's college London, and author of "Anti Muslim prejudice: past and present"; Sulaiman Wilms, a media spokes person for European Muslim council and editor of the German language newspaper and Douglas Murray, a director of the centre for social cohesion, and author of "Neoconservatism: why we need it".

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