U.S. Should Take a Back Seat in Egypt. Over the course of the two-week-old protests in Egypt, the American media has been consumed with debate over how the U.S. government should react. An emerging consensus across the political spectrum argues that President Barack Obama should support the protesters' demand that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resign immediately. This view was prominently expressed in an open letter to Obama by dozens of well-known scholars of Middle East politics, who advised him to essentially abandon 30 years of strong support for the Mubarak regime by throwing in America's lot with the protest movement. Such a step would not clearly serve American interests and has too many potential negative repercussions. Instead, the U.S. should quietly but forcefully encourage the Mubarak regime to follow through with its commitments to reform, while making clear that the U.S. will continue to support it in the run-up to next September's presidential election. ...
We all helped suppress the Egyptians. So how do we change? : Johann Hari. The old slogan from the 1960s has come true: the revolution has been televised. The world is watching the Bastille fall on 24/7 rolling news and Tweeting the death-spasms of Mubarak-Antoinette. This elderly thug is trying to buy and beat and tear-gas himself enough time to smuggle his family’s estimated $25bn in loot out of the country, and to install a successor friendly to his interests.
The Egyptian people – half of whom live on less than $2 a day – seem determined to prevent the pillage and not to wait until September to drive out a dictator dripping in blood and bad hair dye. The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel outlined the “as if principle”. He said people trapped under a dictatorship need to act “as if they are free.” They need to act as if the dictator has no power over them. The Egyptians are trying the same – and however many of them Mubarak murders on his way out the door, the direction in which fear flows has been successfully reversed. Explanation one: oil. Egypt's Three Revolutions: The Force of History behind this Popular Uprising. When the Egyptian Uprising of 2011 began, we heard media pundits, friends, and colleagues milling about in search of apt metaphors to describe the mass protests and revolution in Egypt.
In so far as “history” was mobilized in these discussions, it was generally as repetition or analogy. Hence: the Berlin Wall; Tiananmen Square; the first Palestinian Intifada; the Iranian Revolution; the Paris Commune; and the French Revolution, as well as Egypt’s own 1919 and 1952 revolutions. But do these vivid comparisons conceal more than they reveal? Indeed, one could argue that one of the most striking aspects of the contemporary media discussions surrounding Mubarak’s Egypt is the absence of any real sense of history. It is not enough to fill this void with rhetorical comparisons and poetic license. This article is now featured in Jadaliyya's edited volume entitled Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order?
Egypt remembers | مصر تتذكر. Trolls Pounce on Facebook’s Tahrir Square | Danger Room. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is a war zone, thanks to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s goon squad. But the crackdown isn’t limited to physical spaces where the protest movement congregates. Ever since Mubarak restored internet service on Wednesday, the most important dissident Facebook page has seen a curious flood of pro-regime Wall posts, sowing disinformation. Some of the new up-with-Mubarak commentary at the Facebook page We Are All Khalid Said is classic concern-trolling: people wringing their hands over how Egypt’s dictator deserves better than calls for his downfall. Some is pure abuse, questioning the loyalties of the page’s administrator. And some are blatant attempts to disrupt the protests by claiming upcoming rallies have been canceled. It’s hard not to see the trolling as part of a larger effort by Mubarak’s allies to win the propaganda battle surrounding Egypt’s unrest.
A sampling of pro-Mubarak posts on Thursday: “I’m sad that I was one of you,” Tamir Said hissed. See Also: Special Report: How the Egyptian revolt will recast the Middle East. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition Ms. Mosharafa – a teacher, a member of the burgeoning Egyptian middle class – says it is secular young people such as herself who are the engine powering protests that have shaken the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's modern pharaoh. Magda Abdel Hamid, in contrast, isn't middle class. "We left our children at home and came to fight for their future here," she says. Business owner Abu Bakr Makhlouf is a member of Egypt's elite. Still they rise. Is this democracy's moment? But in this case the protesters have outrun the politicians.
True, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei has won kudos by racing home to demand change, getting sprayed by water cannon in the process. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic opposition group, remains a substantial force with unknown intentions. Why a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood Was Late to the Revolution. Facebook and YouTube Fuel the Egyptian Protests. Nasser Nasser/Associated Press Riot police surrounded supporters of Khaled Said at a protest in Alexandria, Egypt, last June after Mr. Said died in police custody. Mr. Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman, was pulled from an Internet cafe in Alexandria last June by two plainclothes police officers, who witnesses say then beat him to death in the lobby of a residential building. Human rights advocates said he was killed because he had evidence of police corruption.
The Egyptian police and security services have a well-earned reputation for brutality and snuffing out political opposition. Within five days of his death, an anonymous human rights activist created a page — We Are All Khaled Said — that posted cellphone photos from the morgue of his battered and bloodied face, and YouTube videos played up contrasting pictures of him happy and smiling with the graphic images from the morgue. But Mr. Mr. The police had told Mr.
Mr. Who's Behind Egypt's Revolt? Share Who’s behind the Egyptian revolution? It’s spontaneous, yes, triggered by the explosion in Tunisia. But contrary to some media reports, which have portrayed the upsurge in Egypt as a leaderless rebellion, a fairly well organized movement is emerging to take charge, comprising students, labor activists, lawyers, a network of intellectuals, Egypt’s Islamists, a handful of political parties and miscellaneous advocates for “change.”
And it’s possible, but not at all certain, that the nominal leadership of the revolution could fall to Mohammad ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who returned to Egypt last year to challenge President Mubarak and who founded the National Association for Change. Let’s look at the emerging coalition, in its parts.
First, by all accounts, is the April 6 Youth Movement. The leader of the April 6 movement is Ahmad Maher, a 28-year-old construction engineer who was profiled last week in the Los Angeles Times. Bush, Mubarak, The Muslim Brotherhood, And The Nour Forgery Scandal. Everyone now understands that President Obama faces a set of difficult choices in Egypt. Cut Mubarak loose, and risk a revolt from the other American clients in the region while potentially empowering the Muslim Brotherhood. Support Mubarak, and earn the enmity of Arabs and Muslims across the Middle East who correctly see the United States working in tandem with the autocrats who repress them. What has largely gone undiscussed, however, is that the United States faced a very similar dilemma in Egypt once before.
Back in 2005, the Bush administration had to make more or less the same calculation. It’s worth revisiting that episode now, if only because it illustrates how difficult a time America has had arriving at an Egypt policy that is coherent, wise, and principled. In his second inaugural address in January 2005, President Bush declared that America would no longer “tolerate oppression for the sake of stability.” Mubarak would go on to cancel local elections scheduled for 2006. Egypt: Citizen Media Exposes Violence During Media Black Out (Graphic) This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011. Warning: the videos listed bellow contain images that are graphic in nature.
Viewer discretion is advised. On February the 2nd, the Egyptian authorities decided to restore the Internet after five days of a near-complete shut down of the service. During that period, which is believed to have cost the country tens of millions of dollars, the government clamped down on journalists and international media, heavily disrupting cell phone communications and satellite broadcasting. The content of some of these videos has not been independently verified but they capture the violence that was occurring on the sidelines of the “revolution,” away from the peaceful scenes of ordinary traffic in downtown Cairo and empty streets that the State TV has been broadcasting during the period of the ban.
The first videos to filter out of Cairo showed a fierce battle over the Kasr Al Nile Bridge that occurred on the first day of the ban. LRB · Adam Shatz · After Mubarak. Popular uprisings are clarifying events, and so it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime – or some post-Mubarak continuation of it – may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all the region’s autocrats, particularly those supported by the West, and to Washington and Tel Aviv, which, after spending years lamenting the lack of democracy in the Muslim world, have responded with a mixture of trepidation, fear and hostility to the emergence of a pro-democracy movement in the Arab world’s largest country.
If these are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The crisis in Egypt has also been a crisis for the Obama administration. 4 February. LRB · Issandr El Amrani · Why Tunis, Why Cairo? ‘Egypt is not Tunisia,’ the pundits repeatedly said on television after Zine Abedine Ben-Ali fled Tunis for Saudi Arabia. They pointed to the differences between the two countries: one small, well-educated, largely middle-class; the other the largest in terms of population in the Arab world, with a high rate of illiteracy and ever widening inequality. Tunisia was a repressive police state in which information was tightly controlled and most people never dared to criticise the leadership out loud. Egypt was a military dictatorship that allowed a fair amount of freedom of expression, as long as it had no political consequences: you could criticise the president, but not launch a campaign to unseat him.
In Tunisia, a rapacious first family indulged in widespread racketeering, alienating every social class. In Egypt, most of the elite benefited from the stability the regime maintained, and while corruption was endemic, it was not generally identified with a single clan. 4 February. The Book Bench: An Egypt Non-Fiction Reading List. To begin to understand the events of the past two weeks in Egypt, we ought to understand Egypt itself—its tug-of-war between antiquity, Islam, and the West; the foreign occupations; the confusion of the revolution and the reigns of Nasser and Sadat; the initial Mubarak glee and the graft and terror that later set in.
Here’s a reading list that might help us place the current upheaval in historical, political, and cultural context. “Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution,” by John Bradley Both Osman’s and Bradley’s books suggest Egypt’s rupture had clear omens and is not simply part of the domino effect from Tunisia and Lebanon. Osman’s uncannily timely “Egypt on the Brink” was published just last month. Bradley’s “Inside Egypt” came out in 2009 and was promptly banned by the Mubarak government. “A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam,” by Mary Anne Weaver “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” by Lawrence Wright. It's not radical Islam that worries the US – it's independence | Noam Chomsky. La bataille pour l'Egypte se joue aussi sur Facebook. Le Monde.fr | • Mis à jour le | Par Zakarya Moukine Billah Depuis le 25 janvier, la place Tahrir, dans le centre du Caire, est devenue l'épicentre de la contestation contre le régime du président égyptien Hosni Moubarak.
Alors que des milliers de personnes y réclamaient le départ du raïs, des milliers d'autres, avides de débats et d'informations sur les événements du Caire, ont investi les réseaux sociaux, et notamment le site Facebook. Entre le 25 et le 28 janvier – jour où les autorités ont bloqué les accès Internet –, les inscriptions sur le site ont explosé, tout comme le nombre de pages créées et de commentaires postés. Premier réflexe : afficher son opposition ou son soutien à Moubarak. En arabe, en français ou en anglais, des dizaines de pages et de groupes attirent "pro" et "anti". Sauf que certains ne sont pas prêts à patienter jusqu'à l'automne.
Avis sincère ou manipulation ? La question de la sécurité mobilise aussi fortement les deux camps. Egypt: Rapping the Revolution. Inside the White House's Egypt Scramble. The Dictator's Speech - January 31. The Dictator's SpeechWhat Mubarak talks about when he talks. Some dictators don’t know how to talk. They know how to speak, of course. They are able to use language. They utter words, but they don’t say anything. Hosni Mubarak, the current president of Egypt (at least at the time of this writing) recently made a speech in an attempt to quell the street protests and demands for an end to his despotic regime.
The tin ear and woolly mouth of this dictator is rather amusing given the fact that the very word "dictator" comes from the Latin verb "dicere," meaning "to speak. " When you have a skilled dictator, when the dictator is up to the task, this relationship can work. Indeed, the modern history of Egypt contains a perfect example in Abdel Nasser, the great (and greatly flawed) Egyptian president who ruled from 1956 to 70. We believe in international law. It's the last part that really kicks it. Then, suddenly, the floodgates of talking opened again to fill the mute void of power. Mubarak's Egypt: bad paternalism, and the army's interest in managed transition. Mubarak, unlike Sadat before him, was never an ambitious leader. During his 30 years long presidency Mubarak has had no mission and no intention to reshape society, economy or the country’s place in the world. Holding the institutional keys to the whole state structure, as the President has done, Mubarak has been able to manage to keep up the power balance without any other legitimacy than that coming from the authority of office.
Mubarak, born in 1928, attended the military academy, was later trained in Moscow and then served as an Air Force officer in the army. He was rewarded by President Sadat for his boldness in the October War of 1973. This proved to be an important advantage for the consolidation of his power. It is, above all, the institution of the presidency that safeguards the essential supremacy of the Egyptian state. Mubarak has based his legitimacy on legality and rationality. Economic conditions In spite of infitah, Egypt remained dependent on rent revenues. Malcolm Gladwell Surfaces to Knock Social Media in Egypt. How bit.ly data shows the unrest in Egypt - and the internet shutdown | Strata conference 2011 | News.
Egypt ProtestsTweets Mapped. The Twitter Revolution Must Die. Egypt’s Unrest and the Impact of Social Media | The Official Blog of the UNA-GB. Killing the Internet Not Just a Problem in Egypt. How Cairo, Washington Were Blindsided by Revolution. Egypt, Tunisia: Generation TXT Comes of Age? Explaining Egypt. The Song of the Nonaligned Nile. Brian Whitaker's blog, February 2011. How Egyptians Used Twitter During the January Crisis [INFOGRAPHIC] Egyptian protests: How a food crisis is driving a political crisis. - By Annie Lowrey. Spotlight Again Falls on Web Tools and Change. 3quarksdaily. Uprisings: From Tunis to Cairo by William Pfaff. Meeting Arab Development Challenges With Mobile Technologies By Increasing Government, Telecom, And Service Provider Cooperation. Morocco's Burgeoning Musical Scene. Mobilising healthcare - Networks - News & Features - ITP.net.
Books on Egypt. Le legs de la chanson arabe : Fairouz et l’héritage des Rahbani. Understanding past could help restore U.S.-Arab ties | Viewpoints, Outlook | Chron.com. Sonallah Ibrahim: closure by Stealth - The National Newspaper. Middle East injects high tech into health care - The National Newspaper. Diabetes app garners interest in US, Middle East, EU.