Category Archives: Arab Revolutions

Arab Revolutions, Egypt

The Sad Grim Future of Khaled Said……


      

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Young opponents of the old Mubarak regime in Egypt used (and some still use) the motto: “We are all Khaled Said” online. That was to commemorate a young activist who was beaten to death by old regime security agents in Alexandria in 2010. 

  • Now the old regime security is the new regime security, the old goons are the new goons. 
  • Just as the new regime bureaucrats are the old regime bureaucrats, just as the old regime courts are the new regime courts. 
  • Come to think of it: the new regime is the old regime. 
  • The one difference may be that the new regime probably has collected more political prisoners than the old regime, and in a much shorter time. And it is killing off more opponents than the old regime did, either on the streets or through kangaroo courts passing mass death sentences.
  • Just this weekend another Egyptian kangaroo court sentenced ten more young people to hanging, adding them to the more than a thousand others already on death raw for political reasons.
  • Also this weekend an Egyptian appeals court freed a police officer who was charged with killing 37 political detainees.
  • So, you know where all this is heading in the coming months and years.



Expect many more Khaled Saids in the future of Egypt. Some of them will no doubt be called ‘terrorists’, but in many cases that will not be true. They will simply be new versions of the Khaled Said who was beaten to death months before the Tahrir Uprising. But they will be facing the same old enemy that he faced in 2010……..

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Elections, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood, US Foreign Policy

America on the Nile, Whining on the Nile: Time to Grow Up on the Nile?……..

      

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“These discredited Egyptian liberals made their bed with the generals, now they are being forced to sleep in it. So just relax and enjoy it for the next thirty years: you’ve earned it……………” Me

Here is my broad-brush take on political developments in Egypt since 2011:


  • In February 2011 during the uprising against the regime of Hosni Mubarak, many of his Egyptian opponents claimed that the Obama administration was trying to shore up his position, to keep him in power. 
  • On the other hand, many of his supporters complained that the United States was trying to overthrow him, by not helping him. Saudi King Abdullah, who famously claimed the protesters at Tahrir were foreign agents, is still pissed upset at Obama for not helping Mubarak crush his people.

  • After Mubarak fell, almost everybody in Egypt who was not an army general claimed the Obama administration was keeping the SCAF military junta in power. Some among the military probably suspected that Obama was ready to throw them under one of those crowded Cairo buses.

  • In the summer of 2012, Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidency in free and fair close elections. His domestic and Arab opponents mostly acted as if the Obama administration had somehow helped him win the election. The Islamists claimed that he won in spite of American plots against him. Persian Gulf princes and potentates who could not tell an election from the proverbial ‘hole in the ground’ apparently suspected foul play. Egypt’s liberals joined forces with the oligarchs and the Mubarakistas and the Wahhabis to call for ‘restoration’ of the feloul.
  • In July of 2013 General Al Sisi, whom Morsi had promoted to minister of defense, stabbed him in the back by staging a military coup that overthrew the elected president. Al Sisi was urged to act by three factions: Egypt’s deluded liberals, the feloul, and the Gulf princes and potentates. The Muslim Brotherhood -MB- claimed the Americans were in cahoots with the military. Admittedly that was a very tempting suspicion, given the history. 
  • At the time U.S. congressional delegations to Cairo had divergent opinions: McCain/Graham said correctly that July 3 of 2013 was a military coup; Bachmann/Gohmert (the idiot delegation) praised the military coup even as they told Egyptians of the joys of American electoral democracy. 
  • The other side in Egypt, the liberals and oligarchs and feloul, claimed the Americans had made a deal with the MB and had wanted them in power. Egypt’s ‘liberals’, most of whom had urged the military to stage a coup and supported it, now proceeded to whine that the military had made plans with Washington to take power (after a coup that these same liberals pushed for and supported).

  • Now that the military has resumed its overt role as the absolute rulers of Egypt, these liberals, the few who have not remained on the Sisi bandwagon, are back doing what they do best these days: whine. They are blaming you-know-who for it. Western powers and most Arab oligarchs no doubt are happy with the outcome of the Egyptian non-election. But it is not as if the CIA and the U.S. State Department carried people by force, bused them by force, to vote 97% for Generalissimo Field Marshal Al Sisi. These discredited Egyptian liberals made their bed with the generals, now they are being forced to sleep in it. So just relax and enjoy it for the next thirty years: you’ve earned it.

Now it must be time for some of these people to grow up and look for the real culprits where they are, among themselves……………

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Syria

A New Reset for the Syrian Opposition? the True Number of Bashar Al Assad Days……….

      

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There were reports in some Arab media this past weekend that Ahmed Al Jarba will be replaced as head of the Syrian National Coalition, or whatever its latest name is now. A new leaders, the, what, sixth or seventh, in three years? That may call for a change of name as well: throw the jumbled separate words inside a bucket, shake it good, and start pulling out the new name of the opposition……. 

But can they run out of eligible Syrian names to lead it? At this rate of change, the laws of probability, the odds, are bound to bring the circle back to, yes, Bashar Al Assad. Once they run out of eligible candidates among the exiles and AWOL Syrian officers. Someday, maybe in a few years, we will read the headline that the Syrian National Coalition (or whatever its name is by then) has selected Bashar Al Assad as its new leader. Then Al Assad will give press conferences and deliver speeches in Istanbul and Riyadh promising to soon liberate Damascus from Bashar Al Assad and his allies. He may even visit Washington and Paris and meet with Senator John McCain and Bernard-Henri Levy and the Iranian Mujahideen Khalq as they declare that “the days of Bashar Al Assad are numbered“.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Elections, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Syria

Impartial Foreign Monitors of Syrian and Egyptian Elections Are Happy with Great Big Zeros…….

      

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Syrian media reported that an ecstatic Bashar Al Assad met with an uncharacteristically cheerful Iranian parliamentary delegation that had monitored the Syrian election. The Iranians insisted they did not care who won as long as the election went smoothly and everybody from Al Raqqah through, er, Beirut got to vote. They declared themselves satisfied with the election process. They claimed the elections were as free and fair as they had wished them to be, and the results (Assad won with 88%) were fantastic. “Could not be better”, said one bearded Iranian who insisted they were in Damascus as just impartial observers “to keep the honest, honest”.………


Egyptian media is quoted by my Cairo source claiming that General Al Sisi met with a gaggle of Gulf princes and potentates who had monitored the Egyptian election from the GCC democracy-monitoring headquarters in Riyadh. They declared the voting to have been free, fair, and very democratic, “almost as good as anything we have never seen back home”. One worthy grumbled that it was actually too democratic “if you ask me“, even if not tribal enough. When asked about the results (Sisi won with 97%), they said it was obviously fantastic and ordained by Allah and “why haggle over a lousy 3% discrepancy?”………
One smirking shaikh added his own version of a Parthian parting shot: “unlike that Great Big Zero election held in Syria“…….


Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Media, Syria

So, Which Foreigners Did You say Are Interfering in Syria?………


      


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“More recently, however, the mainstream rebels’ allies—chiefly the United States, Britain, France, Qatar and Saudi Arabia—have begun to expand their efforts to help those they consider worthy of support. They have been chuffed by the rebels’ war on ISIS. And they are co-ordinating efforts to help them better. An increasing number of vetted fighters in both the north and south of Syria have been trained in Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, given money to pay salaries, and supplied with anti-tank weapons, albeit so far in limited quantities. Meanwhile, Gulf donors are said to have cut off funds to some of the more zealous Islamist groups, including the Islamist Front, a coalition dominated by Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafist outfit…………..”

The Economist has been hawkish on Syria, but only on Syria of all the Arab uprisings. It has been pissed (to put it succinctly) by Obama’s reluctance to attack Syria for the past three years. It, like other Western and Arab media and their officials, has been critical of ‘foreign’ intervention in Syria. Not all foreign intervention in frowned upon: only Russian and Iranian and Lebanese intervention. Other sources of intervention: European, Turkish, American, Gulf GCC, Saudi, Qatari, Jordanian, and Al Qaeda intervention on the side of the Jihadists is apparently kosher and halal and seeks democracy and freedom and human rights in Syria. That has been obvious from past experience when the Jihadis took over towns and neighborhoods and immediately started to apply democracy, freedom, the chopping of heads, the kidnapping of nuns and priests, among other blessings of what the rest of Syrians can expect.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Justice

Baathist Egypt: Beset by Demons from Hell, Talmodic Jews, Shi’a Plots, and Hanging Courts……

      

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“The judge who sentenced to death more than 720 alleged rioters on a single day in Egypt in April has justified his decision on the grounds that some of the accused were “demons” adherent to Jewish scripture.
In May judge Saeed Youssef sentenced 37 men to death for the murder of a policeman – and then in a separate trial gave preliminary death sentences to 683 others. Youssef said the first 37 were “demons who came out of the depths of hell disguised in the cloak of Islam, who aimed to seize the reins of power in Egypt, loot its wealth and enslave its people”. According to several local newspapers, Youssef then described the men as “enemies of the nation” who used mosques to promote “the commandments of their holy book, the Talmud”……………”

Even Baathist Iraq, in its worst repressive days, did not hand out hundreds of death sentences in one day like this. All this gives us an idea about the low quality of judges and courts that have been common in Egypt over the past few decades, and still are.

I had thought that over the past couple of decades the main threat to Egypt had changed. That it is now the Shi’a threat, something that Mubarak bureaucrats, Al-Azhar, Muslim Brothers, Salafis, and Wahhabi liberals all have been warning us about, especially after the failed 2011 uprising. Now with Saudi-inspired Al Sisi replacing Saudi-inspired Mubarak, the Egyptian door is even more wide open to the Wahhabi interpretations of everything from history to culture to religion.
 
As for the Jewish threat, this should be old stuff. There are only a
few hundred Jews left in Egypt, the remnants of a once vibrant community
that was prominent in the arts, culture, and business. But they mostly left as
soon as they saw a hint of a familiar recent history: they did not
appreciate that concentration camps and mass extermination are an
exclusively European invention (they are). That the Europeans had been honing their gruesome skills at mass murder over several centuries to reach the level of efficiency of 1933-45.

Given that the Holy Quran itself borrowed heavily from the Old Testament, which is also Jewish (but probably not demonic scripture).
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Elections, Arab Revolutions, Lebanon, Syria

Syrian Shock and Awe? Al Assad’s Political Base Extends to Lebanon and Jordan and……

      

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                                 Syrian refugees voting in Lebanon

Lebanese politicians of the right-wing pro-Saudi March 14 Movement and their media are apparently shocked and also pissed at the Syrian refugees in their country. They are probably also secretly awed but are afraid to say so. What they saw in Beirut, with tens of thousands of Syrian refugees lining up for hours outside their embassy to vote in the presidential election, shocked and embarrassed these pro-Jihadist Lebanese. All these refugees turning out to vote for Assad, the man under whose rule Syria has disintegrated, when the opposition urged them to boycott the election! While in Cairo the everlasting Mubarak bureaucrats allegedly had to scrap the bottom of the barrel to get voters for Generailsimo Sisi’s 90+ percent “victory”.

The process was speculated about by the BBC as a possible demonstration of popular support for Al Assad, and by his presumed ‘victims’. Quite a shot at the rebel and Saudi narrative that most Syrians oppose Al Assad (many do oppose him but it is arguable how many). 

In fact I have often written here in the past that the Syrians are divided and it is hard to tell how they would line up. The way the war has been going, many of these refugees may be hoping for the regime to win just so that they can go home and put their shattered lives back together. Clearly, leaving the country means just getting out of the war zone and may not reflect political preferences. Some of the shocked and pissed (and secretly awed) Lebanese of the March 14 bloc are suggesting a typical ‘Arab solution’: they are calling for all pro-Assad refugees to be expelled from Lebanon. Humanitarian help to be based only on one’s politics: can’t get more humanitarian that that. 

Meanwhile media report that in Europe (and in some Arab countries) Syrians were not allowed to vote. Only Egyptians (and Ukrainians) were allowed to vote in their own funny elections.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Egypt, Elections

Brecht Joins Sisi in Egypt: What if they Gave an Election and Nobody Came?……..

      

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“What if they gave a war and nobody came? Why, then, the war would come to you” Bertolt Brecht
“What if they gave an election and nobody came?  Why, then, the election would come to you” I, Moi, ich


“Egypt’s election commission on Tuesday extended voting in the presidential election for a third day amid reported low turnout. Meanwhile government officials, media and the military — worried that turnout was weaker than expected — harangued voters to go to the polls. The front-runner, former army chief Abdel Fattah El Sisi, is trying to garner an overwhelming show of support. Monitoring groups and Sisi’s rival candidate reported low turnout by early Tuesday. Closer to sunset, numbers appeared to be increasing. The election commission said it was extending the vote through Wednesday, citing complaints that migrant workers have been unable to vote where they reside because of laws making it difficult to do so. Election commission officials warned that they would implement a rarely applied rule imposing fines on all able-bodied voters who do not cast ballots. The fine, $72, is a hefty sum for most Egyptians…………..”

If this Aljazeera report is true about the fine, it is a first in the Arab world. Normally Arab rulers go to gruesome lengths to keep people from voting freely: just look at the ‘secret’ numbers of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, Syria, etc, etc. Punishing people for not voting in Field Marshal Sisi’s republic (not voting for Sisi of course: they cretainly would not want Morsi voters to vote). Imagine, some day it is possible that we may see Arab citizens get punished for not engaging in politics. That would be quite a switch.

In any case, whatever official figures claim, turnout has been dismal for these controlled sham elections. It looks like mostly Egypt’s middle-aged and elderly have gone out and voted. Especially elderly women many of whom reportedly see Al Sisi as some kind of a sex symbol. Others are still basking in the glow of his great medical achievements, like recent cures for Hepatitis and HIV. The young Egyptians, who staged one uprising in 2011 for freedom then supported a military coup in 2013, have largely stayed home.

Cheers
mhg

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Al Aqeda, Arab Revolutions, Jihad, Syria

Hopeless Jihadi Manifesto: Rebels of Syria, Unite! Sans Marx and Engels………

      

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“The largest coalition of Islamist rebels in Syria issued a manifesto over the weekend that calls for the increasingly fractious rebels to unite around the notion of liberating the country from the government of President Bashar Assad and installing a free state that will protect the rights of religious minorities, not an Islamist state. The position spelled out in the statement, titled the “Revolutionary Manifesto of the Islamic Front,” marked a reversal of a policy articulated last year that called for creating an Islamist state after the defeat of Assad. Analysts and observers agreed that the statement seemed directed at the international community, particularly the United States, which has been reluctant to support widespread military aid for the rebels over concerns about radicalism. he statement, which was released as an audio posting on jihadi websites…………….” 


An interesting “manifesto” by the so-called Islamic Front, but many days late and many dollars short. The old one by Marx and Engels was more eloquent and more succinct. There is nothing new here in spite of some gushing by the usual Western think tank analysts and experts. Hell, even I would call for them to unite just out of curiosity if not out of any good will toward these sectarian Jihadis.
One major problem with these rebels is that they all want everybody else to unite…….. behind them. Even Saudi-appointed Ahmed Al Jarba controls only his own media room in Turkey and all the GCC media microphones. He also travels to Washington and Europe, which can be fun but he controls about as much ground inside Syria as old Joe Lieberman and John McCain did. 
Their other and main problem is that the tide and momentum of the civil war turned last year, and the other side is winning every battle now. Al Assad’s days are not as numbered now as they were three years ago. Au contraire, he has outlived a gaggle of predecessors of Al Jarba, and if the war continues another year, he will almost certainly outlast Jarba as well.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Syria

One Syrian Defense Minister Quits, Hints at Funny Funding Issues……..

      

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“The Syrian opposition’s defense minister has resigned after reports of disagreements with the group’s head, opposition sources said on Monday. Dissident Asaad Mustafa’s resignation from the government-in-exile highlights divisions among President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents. Mustafa, in his sixties,had been appointed to his post in November as part of a plan by the opposition National Coalition to administer rebel-held areas of the war-torn country, according to Reuters news agency. A rebel source close to Mustafa told Reuters he resigned on Sunday night to protest a lack of funds for his fighters from Coalition head Ahmed Jarba…………………”

Another “leader” of the Syrian opposition bites the dust. This five-star ‘defense minister’ of the Turkish border has also resigned, or possibly booted out. These schmucks can’t run an opposition movement, they can’t lead fractured multiple opposition movements: how will they ever unite and rule one Syria? In the unlikely event that Syria is “liberated” by NATO forces, the Western powers will need to be the actual rulers behind the scenes. Perhaps a Syrian Marshal Petain covering for a French overseer. Or maybe they will appoint a Saudi prince as king of Syria. Cheersmhg

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