Category Archives: Egypt

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 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 Counterrevoltion, Egypt, Human Right

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 Elections, Egypt, Europe, Syria

Tale of Two Funny Elections: European Union Congratulates Al Sisi but not Al Assad……..


      


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“Declaration on behalf of the European Union
on the presidential elections in Egypt
The holding of the presidential elections marks an important step in the imp
lementation of
the constitutional roadmap towards the transition to democracy in Egypt. The Europe
an
Union expresses its willingness to work closely with the new authorities in Eg
ypt in a
constructive partnership with a view to strengthening our bilateral r
elations.
The EU congratulates Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, as the new President of Egypt
, and trusts that
he will tackle the serious challenges faced by the country and the new governm
ent, among
them the dire economic situation, the deep divisions within society, the security sit
uation,
and the respect of the human rights of all Egyptian citizens in line with inter
national
obligations and guaranteed by the new Constitution adopted last January.
On the basis of the preliminary statement of the EU Election Observat
ion Mission the EU
takes good note of the overall peaceful and orderly conduct of the elections……………….”
Yadda, yadda, yadda in European bureaucratese.

The EU congratulated Generalissimo Field Marshal Al Sisi for winning his rigged Egyptian election with 97% of the vote. Effectively they congratulated him for overthrowing the elected president of Egypt, Morsi and taking over the state. They did not congratulate Bashar Al Assad for winning the other funny Arab election, the Syrian election. Perhaps because Bashar won only 88% of the vote and did not reach the required Arab majority of 90%. 
Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Elections, Egypt, GCC, Saudi Arabia

The Pope and Synods of GCC: Punking Al Sisi, Excommunicating Qatar……..

      

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“Saudi Arabia had long seen Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood as a threat. After his ouster, it quickly pledged $5 billion (3.7 billion euros) in aid to Cairo, with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates offering a combined $7 billion. King Abdullah also urged “brothers and friends to avoid meddling in Egypt’s internal affairs,” warning that harming Egypt would amount to “harming Islam, Arabism and Saudi Arabia.” The king appeared to be referring to Qatar, the only Gulf country to back Morsi, and whose relations with Saudi Arabia and most of its other neighbours in the region have been strained………….”

Saudi palace bureaucrats, with the help of the vastest and most expensive media oil money can buy, are trying to recreate the image of their king Abdullah. Even as the king is basking in the diversions of Morocco. (FYI: senior Saudi princes like to spend R&R in Morocco, it is a beautiful and relaxed country in which they often die).
The palace minions and the vast controlled media have been trying to show their king as some kind of Wahhabi Pope, but nobody outside the Persian Gulf states is buying it. Actually very few outside Saudi Arabia are buying it, with the exception of Bahrain’s ruling family and some tribal Wahhabi liberals in one other Gulf GCC state (Hint: it is not Oman or Qatar or the UAE). As for the wider Arab world, nobody is buying it except for the Salafis whom I correctly consider to be a fifth column for the princes.

This week, the Saudi king, or maybe rather his palace minions, surprised General Al Sisi after his election victory (he got 97% of those who bothered to vote) by sending him a public congratulatory message that is also a combination road map and twenty-five year plan for Egypt. Basically telling him to keep  good thing going. It was a backhanded congratulatory message: basically the old king, or his minions, told Al Sisi and the Egyptians what to do. In other words, the oil potentate effectively punked Generalissimo Field Marshal President Al Sisi. Talk about interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign country.
The princes are also trying to pressure the
Qatari potentates into surrendering by abandoning their support for the
Muslim Brotherhood. Failing that, the King’s message also threatens to ‘excommunicate’ and expel Qatar from the GCC synods.


On the brighter side, the king called for a conference of all donor states to Egypt, presumably to drown the country with oil money, provided it continues to toe the Saudi line. As a down payment, 20 thousands heads of cattle arrived in Alexandria, with 80 thousand more to follow, gifts from the UAE rulers. The sheep and cows did not originate in the United Arab Emirates, but like almost everyone else in that country they were imported from elsewhere.
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Counterrevoltion, Arab Elections, Arab Politics, Egypt, GCC, UAE

The GCC Livestock Exchange: Cattle from the UAE, Votes from Egypt………

      

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Egyptian media report that 20 thousand heads of cattle have arrived by ship at the port of Alexandria. They are the first payment of a 100 thousand head of cattle grant from the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Egypt.
The political heads of cattle arrived suspiciously just after Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi was declared the winner of the election by 97% of the vote. But the timing could be a coincidence, or maybe not. Yet, in the brotherly and sisterly world of official inter-Arab relations, a free lunch is an illusion. After all, the potentates and princes did not give a fig about the Egyptian people when Morsi was president.
On the other hands millions of heads of cattle voters voted for Al Sisi in the election, which gave him a modest 97% of the vote. That is modest by the standards of Yemen, where president general Hadi Al Zombie won by 99.8% a couple of years ago (and it is not true that only GCC rulers and Saudi princes voted in his election). In comparison, it is expected that Bashar Al Assad will win the Syrian election by a relatively modest margin, as he is unlikely to win more than 85% (my prediction).
The Saudi king woke up from his sleep long enough to announce that the election of Sisi heralds a new Arab awakening (he was in a rare mood to flaunt fancy words). Overall the Egyptian deal is not so bad for the potentates: 100 thousand heads of cattle in exchange for millions of heads of…………..

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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Egypt, Elections, GCC

La Vache Qui Rit 2.0: Egypt Leaps Forward to the Past………

      

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                                          Les Vaches Qui Rient


Even before Hosni Mubarak took over in 1981, many Arabs had started calling him “La Vache Qui Rit”, the Laughing Cow, after a popular French cheese spread that advertised a lot on Arab television.
The idea was that when he was vice president under Anwar Sadat, all he did was grin during cabinet meetings. Grin and nod approval at whatever Sadat said. That was the plausible claim.
Enter Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi. Now Al Sisi also grins and nods a lot, but mainly in the presence of Saudi princes and Gulf potentates. I fully expect him to be considered the newest version of the old one. La Vache Qui Rit 2.0.


As for military-appointed interim president Adly Mansour Al Zombie, it is back to the cellars for him. Back to the dusty judicial bureaucracy from whence he was plucked to play pretend president.


Cheers
mhg

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Egypt

Photographic Tale of Two Polling Stations: Voting in Cairo, Voting in Beirut, Voting in Riyadh……

      

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Pictorial tale of elections: Compare the two polling stations in the photos below. One is of Syrian exiles and refugees in voting in their elections in Beirut Lebanon. The other one is of a lonely Egyptian polling station in the heart of Cairo:




  

Syrian Refugees voting in Beirut                             Nobody voting in Cairo
 
Prince Chuck Bin Windsor voting in Riyadh


Saudi prince and his, er, ahem, voters


Cheers
mhg

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Egypt, Elections

Egypt Votes, Barely: the 7.5 Percent Election? the 98 Percent Election?……..

      

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“The overall turnout of the Egyptian voters in the initial two days of presidential election 2014 reached only 7.5 percent of the total number of people listed in the electoral rolls, according to The Egyptian Center for Media and Public Opinion Studies, known as Takamol Masr……………”

You can call it the 7.5% election based on this estimated voter turnout (or participation). Or you ca call it the 98% election, based on early estimates of the margin of ‘victory’ of Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi.

Cheers
mhg

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