“A court in southern Egypt on Monday decreed a mass death sentence for nearly 700 people, including the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement of Egypt’s ousted Islamist president. On the same day, another Egyptian court banned the April 6 movement, which was among the primary engines behind the landmark 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt’s sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the nearly 10 months since an interim government took power has provoked expressions of concern from human rights groups and Western governments, but little in the way of meaningful punitive actions against the military-backed regime………………”

The best scenario, an optimistic scenario, in this impending Egyptian butchery is that it is just a political show. They are setting the stage for a great show of mercy by the new dictator. The Kangaroo courts continue their job, preparing the way for a new dictator for life in Cairo. He, Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi will probably show “restraint” and “mercy” after pleas from allies and suppliers in the West. He will likely show calculated moderation by commuting most of these hundreds, thousands by then, of death sentences to life in prison. All these people, including tens of thousands awaiting trial, will end up in prison for life simply because they exercised their right of protest. 

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An Egyptian daily newspaper quotes a high government official that Saudi Arabia has postponed delivery of any new aid to Egypt until after the results of the coming presidential elections are ‘known’. The official is quoted that a ‘huge’ financial aid package will be announced after the victory of Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi is assured (just in case there is any doubt about the kind of election they are staging in Egypt). This new aid is promised to surpass all previous aid packages to Egypt………

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mhg

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“The world’s chemical weapons watchdog will send a fact-finding mission to Syria to examine claims by the United States and other Western powers that the Syrian government may have used deadly chlorine gas against its own people. Tuesday’s announcement by the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) followed a week of intensive diplomatic efforts by Washington to rally international support for such a mission, which is likely to renew international scrutiny of Syria’s chemical weapons at a time when Damascus was receiving credit for destroying its stockpiles of the lethal toxins.………….”

Here we go again. It has been happening regularly, ever since the tide of the Syrian war seemed to turn against the Wahhabi side. I believe that nobody, not even an Arab political leader, is that stupid. Imagine, every month or so the “activists” or the “opposition” claim that Bashar Al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons: Sarin or Chlorine or whatever. It is like clockwork. They always accompany the claim with photos and videos of people choking or dead and canisters clearly marked (in English): Sarin or Chlorine. They do not, however, paste a return address for these canisters at the presidential palace in Damascus. 

Some older posts on this:

“A hospital visit was out of the question; admission for Rohingya Muslims, a long-persecuted minority, always requires a lengthy approval process — time that the baby, named Parmin, did not have. In desperation, the pharmacy owner sent the family to the rarely staffed Dapaing clinic, the only government emergency health center for the tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims herded into displaced people’s camps. Although it was just 4 p.m., the doors were shuttered. “We became like crazy people, running everywhere,” the child’s grandmother, Daw Mu Mu Lwin, said. With no good choices left, the family returned to the pharmacy, where Parmin died, untreated, three and a half hours later, cradled in her grandmother’s arms. The baby’s death was part of a rapidly expanding death toll and humanitarian crisis among the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that Myanmar’s Buddhist-led government has increasingly deprived of the …………….Some aid workers fear they are being kept away so there are fewer witnesses to rampant mistreatment most basic liberties and aid even as it trumpets its latest democratic reforms and occasional bloodletting ……….”

Which brings me to a curiously silent figure: Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, allegedly acclaimed humanitarian freedom fighter of Burma (Myanmar). The lady has struggled for years for democracy in her country. Yet the lady has been stubbornly and deafeningly silent about the expanding systemic genocide in her country. Like many otherwise ‘good Germans’ of the 20th century, she has been silent on organized ethnic cleansing in her country. Understandably silent because she would have to pay a heavy political price, a price to be exacted not by the military rulers of the country, but by the Buddhist monks and their millions of followers. 

Burma and its Muslims: Myanmar Takes the Nazi Route
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mhg

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Mr. Ahmad Al Jarba, the Saudi-appointed current head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) will be in the United States this week, seeking ‘long term’ ties with the United States. Recent Syrian history is certainly against him. It is unlikely that he himself will last ‘long term’ enough, that he will be around much longer than his several predecessors who bit the dust quickly. 

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mhg

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“The flow of foreign fighters to Syria to join the war against Bashar Assad’s dictatorship is becoming the largest in the history of the global jihad, and the Syrian battleground is on the way to outstripping the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets as a training ground for Islamic militants. Security services around the world are becoming increasingly alarmed at the implications for the safety of their citizens. American intelligence officials now put the number of foreign fighters who have gone to Syria since the war began in 2011 at between 8,000 and 10,000. Other sources put the total even higher, up to 12,000. The largest contingent is probably Saudis. Saudi sources put the number of their citizens who have gone to wage jihad in Syria at 1,200, of whom 300 are reported to have died on the battlefield. Jordanian sources report about a thousand Jordanians………….”

The prospects look grim. All forms of Jihad are humorless, but this Syrian Jihad is even more so. I mean with contingents from Saudi Arabia, Gulf Salafis, Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya, Algeria, and Jordan (especially Jordan) who can expect anything else? If there are such things as Algerian and Libyan humor, I have never heard of them. Have you ever heard of Wahhabi humor (there is some but the jokes start like this: these three true Salafi believers dive into a river of wine near a couple of skinny-dipping skinny houris, and………….)?

Not that Syrian humor was well-known even before the current tragedy started in 2011. Remember, the Baath Party has been in power in Syria since 1963. In Iraq it ruled briefly in 1963, but came back with a vengeance in 1968 to wipe out any Iraqi sense of humor (assuming any existed after four centuries of humorless Turkish rule). The terms “Baath” and “humor” don’t fit well in the same sentence, or in the same paragraph, or in the same chapter. Come to think of it, I can think of many terms that don’t fit anywhere near the word ‘humor’: Salafi, Al Saud, Al Khalifa (well, maybe just LOL), mullah, functionary, bureaucrat, Mitch McConnell, among others. 

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It could be one way to flush out malcontents, reformists, cynics, and even a few potential ‘terrorists’. It all depends on what you write the king about. After all, social media like Twitter and Facebook have opened avenues for protest and political activism, but they have also helped flush out active and silent regime opponents. 

“Not only does al Qaeda host Ansar al-Sharia, one of the militias responsible for the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But U.S. intelligence now assesses that leaders from at least three regional al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and members of the organization of Al-Mulathameen Brigade loyal to Algerian terrorist, Mokhtar BelMokhtar—have all established havens in the lawless regions of Libya outside the control of the central government. One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, “Scumbag Woodstock.” The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West. An American counter-terrorism official used a different metaphor to describe the situation. “Libya today plays host to members and associates of several AQ-allied groups, in some ways becoming a jihadist melting pot,”………………”

An excellent description of them: a melting pot. In most Middle East countries, especially Arab ones, tribal and sectarian identities define a person and define political life (in the few places where there is a political life). The order is: Clan, Tribe, Sect, Religion, Country. In that exact order. Sometimes Ruler or King (or Sisi) is inserted before Country, sometimes they add God at the beginning to make it seem kosher and halal. 

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mhg

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I am doubtful about the exact purpose of all this, but why not? Everybody else in the region seems to spend a lot of time and resources doing military exercises and parades. From Iran to North Africa they do it all the time. Even faraway NATO powers do exercises all over the region. Even Al Qaeda terrorist franchises do it, wherever they do these things. So why not the Saudis?

“And it’s also likely that this year’s results could be ignored by granting the “most politically suitable” party the right to form a government under dirty sectarianism and Iranian orders. Despite all current divisions and upcoming violations, Iraqi elections remain unusual given the standard of regional elections from Iran in the east to Algeria in the west. Political pluralism and the real diversity of the top figures and parties mark the Iraqi elections with a value that is worth appreciating……………”

This one deserves the Joke of the Week Award. He is the current general manager of Saudi semi-official Alarabiya network and former chief editor of Prince Salman’s newspaper (Asharq Alawsat). A propagandist for the absolute tribal super-sectarian Saudi princes complaining about the sectarian Iraqi elections and their imperfect outcome. How they decide the government and how much sectarian influence there is. Sectarianism pervades Iraq but an even more extreme version of it pervades every other Arab country, even those that have only one sect (e.g. Egypt and North Africa). There is a lot of sectarianism in Iraq, unfortunately, but nothing as near as there is in Saudi Arabia and most other Arab countries. The Iraqi elections are imperfect but so have been elections in other countries (some of them downright funny although not humorous). Some might say that having no elections is the ‘optimum’ of political imperfections.