Tag Archives: Egypt

Arab Elections, Arab Revolutions, Egypt

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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Arab Elections, Arab Revolutions, Egypt, U.S. 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).

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

Arab Elections, Egypt, European Union, 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, 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 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

[email protected]

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

[email protected]