Category Archives: Egypt

Links 20 August 2013

During my time in the labyrinth of footloose youth, I’ve barely had time for other Internet reading. However, current affairs did manage to poke through a bit in the past couple of days. The themes of interest for me were the detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda while passing through London (Greenwald is the journalist who receieved Edward Snowden’s classified documents about NSA spying); a call for Swedes, men and women, to wear hijabs in solidarity with a pregnant Muslim woman who was assaulted in the street for wearing a hijab; and testimonials from Egyptian revolutionary youth showing how torn, angry, disgusted, and betrayed they are by the horrifying turn toward authoritarianism their country has taken. Here are the links.

The Guardian, “David Miranda’s Detention at Heathrow ‘Extraordinary’ Says Senior MP“:

    “David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8:05 a.m. and informed that he was to be questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was held for almost nine hours and officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.
    “‘It is an extraordinary twist to a very complicated story,’ [Kenneth] Vaz [chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee] told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. … ‘What needs to happen pretty rapidly is we need to establish the full facts — now you have a complaint from Mr. Greenwald and the Brazilian government. They indeed have said they are concerned at the use of terrorism legislation for something that does not appear to relate to terrorism, so it needs to be clarified, and clarified quickly.’ …
    “Miranda was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under Schedule 7 — over 97% — last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours. …
    “Widney Brown, Amnesty International’s senior director of international law and policy, said: ‘It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance. David’s detention was unlawful and inexcusable. … There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government.'”

Washington Post, “U.S. Had Advance Notice of Britain’s Plan to Detain Reporter Glenn Greenwald’s Partner“:

    “White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that U.S. officials had received a ‘heads-up’ that London police would detain David Miranda on Sunday, but he said the U.S. government did not request Miranda’s detention, calling it ‘a law enforcement action’ taken by the British government.
    “‘This was a decision that was made by the British government without the involvement and not at the request of the United States government. It’s as simple as that,’ Earnest said. …
    “Greenwald, in an e-mail on Monday, said his partner had been questioned about a variety of subjects including ‘what stories we were working on at that moment.’
    “‘David was asked mostly about the work Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I were doing on NSA stories…’ Greenwald said. ‘He was also asked about Brazil, the political situation in Brazil, and his friends and family.’ …
    “Greenwald declined to respond to a question about whether Miranda had served as a courier for classified material related to the paper’s NSA coverage.”

BBC News, “David Miranda Detention: MP Asks Police for Explanation“:

    “‘I remained in a room, there were six different agents coming and going, talking to me,’ Mr. Miranda said. ‘They asked questions about my entire life, about everything. They took my computer, video game, mobile phone, my memory cards, everything.’
    “In Germany, Mr. Miranda had been staying with U.S. filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has also been working on the Snowden files with Mr. Greenwald and the Guardian, according to the newspaper.
    “His flights were being paid for by the Guardian. A spokesman said he was not an employee of the newspaper but ‘often assists’ with Mr. Greenwald’s work. …
    “Mr. Greenwald said the British authorities’ actions in holding Mr. Miranda amounted to ‘bullying’ and linked it to his writing about Mr. Snowden’s revelations concerning the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). …
    “He told the BBC police did not ask Mr Miranda ‘a single question’ about terrorism but instead asked about what ‘Guardian journalists were doing on the NSA stories.’
    “Mr. Greenwald said he would respond by writing reports ‘much more aggressively than before.’
    “‘I have lots of documents about the way the secret services operate in England,’ he said. ‘I think they are going to regret what they did.'”

The Guardian, “NSA Files: Why the Guardian in London Destroyed Hard Drives of Leaked Files“:

    “Guardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden. The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents. …
    “The initial UK attempts to stop reporting on the files came two weeks after the publication of the first story based on Snowden’s leaks…. Two senior British officials arrived at the Guardian’s offices to see [Editor-in-Chief Alan] Rusbridger and his deputy, Paul Johnson. They were cordial but made it clear they came on high authority to demand the immediate surrender of all the Snowden files in the Guardian’s possession.
    “They argued that the material was stolen and that a newspaper had no business holding on to it. The Official Secrets Act was mentioned but not threatened. …
    “After three weeks which saw the publication of several more articles on both sides of the Atlantic about GCHQ and NSA internet and phone surveillance, British government officials got back in touch and took a sterner approach. ‘You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back,’ one of them said.”

Al Jazeera, “Swedes Don Hijab to Support Muslim Woman“:

    “Scores of Swedish women from various faiths have posted pictures of themselves wearing hijab, or traditional Muslim headscarves, in solidarity with a woman attacked in a Stockholm suburb, apparently for wearing one.
    “Police spokesman Ulf Hoffman said an unknown assailant had attacked the pregnant woman in the suburb of Farsta on Friday by banging her head against a car.
    “Hoffman said the man shouted slurs which have led police to believe the attack was motivated by the woman’s religion. …
    “Using hashtag #hijabuppropet (hijab outcry) women posted their photos in headscarves on the social networking sites Twitter and Instagram. …
    “In an opinion piece published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet on Sunday, the organisers of ‘hijabuppropet’ urged Justice Minister Beatrice Ask to ‘ensure that Swedish Muslim women are guaranteed the right to personal safety and religious freedom, without being subject to verbal and physical attacks.'”

A few of the hijab photos posted to twitter, from the “Traveler in Time” tumblr account.

More photos from BuzzFeed, “Women in Sweden Wear Headscarves After Muslim Woman Is Assaulted.”

Jack Shenker in Mada, “Beyond the Voice of Battle“:

    “What is happening in Egypt at the moment, and what is being lost? Lives, above all else; hundreds of them….
    “But beyond people, something else is being lost, too — just as those most invested in the old Egypt intended. For me, the most powerful expression of Egypt’s revolution has never been anything tangible, but rather that state of mind when the world seems to tip on its head and bevel with possibility, where the landscape of imagination is recast. I first encountered it on January 25 2011….
    “The deployment of the police across the road in front of us was a signal that…we would come a stop, engage in some minor scuffling, and then be herded into a harmless protest pen so that the capital could get on with its day. But on this occasion, with reports of mass unrest spreading throughout the city, something was different. Nobody among the marchers slowed, nobody broke ranks, and instead they just kept on going, right towards those shields, chanting and glaring mutinously into the eyes of those that held them…. In the end, the troops simply gave way. And as we pushed past them and onto the empty street behind, several protesters broke into a run — or more accurately a skip, a dance, a hodgepodge of hops and jumps — and many began whooping and hollering and even kissing the ground. …
    “That newfound sense of agency, of an ability to shape the world around you in ways you never knew existed — that gave me my definition of revolution…. Nothing can pose a greater threat to elites wishing to preserve their political and economic privileges than that sense of agency, and since Egypt’s revolution began, not a single farm, factory, classroom or college in the land has remained entirely immune from its influence.
    “Which brings us to the scenes on Egypt’s streets today. The relentless imposition of state violence creates binaries as well as bodies: You are either with us or against us, pro-military or pro-Brotherhood, an Egyptian or a terrorist. And binaries from above achieve the opposite of imagination from below. … How Egypt’s defenders of the status quo, forced onto the back foot by a revolution that struggles against authoritarianism and state violence, have longed to [undermine the independent thought of the people]. In their current ‘war on terror,’ as the strapline on state television puts it, they finally have the enemy, the fight and the stage on which to do so. Thus far, their efforts are meeting with spectacular success.”

Yasmin El Rifae in Cairo, again, “Dispatches“:

    “Egypt has given me a life-changing political education in the last two and a half years. … It’s hard, now, not to feel like something has been stolen from me. As I write this, I am deeply aware of how many others have had the much more devastating loss, the theft, of a loved one or a limb.
    “The past days have left me with a feeling of uselessness and alienation. I condemn both the Brotherhood and the security forces in their inter-locking cycle of violence and lies. There is no place for me in the street, or in a national conversation determined to start and end with chauvinistic nationalism. So I stay in and watch the city descend into silence, the streets emptying of life as military curfew approaches.
    “This is not the first time the state has pushed us to the edge…. It’s not the first time, but it might be the bloodiest and the scariest – and the one receiving the loudest applause. I do not know how we will move forward from here, or when we will stop flaunting our cruelty as a source of pride.”

Omar Robert Hamilton in Mada, “Everything Was Possible“:

    “I mourn the dead and I despise those killing them. I mourn the dead and I despise those sending them to their deaths. I mourn the dead and I despise those that excuse their murder. How did it come to this? How did we get here? What is this place?
    “There were moments when we could have broken the army’s grip on the country. We should have stayed in Tahrir after Mubarak was ousted. … But we left. Everyone said they would be back the next day and then, somehow, they weren’t. People wanted to shower and to sleep in their own beds. Then spontaneous cleaning brigades of earnest patriots spread through the city and by midday everything was nice and tidy and gone. …
    “Had all the forces that were supposedly against the military — the revolutionaries, the liberals, the Brotherhood and the Salafis — ever truly united where might we be today? Dead, possibly. But maybe not. Maybe somewhere closer to a civilian state. A real, ideological alliance was never possible. But a tactical, practical one might just have worked. But rather than work together each party repeatedly met with and made deals with the army, consistently placing the generals in the strongest tactical position. Everyone was to blame. …
    “It was transformative: the belief we all shared, for a moment, in each other. In an eternity of disappointment and greed and malice that moment…in which having a community was preferable to being alone with a book, had a value that will never be lost. You cannot underestimate how important these two and half years have been for people, how empowered, how unafraid people were. The existence of the revolution should not be confused with the existence of a political leadership and process. The revolution is dead when we say it’s dead. The revolution is dead when we will no longer die for it. …
    “I cannot stand up to death today. Today I am a coward who can only write. I see the revolution being dragged away to be shot over a shallow grave and I don’t know what to do. But I do know that, before it’s too late, we will grab it, we will fight for it. We have to, or we will never be able to live with ourselves.”

Lee Smith in Tablet, “What’s Wrong with Egypt’s Liberals? For Starters, They’re Not Liberals“:

    “If some observers mistakenly predicted that the Twitter-friendly liberals who thronged Tahrir Square two and a half years ago would become the new face of Egypt, almost no one could have guessed that those same liberals would soon find themselves demonstrating in favor of military rule. Now American journalists, analysts, and Middle East experts all want to know what happened to a political movement whose ostensible goal was to overthrow an authoritarian leader in order to usher in a golden age of Egyptian democracy. …
    “Seen through modern Western eyes, none of this makes sense. Just because the anti-Morsi camp allegedly put millions of people into the streets to demand the elected president’s ouster doesn’t make the army’s action ‘democratic.’ But for some observers in the Middle East, the strange bedfellows that Egyptian liberals seem to prefer are not so shocking: The coup is merely the latest inflection of a longer historical arc that unites authoritarians and liberals in a profound ambivalence about Western values and the West itself. ‘I’m not at all surprised this was the work of what we’ve come to call the liberals,’ said Samuel Tadros, author of the newly published Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity….
    “Tadros…told me in a recent interview that they were never liberals in the first place, or at least not as the term is usually understood in Western political communities. ‘In Egypt, liberalism didn’t start as it did in Europe with the emergence of an independent bourgeoisie that sought to limit the powers of the state and other entrenched institutions like the church and the aristocracy. In Egypt, there was no crisis pitting the individual against the state because liberalism was born with the rise of the civil-servant class in the mid 19th century. Since civil servants are a part of the state, this liberalism is not at all interested in limiting the role of the state.’ …
    “Because the civil-servant class owed its advancement — education, employment, rise in salaries — to the state, it came to see the state as the agent of change, he explains. And not surprisingly the liberals came to worship the institution that embodied state power in its purest form, the ruler. ‘It is the job of the ruler to impose modernity on a reluctant population,’ said Tadros. Arab liberals understand themselves as members of an elite class that shares little in common with the unwashed masses. If the ruler can’t modernize the masses, at least he must protect the advantages that the state lavished on the liberals.”

David Kenner in Foreign Policy, “How 36 Egyptian Prisoners Suffocated to Death in the Back of a Police Van“:

    “Of all the ways to die, this was one of the most horrible. On Monday, the Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamist prisoners the day before…. Security officials said that the prisoners had rioted while in a prison truck and captured a guard, causing the officers to respond by firing tear gas and the prisoners to die of asphyxiation. If that’s the case, crowd control experts say, the prisoners perished in agony — gasping for air and incapable of resisting their guards. …
    “Lawyer Ossama ElMahdy visited the morgue on Monday…and tweeted extremely graphic pictures of the bodies. He wrote that the dead men’s faces were so blue — almost black — that the families assumed they were burned, but they were not.
    “It is possible to kill 36 people with tear gas, but it is extremely difficult…. ‘It would be an agonizing death as well, with a burning sensation on all the wet areas of the body, a gasping and even gagging sensation, coughing, tightness of the chesta gasping and even gagging sensation, coughing, tightness of the chest,’ said Sid Heal, a former officer in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and expert on crowd control techniques. … Whatever happened in that prison truck, however, did not convince the police officers to let in fresh air and save their prisoners’ lives.”

Revolution: Game Over

At least 120 are dead in Cairo in a pre-dawn massacre.

    “The massacre took place in the small hours of Saturday morning, at a sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya, east Cairo, where tens of thousands of pro-Morsi supporters have camped since Morsi was deposed on 3 July.
    “Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad said the shooting started shortly before pre-dawn morning prayers on the fringes of a round-the-clock vigil being staged by backers of Morsi, who was toppled by the army more than three weeks ago.
    “‘They are not shooting to wound, they are shooting to kill,’ Haddad said, adding that the death toll might be much higher. …
    “The deaths come just two weeks after military and police officers massacred 51 Morsi supporters at a nearby protest in east Cairo.
    “They also happened less than 24 hours after hundreds of thousands of anti-Morsi protesters gathered in Egyptian streets to give General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the army chief who ousted Morsi, their assent to crack down on what he had on Wednesday called ‘terrorism’.
    “Sceptics say this is a euphemism for a violent campaign on largely peaceful Morsi supporters….”

Mohamed ElBaradei, how does it feel now to be seated in this government? Here’s what you said yesterday, before the killings:

    “It is time that we end this miserable state of polarisation using rational means. We have to be tolerant so that we can build Egypt.
    “Non-violence, rule of law…and reconciliation based on inclusiveness are key principles to adhere to during this difficult time.”

So will you resign in protest today? Call for an aggressive investigation? Or will we hear more mealy-mouthed words?

The tragedy of Egypt is that both “sides” in this struggle, the military and the Brotherhood, seem to be treating it as a zero-sum game, meaning there is no room for those who feel caught in the middle and can’t bring themselves to identify with either (authoritarian) camp. By rights, this should include nearly all the revolutionary forces who brought down the Mubarak regime in the first place.

I’ve never been to Egypt, but I do try to evaluate the news out of Egypt as if I were an Egyptian citizen, faced with the choices they are faced with, and I’ll say this: throughout the whole post-revolutionary process until now, with all its ups and downs, I’ve never once felt the urge to boycott an election or a referendum. However flawed the choices may have been, it always felt better to validate the concept of citizen participation. But if there were elections under this new regime in a few weeks or months, even if there were candidates who matched my political views exactly, it would be nearly impossible to persuade me to go to the polls, because I would feel like I was validating the very massacres we’ve just seen. Cold-blooded, premeditated, state-sponsored killing. In my eyes, the process is irrevocably tainted in a way that it hasn’t been until now, even at its worst moments.

The Egyptian revolution is over, it seems, and it failed. I hope I’m wrong.

UPDATE: Abdel-Rahman Daour, a spokesman for the pro-Morsi sit-in:

    “No one’s going anywhere. We either have freedom or we die. We’re not going to live in a country without freedom.”

Islam Taher, a pro-Morsi protester whose childhood friend was killed:

    “If this was animals being killed, people would care. But because it’s us, they don’t.”

Links 23 July 2013

Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post, Egypt’s “Democrats” Abandon Democracy:

    “What happened to Egypt’s young liberals? Five years ago, they were the most promising movement in an Arab world dominated by strongmen like Mubarak. Now the vast majority of them are cheering another general, coup leader Abdel Fatah al-Sissi….
    “This dizzying turnaround is unprecedented in the history of popular pro-democracy movements. Poland’s Solidarity or the anti-Pinochet movement in Chile would never have dreamed of embracing their former oppressors. …
    Once proud of their networked, leaderless structure, the liberals eventually embraced former U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei as their figurehead. It was a disastrous choice: Arrogant, vain and more comfortable in a Viennese salon than a Cairo slum, ElBaradei was polling in the single digits when he withdrew from last year’s presidential race. …
    “The liberals could have waited and organized for parliamentary elections, due in a few months; polls showed the Muslim Brotherhood sinking fast. Instead, they took the easy way out and switched sides. As the Wall Street Journal reported, in the months before the coup, secular opposition leaders met regularly with Egypt’s top generals, who promised that they would respond to large street demonstrations by ousting Morsi. …
    “Meanwhile, as vice president, ElBaradei sits in a government that is holding hundreds of political prisoners incommunicado; that has shut down al-Jazeera and Islamist media; and that has gunned down scores of unarmed street protesters. It’s an outcome that Esraa Abdel Fattah and her idealistic young friends never would have wished for five years ago.”

Khaled Fahmy in Ahram Online, On Fascism and Fascists:

    “I believe that the Brotherhood’s record in power clarifies how… their inability to control the army and the police, rendered their leaders paranoid and anxious. In light of the ongoing revolution and daily protests against their policies, the Brotherhood felt a need to reach an understanding with these two institutions. And indeed, in every incident of street confrontations between protestors and the police, the Brotherhood sided against the people. …
    “And after they thought that they had succeeded in neutralising these two key institutions, the Brotherhood dedicatedly sought to control the public domain. Thus, they drafted laws to control civil society organisations; to control demonstrations; to gerrymander electoral districts in favour of their candidates; and to control the judiciary, all in the shadows of a constitution that they drafted in an exclusionary and flawed manner.
    “Due to all that…the people finally rose in one large uprising on 30 June. In this revolution, Egyptians strongly expressed their rejection of the Brotherhood’s project, a project that was seen as…clamping down on the people’s hard-won liberty. … And yet do we not, by focusing on these demands, ignore the elephant in the room? Are we not ignoring the army and its blatant intervention in the political process since 3 July? …
    “The public, which throughout SCAF’s rule chanted against the military, is now flaunting General El-Sisi’s photos and is taking him to be their prophet and saviour. The people forgot, or decided to forget that the army, whose jets they now dance under in Tahrir Square, is the same army that conducted virginity tests on female protestors, trampled the ‘blue-bra girl,’ abducted and tortured protesters in the Egyptian Museum and the Cabinet headquarters, performed surgical operations on protesters in military hospitals without anesthesia or sterilisation, and above all, has run, and continues to run, an economic empire that is estimated to be equal to a quarter of the country’s GDP.”

Baheyya, The Middling Muslim Brothers:

    “The Muslim Brothers have always been an essentially middling movement, not in the sense of ‘mediocre’ but in the sense of straddling two worlds. Their base is rooted in the middle and lower classes, with a real interest in transformative socio-economic change. But their leadership has always had its eye on joining, not destroying, the system.
    “Over the years, the MB leadership crystallized into a counter-elite of well-to-do, urban, upwardly-mobile professionals and businessmen eager to enter the exclusive ranks of the establishment. … But as with all large organizations, the leadership has developed interests of its own, principally self-preservation. …
    “Morsi’s performance [as president] oscillated between acting with resolve to push back against obstruction and going slow so as not to antagonize powerful entrenched fiefdoms. … In ordinary times and places, a dual strategy of confrontation and appeasement is the stuff of presidential politics. In the power struggle of post-revolutionary Egypt, presidential politics is an existential gamble. Morsi became trapped in a cycle where he was accused of dictatorship if he moved aggressively and accused of betrayal if he pursued accommodation. …
    “Had Morsi pursued a different tack and built a robust popular front to help him take on the Mubarakist ruling caste, would he still be president today? … My argument suggests that even if he wanted to, Morsi wouldn’t have been able to build firm bridges. He was too imprisoned by the MB leadership’s strategic decision to go it alone.”

McClatchy, Mood Shifting, Congress May Move to Limit NSA Spying:

    “Skepticism has been slowly building since last month’s disclosures that the super-secret NSA conducted programs that collected Americans’ telephone data. … Most in Congress remain reluctant to tinker with any program that could compromise security, but lawmakers are growing frustrated. ‘I think the administration and the NSA has had six weeks to answer questions and haven’t done a good job at it. They’ve been given their chances, but they have not taken those chances,’ said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash.
    “The House of Representatives could debate one of the first major bids for change soon. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., is trying to add a provision to the defense spending bill…that would end the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ telephone records. It’s unclear whether House leaders will allow the measure to be considered. …
    Other bipartisan efforts are in the works. Thirty-two House members, led by Amash and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., are backing a plan to restrict Washington’s ability to collect data under the Patriot Act on people not connected to an ongoing investigation. Also active is a push to require the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which rules on government surveillance requests, to be more transparent. …
    “‘It is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to have a full and frank discussion about this balance when the public is unable to review and analyze what the executive branch and the courts believe the law means,’ said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who has asked the administration to make the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court public.”

Politico, Elizabeth Warren, Hard-Liner:

    “Earlier last week at the White House, President Barack Obama tried to use his powers of persuasion on Elizabeth Warren, privately urging the consumer watchdog-turned-Massachusetts senator to back the student loan deal he was reaching with Senate leaders.
    “It didn’t work. On Thursday, she went to the Senate floor to attack the plan, saying it would hurt students and benefit big banks. ‘I think this whole system stinks. We should not go along with any plan that continues to produce profits for the government. It is wrong,’ Warren said. …
    “Warren and several other liberal Democrats…opposed the deal because it continues a government program they think is based more on revenue than on helping students. They contend the program creates profits of $184 billion over the next 10 years.
    “On the floor of the Senate, she described Republicans’ position on student loans as ‘whatever you do, make sure that the government makes $184 billion off the backs of students.'”

CBS News, Violence Continues in France over Islamic Veil Ban:

    “Some 20 cars have been torched and four people detained in a second night of violence in suburbs west of Paris, a result of tensions linked to authorities’ handling of France’s ban on Muslim face veils. …
    “The Friday night violence came after a gathering of about 200–250 people to protest the arrest of a man whose wife was ticketed Thursday for wearing a face veil. The husband tried to strangle an officer who was doing the ticketing, the prosecutor said. …
    “The law affects only a very small proportion of France’s millions of Muslims who wear the niqab, with a slit for the eyes, or the burqa, with a mesh screen for the eyes. But some Muslim groups argue the law stigmatizes moderate Muslims, too. France also bans headscarves in schools and public buildings. …
    “The Collective Against Islamophobia in France…said in a statement that it was contacted by the veiled woman ticketed in Trappes on Thursday, and that she said the police officer yanked her by the veil and pushed her mother.
    “Police argue they are doing their jobs and that veiled women are breaking a well-known law.”

Machines Like Us, Purple Sunlight Eaters:

    “A protein found in the membranes of ancient microorganisms that live in desert salt flats could offer a new way of using sunlight to generate environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
    “This bio-assisted hybrid photocatalyst outperforms many other similar systems in hydrogen generation and could be a good candidate for fabrication of green energy devices that consume virtually infinite sources — salt water and sunlight.”

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, My Game of Thrones Problem:

    “I’m normally not victimized, particularly not by pop culture. But I’m feeling more than a bit victimized by Game of Thrones….
    “I am disturbed by how the series, which was already pretty dark, seems to be getting even more lurid. [Author George R. R.] Martin depicts how violence becomes routine as parts of the population sink into near starvation, brigands prowl the countryside, and dispossessed townspeople (‘sparrows’) flock to churches, the bigger cities, and castles seeking what little security and food they might offer. …
    Game of Thrones also resonates a bit too closely for comfort to what I see in my day job [as an economics pundit]: how people who are simply power-hungry can prevail over those who constrain themselves by trying to do the right thing (however difficult that might be to define), how lousy leaders can do a remarkable amount of damage in a short time, how the noble classes can insulate themselves from economic and physical wreckage and let ordinary people endure hunger, destruction of dwellings and towns, and pillage by wandering bandits. We don’t get much of a picture of Westeros [the imaginary kingdom where Game of Thrones is set] before the wars among the king wannabes broke out, but we get lots of vignettes of the havoc of war: burning of the countryside, stolen livestock, townspeople tortured in case they know where gold is hidden, churches torn down, and plenty of rapes, murders, and mutilations. It was a once well-ordered, fairly well functioning society, and now that it’s been broken, it looks like it would take a long time to restore anything like the former order. …
    “If you’ve stuck with Game of Thrones despite the pain factor, to what do you attribute the personal and cultural appeal?”

John Lancaster in London Review of Books, When Did You Get Hooked?

    “[Game of Thrones tells its story] by hopping about from person to person across the wide geography of Westeros and beyond, with the point of view moving around a large rep company of principal characters, most of them, most of the time, afraid for their lives. The Wars of the Roses, in this reimagining, are — as they surely were in real life — a blood-soaked, treacherous, unstable world, saturated in political rivalries, in which nobody is safe. The violence in this milieu…is long on murder of the innocent, poisoning and rape. It’s not a world any sane person would want to live in, not for a moment…. This sense of unsafety and instability is at the heart of the books. …
    “That, I think, is the first reason for the immense popularity and success of Game of Thrones. This sense of instability, of not knowing what’s about to happen, speaks to the moment. We all feel anxious and uncertain about the future, none of us knows quite how firmly our feet are planted. It’s hard to dramatise economic uncertainty, so why not convey this feeling through a made-up version of the Wars of the Roses? Add the depth and texture and profoundly satisfying thoroughness with which Martin has imagined this world, and the range of his imaginative sympathy with its large company of characters, and it’s a wonder it’s taken the world so long to fall in love with the books.
    “The second big reason for the success of the series may be adjacent to the point about instability. … In Westeros, seasons last not for months but for years, and are not predictable in duration. Nobody knows when — to borrow the minatory motto of the Starks [a family from the north who are key protagonists] — ‘winter is coming.’ At the start of Game of Thrones, summer has been going on for years, and the younger generation has no memory of anything else…. The first signs of autumn are at hand, however, and the maesters — they’re the caste of priest/doctor/scientists — have made an official announcement that winter is indeed on its way. A winter that is always notoriously hard, and can last not just years but a decade or more. … Westeros is like our own world, in which hard times have arrived, and no one feels immune from their consequences, and no one knows how long the freeze will last. Our freeze is economic, but still. Put these two components together, and even the fantasy-averse, surely, can start to see the contemporary appeal of this story, this world. It’s a universe in which nobody is secure, and the climate is getting steadily harder, and no one knows when the good weather will return.”

New Scientist, Shiny, Happy Earth Photobombs Saturn Snapshot:

Links 20 July 2013

Wall Street Journal, In Egypt, the “Deep State” Rises Again:

    “In the months before the military ousted President Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s top generals met regularly with senior aides to opposition leaders, often at the Navy Officers’ Club nestled on the Nile.
    “The message: If the opposition could put enough protesters in the streets, the military would step in — and forcibly remove the president.
    “‘It was a simple question the opposition put to the military,’ said Ahmed Samih, who is close to several opposition attendees. ‘Will you be with us again?’ The military said it would. …
    “The two sides needed each other. Opposition parties had popular credibility, unlike Mubarak-era officials. Mubarak figures brought deep pockets and influence over the powerful state bureaucracy. …
    “As Mr. Morsi’s ouster neared, there were increasing meetings between the military and opposition. They included senior aides to [National Salvation Front leader Mohammed] ElBaradei, former presidential candidate and Arab League chief [Amr] Moussa, and another presidential candidate, Hamdeen Sabahy, according to Mr. Samih, and other people close to top NSF members. …
    “The generals said that if enough Egyptians joined public protests, the military would have little choice but to intervene, according to several activists close to Mr. ElBaradei and U.S. officials. ‘The military’s answer was, if enough people come out into the streets, then it will be exactly like Mubarak,’ Mr. Samih said.”
    [NOTE: To get past the subscriber paywall, search for the text of the first paragraph using Google and click on the link there.]

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, Here’s How the Coup in Egypt Went Down:

    “The military, representing the ‘deep state,’ negotiated a deal with Morsi’s secular opponents…. The deep state’s job was to keep public services in shambles as a way of stoking public anger. The secularists provided the populist cover and the shock troops for widespread protests. The military provided the muscle to oust Morsi and take over the government. After the deed was done, public services were quickly restored, the secularists were given a share of political power, and the military regained much of its old influence and independence. All nice and neat.”

Associated Press, Disputes Between Morsi, Military Led to Egypt Coup:

    “The degree of [the] differences [between President Mohammed Morsi and armed forces chief General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi] suggests that the military had been planning for months to take greater control of the political reins in Egypt. When an activist group named Tamarod began a campaign to oust Morsi, building up to protests by millions nationwide that began June 30, it appears to have provided a golden opportunity for el-Sissi to get rid of the president. The military helped Tamarod from early on, communicating with it through third parties, according to the officials.
    “The reason, the officials said, was because of profound policy differences with Morsi. El-Sissi saw him as dangerously mismanaging a wave of protests early in the year that saw dozens killed by security forces. More significantly, however, the military also worried that Morsi was giving a free hand to Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula, ordering el-Sissi to stop crackdowns on jihadis who had killed Egyptian soldiers and were escalating a campaign of violence. …
    “In April, the youth activists of Tamarod, Arabic for ‘Rebel,’ began collecting signatures on a petition for Morsi to step down. When it said it had 2 million signatures in mid-May, the military took an interest and worked through third parties that connected the group with liberal and opposition-linked businessmen who would bank it, said two high-ranking Interior Ministry officials.
    “The campaign claimed in June to have more than 20 million signatures — though the number has never been independently confirmed — and called for mass rallies against Morsi to start June 30, the anniversary of his inauguration. El-Sissi issued a statement saying the armed forces would intervene to stop any violence at the protests, particularly to stop Morsi supporters from attacking the rallies. He gave the two sides a week to resolve their differences — with the deadline being June 30.”

Max Blumenthal in Al Jazeera English, People, Power, or Propaganda? Unraveling the Egyptian Opposition:

    “Among the first major Egyptian public figures to marvel at the historic size of the June 30 demonstrations was the billionaire tycoon Naguib Sawiris. On June 30, Sawiris informed his nearly one million Twitter followers that the BBC had just reported, ‘The number of people protesting today is the largest number in a political event in the history of mankind.’ …
    “Sawiris was not exactly a disinterested party. He had boasted of his support for Tamarod, lavishing the group with funding and providing them with office space. He also happened to be a stalwart of the old regime who had thrown his full weight behind the secular opposition to Morsi.
    “Two days after Sawiris’ remarkable statement, BBC Arabic’s lead anchor, Nour-Eddine Zorgui, responded to a query about it on Twitter by stating, “seen nothing to this effect, beware, only report on this from Egypt itself.” Sawiris seemed to have fabricated the riveting BBC dispatch from whole cloth. …
    “Some Egyptian opponents to Morsi appear to have fabricated Western media reports to validate the crowd estimates. Jihan Mansour, a presenter for Dream TV, a private Egyptian network owned by the longtime Mubarak business associate Ahmad Bahgat, announced, ‘CNN says 33 million people were in the streets today. BBC says the biggest gathering in history.’
    “There is no record of CNN or BBC reporting any such figure.”

Patrick Kingsley in The Guardian, Killing in Cairo: The Full Story of the Republican Guards’ Club Shootings:

    “In the early hours of 8 July 2013, 51 Muslim Brotherhood supporters camped outside the Republican Guards’ club in Cairo were killed by security forces. The Egyptian military claimed the demonstrators had attempted to break into the building with the aid of armed motorcyclists. …
    “The military has said that the assault on the protesters was provoked by a terrorist attack. At about 4 a.m., according to the army’s account, 15 armed motorcyclists approached the Republican Guards’ club compound. The army said that the motorcyclists fired shots, that people attempted to break into the compound, and that the soldiers then had no choice but to defend their property.
    “However, a week-long investigation — including interviews with 31 witnesses, local people and medics, as well as analysis of video evidence — found no evidence of the motorcyclist attack and points to a very different narrative, in which the security forces launched a co-ordinated assault on a group of largely peaceful and unarmed civilians.”

Reuters, Egypt’s Brotherhood Proposes Crisis Talk Framework via EU Envoy:

    “The Muslim Brotherhood said on Thursday it had proposed through an EU go-between a framework for talks to resolve Egypt’s political crisis, its first formal announcement of an offer for negotiations since President Mohamed Morsy was toppled.
    “Brotherhood official Gehad el-Haddad, who represented the movement in previous EU-facilitated talks, told Reuters…[that] the Brotherhood would be willing to negotiate over any political issue, including new elections to replace Morsy as president, but insisted that the army would first have to reverse its decree that unilaterally removed Morsy.
    “‘First they have to reverse the coup,’ he said. ‘You can’t come on a tank and remove an elected leader…. It is a stand-off, it is either a military coup or a democratic choice.”

Egypt Independent, Tamarod Calls for Protest Against Constitutional Declaration:

    “The Tamarod campaign and the 30 June Front have both said that they have strong misgivings concerning the roadmap announced by the Army, stressing that they want the constitution to be rewritten entirely. They have announced their dissatisfaction with the current Constitutional Declaration, and have called on the Egyptian people to participate in rallies in Tahrir Square and at the Ettehadiya Presidential Palace on Friday to make those demands.”

The Telegraph, Chinese Museum Found with 40,000 Fake Exhibits Forced to Close:

    “The museum’s public humiliation began earlier this month when Ma Boyong, a Chinese writer, noticed a series of inexplicable discrepancies during a visit and posted his findings online.
    “Among the most striking errors were artifacts engraved with writing purportedly showing that they dated back more than 4,000 years…. However, according to a report in the Shanghai Daily the writing appeared in simplified Chinese characters, which only came into widespread use in the 20th century. …
    “Wei Yingjun, the museum’s chief consultant…said he was ‘quite positive’ that at least 80 of the museum’s 40,000 objects had been confirmed as authentic. …
    “Mr. Wei said that objects of ‘dubious’ origin had been ‘marked very clearly’ so as not to mislead visitors and vowed to sue Mr. Ma, the whistle-blowing writer, for blackening the museum’s name.”

The Guardian, Dutch Art Heist Paintings May Have Been Burned by Suspect’s Mother:

    “Ash from an oven owned by a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-pound paintings, including works by Matisse, Picasso and Monet, contained paint, canvas and nails, a Romanian museum official said on Wednesday.
    “The discovery could be evidence that Olga Dogaru was telling the truth when she claimed to have burned the paintings, which were taken from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal gallery last year in a daylight heist.
    “Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania’s National History Museum, told the Associated Press that museum forensic specialists had found small fragments of painting primer, the remains of canvas and paint, and copper and steel nails, some of which pre-dated the 20th century.”

Links 15 July 2013

Rami G. Khouri in The Daily Star, Spare Us Your Intellectual Disneylands:

    “Arab citizens, who now can express their identities and mobilize in the millions for mass political action, represent the agency of the individual citizen that remains, in my mind, the single most important development in the country since January 2011. …
    “Egyptians are not mobs who must choose only between democracy and army rule; rather they comprise thousands of citizen groups that rise and fall according to the times and conditions. Some go to public squares, some give to local charities, some stay home and watch television and vote when they are given that opportunity, and many millions do some or all of these things. This historic assertion of citizen agency in the past 30 months has resulted in indigenous political movements whose fortunes rise and fall. Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, the revolutionary youth, Salafist Islamists, the National Salvation Front…all have only one thing in common: They are accountable ultimately to the will of the Egyptians, and cannot try to impose a system of rule or national policies that the citizenry does not accept.”

Baheyya, Fashioning a Coup:

    “It’s soothing to believe that a popular uprising ejected an incompetent Islamist president. It’s not comforting to point out that a popular uprising was on the cusp of doing so, until the generals stepped in, aborted a vital political process, arrested the president, and proclaimed their own ‘roadmap’ for how things will be from now on. …
    “With their July 3 coup, Egypt’s new military overlords and their staunch American backers are playing an age-old game, the game of turning the public against the ineluctable bickering, inefficiency, gridlock, and intense conflict that is part and parcel of a free political life, so that a disillusioned, fatigued people will pine for the stability and order that the military then swoops in to provide. …
    “As the recently self-designated ’eminence grise’ Mohamed ElBaradie summed it up, ‘Without Morsi’s removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war.’
    “And that is the essence of the anti-political doctrine that worships order, fears political struggle, mistrusts popular striving, and kowtows to force majeure.”

Associated Press, Edward Snowden Has “Blueprints” to NSA:

    “Edward Snowden has highly sensitive documents on how the National Security Agency is structured and operates that could harm the U.S. government, but has insisted that they not be made public, a journalist close to the NSA leaker said.
    “Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who first reported on the intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that disclosure of the information in the documents ‘would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.’
    “He said the ‘literally thousands of documents’ taken by Snowden constitute ‘basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.'”

The Hill, Greenwald Warns Snowden Holds NSA “Blueprints”:

    “Greenwald’s latest comments come days after he warned that Snowden would release damaging information if he was not granted safe passage to asylum in a third country or if harm came to him.
    “‘Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the U.S. government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,’ Greenwald told an Argentine newspaper last week.
    “‘The U.S. government should be on your knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden because if something happens, all information will be revealed and that would be their worst nightmare,’ he added.”

Washington’s Blog, The Government Is Spying On ALL Americans’ Digital and Old-Fashioned Communications.

James Fallows in The Atlantic (quoting a reader), The Impending Senate Vote on Confirming Nominees:

    “‘On the procedural level that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s…. As a consequence, Obama cannot get anything done; he cannot even get the most innocuous appointees in office.
    “‘Yet he can assassinate American citizens without due processes…can detain prisoners indefinitely without charge; conduct surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant; and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called insider threat program). At home, this it is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal law enforcement agencies and their willing handmaidens at the state and local level. Abroad, Obama can start wars at will and pretty much engage in any other activity whatever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, to include just recently forcing down a plane containing a head of state. And not a peep from congressional Republicans, with the exception of an ineffectual gadfly like Rand Paul. Democrats, with the exception of a few like Ron Wyden, are not troubled, either….
    “‘Clearly there is government, and then there is government. The former is the tip of the iceberg…which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part is the Deep State, which operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. The Deep State is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies, key nodes of the judiciary…cleared contractors, Silicon Valley (whose cooperation is critical), and Wall Street.
    “‘This combination of procedural impotence on the one hand and unaccountable government by fiat on the other is clearly paradoxical, but any honest observer of the American state must attempt to come to grips with it.'”

MJ Rosenberg, I Can’t Imagine Being the Parent of a Young Black Man:

    “In addition to all the other random dangers teens face, black kids have to worry about the cops too or pseudo cops like George Zimmerman.
    “This verdict only confirms what black parents already knew: it is not safe out there for their boys. The good thing: maybe now their sons understand what their parents are so anxious about. Black parents aren’t paranoid. They know that their boys are at risk. Everywhere. …
    “I am glad I’m not black. I just don’t have the courage for it.”

George Dvorsky in io9, 10 Mindnumbingly Futuristic Technologies That Will Appear by the 2030s.

Erroll Morris in Slate, The Murders of Gonzago:

    “Josh Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing…is an examination of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, in which between 500,000 and 1 million people died. The Act of Killing is truly unlike any other documentary film. … One of the extraordinary things about documentary is that you get to continually reinvent the form, reinvent what it means to make a documentary — and Oppenheimer did just that. He identified several of the killers from 1965 and convinced them to make a movie about the killings. But the film is even weirder than that. Oppenheimer convinced these killers to act in a movie about the making of a movie about the killings. There would be re-enactments of the murders by the actual perpetrators. There would be singing, and there would be dancing. A perverted hall of mirrors.
    “But there is method to Oppenheimer’s madness — the idea that by re-enacting the murders, he, the viewers of the movie, and the various perpetrators recruited to participate could become reconnected to a history that had nearly vanished into a crepuscular past. Oppenheimer has the optimistic thought that the past is inside us and can be brought back to life.”

The Paradoxes of the Egyptian Moment

Did deposing Morsi serve the interests of “the revolution”?

We have a situation in which the elected president of Egypt was unable, and apparently unwilling (or even clueless about) advancing the key goals of “the revolution” that brought him to power. Rather, he sought to advance the interests and entrench the power of the narrow faction from which he came. So the “forces of revolution” which had seemed outnumbered during elections (for parliament, for president, and during the constitutional referendum) reemereged and demanded a “reset” in which a new president be found to advance their interests.

Those interests include challenging the dominance of the army in the public sphere (politics and the economy) — but paradoxically, the “revolutionaries” called on the army for help in deposing Morsi because he was not the right man to lead the charge against the army and the deep state! So now we have a situation where the army and even the police are, provisionally, the sponsors and backers of a movement (“the revolution” led by Egyptian youth) which by its very logic of its intentions, will turn against them at some point down the road!

As a friend reminded me yesterday, the Muslim Brothers were by no means the leaders of the February 2011 revolution against Mubarak. However, they were the best-organized political force left standing once Mubarak’s old guard was defeated, so they were the main beneficiaries of the elections that the Febuary 2011 revolution made possible. The February 2011 revolutionaries then found themselves in the unenviable position of having achieved a key demand — free and fair elections — which nevertheless set Egypt on a course that was in direct conflict with the rest of their demands — namely for an open, inclusive, and participatory society based on human dignity and social reform. This deeper transformation, which the revolution had really been all about to begin with, simmered under the surface over the past year and a half, largely frustrated by the Muslim Brothers who had seized power, and lacking an organized, institutional voice.

Finding that voice and building those institutions (through political parties, NGOs, the media, and elements of the new state) are the unfinished business of “the revolution.” The recent army-sponsored “reset” has once again opened the space for that to happen, but the “revolutionaries” will have to continue their transformative struggle, both through elections and culturally, socially — and of course realize that the army that helped them today is in a marriage of convenience only, and can’t be counted on to share their vision of an open society over the long term.

Links 09 July 2013

New York Times, Army Kills 51, Deepening Crisis in Egypt:

    “The mass shooting of Islamist protesters by security forces on Monday at a sit-in for Mohamed Morsi, the ousted president, injected new outrage into the standoff over his removal by Egypt’s top generals….
    “Leaders of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group and best-organized political force, said the generals had now shown their authoritarian colors, using lethal weapons to crush dissent while holding the freely elected president captive. They called for a national ‘uprising’ against the return of a military dictatorship. …
    “Sit-in participants said gunmen had fired on them from atop the military buildings surrounding their camp. Video footage captured by the Islamists showed a soldier firing down from a roof while another calmly filmed the mayhem below.
    “Sandbagged gun turrets were still visible hours later on some rooftops, and the angles of scores of bullet holes in cars, lampposts and the Islamists’ makeshift metal barriers indicated that gunfire hit at an angle from above.
    “Many witnesses said the fighting lasted for hours, with hundreds of heavily armed soldiers chasing mostly unarmed protesters through the streets for blocks while continuing to shoot. Bullet holes, bullet casings and pools of blood dotted the ground hundreds of yards from the presidential guardhouse where the fighting had begun.”

Juan Cole, Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood Calls for “Uprising” as Plan for Elections is Announced:

    [Dr. Cole cites an eyewitness account by a man named Omar Ahmed who is “known to Egyptian friends whom I trust.”]
    “He says that the army [used] a microphone to demand that the crowd near the Republican Guards Barracks disperse, and that the Brotherhood used their microphones to announce that martyrdom so near Ramadan would be a great thing. The army fired tear gas.
    “Then Omar heard firing at the troops and screams from the military side. The sniping was coming from al-Mustafa Mosque. The troops were also being hit with molotov cocktails. Then the microphone of the mosque threatened the troops, saying they are baby-killers.
    “Then a Brother began firing wildly with an automatic weapon. The troops returned fire and after that there were just bodies falling and men being taken into custody by the army. At 5 am, an hour into the clashes, reinforcements of more police and military showed up, and the Brotherhood militants withdrew to the Rabia al-Adawiya square or found refuge with local families in their apartments….
    “The dead include at least three military, and some 51 others, most of them likely non-combatants in the wrong place at the wrong time. …
    “On Monday evening, interim president Mansour tried to change the conversation by setting out a timetable for return to elected government. He said that within 15 days, a council of jurists must be appointed that would have two months to revise the 2012 constitution…. Parliamentary elections must be held by the end of the year or very early in Jan. 2014. The date for presidential elections hasn’t been set yet.”

Sarah Carr in Jadaliyya, On Sheep and Infidels:

    “There is a visceral hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafi associates amongst some Egyptians. This hatred spans all social classes and predates current events. It is born out of an arguably justified mistrust and fear of the group, who have lied, put their own interests first, excluded other groups, ramrodded through an excuse for a constitution, attempted to give Morsi dictator powers, flirted with the military and dallied in sectarianism politics in a frightening way. It failed to understand that it was running a country, and it missed the point that for public relations purposes if you are an Arab president who desires to quash dissent through an organized group you better make sure that that group is in uniform.
    “Perhaps most importantly, they were feeble as hell at governing Egypt at a time when amateurs really just would not do.
    “When Morsi supporters attempt to put their case forward their arguments bounce back off a wall of hate, but — deep breath — in my opinion these arguments were not without merit — up until 30 June. … Mendacity, poor governance, self-interest, and sidelining of other political powers are pretty much the watch-words of all political groups and are not, in isolation, enough to justify a president’s removal by the military. …
    “So my position on events pre-30 June has not been changed by events since: the Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high. It has created a generation of Islamists who genuinely believe that democracy does not include them. The post-30 June fallout reaffirms this belief, especially with Islamist channels and newspapers closed down as well as leaders detained and held incommunicado…. It is Egyptian society that will pay the price of the grievances this causes, and the fact that, with a silenced media and no coverage from independent outlets they have been left with virtually no channels to get their voice heard. …
    “Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.”

Nikolas K. Gvosdev in The National Interest, U.S. Values and Interests Clash in Egypt:

    “Of course, one of the main problems was that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were classic “illiberal democrats”—prepared to accept the necessity of elections and to have some policies put to the voters for validation but in no way inclined to endorse the full panoply of civil and political rights and ready to impose limits on freedom of speech and assembly. They were, in other words, prepared to accept opposition—but only on their terms. …
    “This creates a new dilemma for Washington. Certainly American interests are served by having the Egyptian military—much more of a known quantity, compared with the Brotherhood, ‘back in the saddle,’ but it also means accepting the armed forces as a clear counterweight to the possible excesses of the popular majority or of political leaders like the Brotherhood—and allowing the army to set ‘red lines’ for politics and to enforce them. … To some extent, what has happened in Egypt resembles the ‘soft coups’ that used to occur in Turkey, where the military would intervene and where such intervention usually coincided with U.S. interests, even if it offended U.S. values.”

Human Rights Watch, Egypt: Judge Government on Respect for People’s Rights (from July 4):

    “Egypt’s new government should break decisively from a pattern of serious abuses that has prevailed since the January 2011 uprising, and make a commitment to respect the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly. Authorities should protect and promote the rights of all Egyptians, and halt arbitrary arrests of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated Freedom and Justice Party. …
    “‘Egyptians suffered enormously under the generals and then under President Morsy’s government, which shoved human rights to the sidelines,’ said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. ‘One test of whether Egypt can return to a path of democratic development will rest on whether the Freedom and Justice Party can operate without political reprisals against its members.’ …
    “Egypt’s new interim president and the military leadership should immediately end reprisals against Muslim Brotherhood political leaders, including arrests or travel bans, and should allow the Freedom and Justice Party to fully exercise freedom of association, Human Rights Watch said.
    “The new government needs to make it clear immediately that it and all state bodies, including the armed forces, will respect all basic rights that apply within Egypt at all times.”

Agence France Presse, Morsy Ouster in Egypt Crushes Hamas Dreams: Analysts.

BBC News Magazine, Hikikomori: Why Are So Many Japanese Men Refusing to Leave Their Rooms?

Afrik.com, Homosexuality: Tariq Ramadan Drops a Bomb in Dakar (in French).

    “In a country with a 95% Muslim population who are radical with regard to any recognition of homosexual status, one must be brave, yes, very brave to dare to integrate gays into the ranks of ‘followers of Islam.’ And that’s what the Swiss citizen of Egyptian origin did in confiding that ‘it isn’t because one is homosexual that one isn’t Muslim.’ A remark that continues to provoke controversy in the country. Tariq Ramadan didn’t stop there. … ‘All scholars are unanimous on the question. Islam forbids homosexuality, as do all the monotheistic religions. But, being homosexual doesn’t mean that one isn’t Muslim. There is no witch hunt,’ noted Tariq Ramadan, who went further. ‘We need to promote a discourse of responsibility and avoid judging.”

The Whole Truth

This article by Zied Boumaiza on the Nawaat Tunisia website is a shade more pessimistic than I am, but it comes close to capturing my feelings. The original is in French, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating the whole thing for my English-only readers.

— • —

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It can’t stray from its path, nor change its essence according to context, affinity, or mood. There’s only one justice, too, for everyone and from every angle. It can’t keep quiet in the depths of a noble soul without risk of suffocation.

So let’s tell it like it is, despite the pain of defending today what we’ve always fought. It’s torture, isn’t it, to take the side of yesterday’s oppressor. What to do if today he’s the oppressed? Power changes sides, but principles remain unchangeable.

A coup d’état, a putsch, a usurpation, a betrayal. That’s what it is. Without any euphemism, let’s not try to cover up what just happened in Egypt with pretty words.

Military men who depose a president elected through universal suffrage, who put him in prison and all the leaders of his party with him — a party, let us note in passing, that swept more than 60% of the seats in democratic elections — who suspend a constitution ratified by popular referendum with more than 67% of the vote, or in other words, a plebescite.

The Egyptian “people” have clearly filled the streets and squares of Egypt with a dramatic surge unique in History to demand the fall of the regime, but is that enough to force out a regime installed by the will of the people?

The will of the people is measured in number of votes, not in square meters nor in decibels. More than 12 million voted for Shafik last time, enough to fill Tahrir Square five times, yet he wasn’t the winner. Isn’t that democracy? Do we need to reread our classics?

    “Election: an operation by which free citizens choose their masters.”

So this people had the chance three times over to hand the Muslim Brothers a stinging defeat. Three attempts to reject political Islam, three bullets to shoot down that mediocrity, and instead, this great people propelled the Brotherhood to the throne of Egypt three times in a row. So there’s no surprise that the Brothers would think they had a blank check. And even then, not a television station was censured, not a word in a newspaper was crossed out by those in power, despite an out-of-control press. For good or ill, they respected the freedom of the press a thousand times better than their successors. That’s a fact.

So this great people has to own up to its choices — and by the way, there are millions who still do own up to them, and who today feel like they’ve been stabbed in the back. Those people don’t resemble me. I believe they’ve been duped, blinded, and are completely wrong, but I understand their rage perfectly.

The rest of you, progressives, democrats, and activists for the rule of law, isn’t it shameful, this complicit silence or this unseemly gloating? Isn’t it a betrayal of the values you’ve defended your whole lives? So shake off your discomfort and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

As far as Egypt is concerned, that country I love so much — it will never again raise its head. The democratic process has stalled out, injustice is accomplished, and trust is forever shaken. There’s no way to turn back. The anger is churning and will keep churning, and the resentment will always be there. The fury has begun, and God alone knows how many corpses it will take before it’s over.

Links 06 July 2013

Daniel Levy in Al Jazeera English: Mubarak’s Children Come Home:

    “The man undoubtedly cooing as he watched the military coup against Mohamed Morsi…was his authoritarian predecessor Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak’s prison cell must now be a cheerier place, and one reason stands out. For all of their vocal hatred of the ex-leader and apparent objection to everything ‘Mubarakist’, the Tahrir revolutionaries have just proven themselves to be the most faithful followers of his core legacy — anything but the Brotherhood. …
    “The Morsi year was hardly a success story…. But to embrace the army as the great liberator just as it was busy deposing a democratically elected president and upper House of Parliament, moving tanks against rival protestors, arresting political leaders and shutting down TV stations, surely that requires a large dose of pre-existing prejudice. From day one of Morsi’s election to day 366 (when the military coup ultimatum was announced) it was more the opposition than the presidency who rejected power-sharing and compromise, insisting instead on zero-sum politics. …
    “The Tahrir protesters abandoned at least two key democratic principles — respect for outcomes expressed at the ballot box and the non-interference of the military in politics. If the Tamarod (rebel) movement, behind the latest anti-Morsi mobilization, really had 22 million supporters as it claimed, then that should have been translated into votes in parliamentary elections scheduled by President Morsi for later this year. If there were grounds for doing so, a new Parliamentary majority could then have impeached the President. …
    “This is not a victory for freedom but for the old regime, or more precisely the Egyptian deep-state — a bureaucratic, military, and business elite, that never went away, is considered to be the real power in Egypt, and that just reasserted its interests.”

Mark Levine in Al Jazeera English: L’Etat, C’Est Nous — Who Will Control the Egyptian State?

    “For its part, the military clearly considers itself, if not coterminous with the Egyptian state, then the primary conduit through which the needs and desires of the people can be realised…. Its main strategy for maintaining the ‘legitimacy’ that Morsi so quickly lost is to serve as the grand mediator of contending social and political forces that, left to their own devices, risked tearing Egypt apart.
    “In so defining its role the military has taken a page from the Arab world’s deepest state, Moroccan monarchy and the Makhzen, the political and economic elite that surrounds, is managed by and serves it. … By defining itself above partisan politics and economic interests, the King and Makhzen have been able to rule Morocco for centuries, weathering challenges that sent many other regimes to the historical dustbin and ensuring a level of entrenched political power and corruption that is the envy of most autocratic regimes. It’s a record the Egyptian military would love to emulate.
    “The question is, will the Egyptian people accept the Makhzenification of the Egyptian military? … As for the one revolutionary group within the leadership, the Tamarod movement represented by El Baradei, he and senior Tamarod leaders such as Mahmoud Badr have showered the military with praise in recent days, an attitude that has angered many revolutionary activists. Yet it’s hard to imagine Badr or any other leader of the ‘rebellion’ actually believes in the good intention of the military or other remnants of the old order. … Perhaps it is Tamarod and the millions of other protesters in the streets of Egypt…who are playing the military and the deep state, and not the other way around.
    “Who’s playing whom will become clear in the coming months. The only way the ‘rebellion’ will complete its revolutionary transformation is if it fundamentally transforms the Egyptian economy and the deeply buried political networks that still control it. And the military will do whatever it can to prevent this from happening.”

Nathan Brown in The New Republic: Egypt Coup — A Roadmap for Backseat Drivers:

    “[General Abdel Fattah] Al-Sisi’s statement [deposing President Morsi] was immediately blessed by the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Egypt’s top religious official. And the country’s largest Salafi party fell into line as well. Al-Azhar and the Salafis are rivals to the Brotherhood to be sure, but why were they so quick to sign off on deposing Egypt’s first Islamist president?
    “Here’s the unspoken secret: the military, al-Azhar, and the Salafis got exactly what they wanted in the 2012 constitution. There are provisions on the military (no real civilian oversight), al-Azhar (a muscular supervisory role over Islamic legal issues), and the Islamic sharia that each of these actors want to protect. The Brotherhood had allowed these clauses in order to get necessary support for a constitution that other political forces had bitterly come to oppose.
    “So when it comes time to suggest constitutional amendments, today’s happy family of Morsi opponents may turn into a rather dysfunctional group. This is precisely where the 2011 revolution began to go off the rails…. It could happen again.”

Reuters: Egypt Left Leader Backs Military Role, Sees Short Transition:

    “Egypt’s leading left-wing politician endorsed military intervention to oust elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and said he expected a short transition to a new democratic president and parliament.
    “Hamdeen Sabahi, leader of the Popular Current movement…said the army had implemented the will of the people and was not seeking power for itself. …
    “Those who called Mursi’s removal this week a military coup were insulting the Egyptian people, who had turned out in their millions to demand his ouster, Sabahi said. …
    “Sabahi, a firebrand orator who models himself on former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, spelled out the sequence of steps he said had been agreed for the transition.
    “‘We have agreed on a roadmap that has a new constitution that will be drafted by a committee to amend the suspended constitution and change the disputed articles, after which people will vote on it in a referendum. Then, there will be a presidential election, then a parliamentary election,’ he said.”

Jack Whelan in After the Future: Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy:

    “According to the civics text books, a democracy is a government in which the people are sovereign. … [Yet] it’s been demonstrated time and time again that majorities often get it wrong. … The ancient Greeks thought democracy was a form of government that inevitably devolved into tyranny precisely because of its vulnerability for majorities to be manipulated by demagogues who used popular support to obtain power, and then used that power to establish an autocracy. …
    “And so it should be obvious that because a government was democratically elected, it does not mean that it has legitimacy. The ballot box confers what I would describe as a provisional legitimacy; it’s not absolute. Ultimately legitimacy is conferred in the streets. …
    “There isn’t something sacred about democratic elections. If 50% + 1 of your electorate is insane, ignorant, and easily manipulable, you probably shouldn’t have them. … Democratic elections, I’d argue, have legitimacy only in societies with majorities that possess a basic level of decency, maturity, and civic mindedness…. Legality does not equal legitimacy.”

Jack Whelan in After the Future: Sirota v. Brooks on Egyptians’ Mental Capacity:

    “What if the Christian fundamentalists in Mississippi completely dominated the state Republican Party in the next election cycle, win in a landslide, and ram through the substitution of Biblical Law for its state constitution? Would that be ok just because a majority supported it in a democratic process? Or would it be a sign that most Mississipians lacked the mental capacity to govern in the modern world? Why is it different in Egypt, and why is it wrong to question the mental capacity of any country, state, or party that allows itself to be governed by religious fanatics? …
    “Democracy is not an end it itself; it is a means to an end, namely to deliver within the framework of a contemporary, pluralistic society a basic level of sanity and decency. If I live in a society in which power resides with an entrenched faction dominated by actors who are not sane and decent, even if they are democratically elected, then democracy has failed. If insanity and indecency have clotted the system with majority approval, then the decent, sane people in the minority cannot be blamed for looking for other than democratic means to fix the problem.”

(Yes, but who decides who the “sane and decent” people are — and who gives them that right? Apparently, they just know who they are, and they give themselves that right. This “right to know better” is the flaw of liberal elitism, which led to the Christian fundamentalist backlash in the US in the first place. A similar arrogance can be seen today among certain secular-minded people in the Arab world. They only support democratic outcomes if those outcomes break their way. See the quote from Daniel Levy above: “It was more the opposition than the presidency who rejected power-sharing and compromise, insisting instead on zero-sum politics.”)

Michael Plitnick in Souciant: Egypt’s Elusive Democracy.

Lakome.com: Egyptian Crisis and Eventual Repurcussions for Morocco — What Do Moroccan Politicians Think? (in French).

The Guardian: Morsi’s Downfall Determined by Coffee Shop Rebels Rather than Army:

    “‘The economy was being wrecked by the [Brotherhood] movement,’ [said a senior western diplomat who had spent time with Morsi]. ‘They were spending at least $1.5bn per month more than they should have. They were using months and months of reserves at a critical level. You couldn’t deny the underlying trend that the government was heading for bankruptcy.’ …
    “By March, serious diplomatic efforts had started to convince Morsi to form a government of national unity.
    “‘We were trying to convince them to broaden the base of political participation,’ said the diplomat. ‘After much negotiation, they declined and then went about making it even worse by maintaining a technocratic government run by newly promoted lower-grade officials with bad ideas.’ …
    “By mid-June, with other state institutions now sharing the military’s alarm, the tide was clearly turning against Morsi. Tamarod claimed to have received more than 20m petition signatures.
    “Within a week, citizens experienced shortages of essentials, especially food and fuel. Long queues for fuel are rare in Egypt, where the military…is usually a guarantor of supply. But in the leadup to the first anniversary of Morsi’s swearing in — June 30 — …the shortages seemed specially severe.”

(Doesn’t this last bit belie the headline, which claims that youth, not the army, are responsible for the fall of Morsi? Doesn’t it raise the suspicion that the army may have engineered fuel shortages, to stoke popular discontent with Morsi’s government at a crucial time?)