Another factor ignored generally has been the upsurge by “Salafi” Islamists, that is, those even more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood. Many of these people, and certainly their leaders, have been radicalized by the Brotherhood but want a faster pace and higher level of violence for the revolution.
The Financial Times reports:
“Attacks against citizens by ultraconservative Muslims have deepened fears of a surge in religious violence in Egypt during the country’s political transition after the fall of Hosni Mubarak as president.”
And then it says something completely false:
“The attacks are being ascribed to followers of Salafi Islam, a purist form of religion whose conservative message was allowed to spread through society in the Mubarak years because it focused on morality rather than politics.”
No, these are the people who waged a virtual civil war in the 1990s and were repressed by the Mubarak regime. Indeed, many of them responded to repression and long imprisonment by declaring that they concluded violence had been a mistake. The Mubarak regime defeated an Islamist threat precisely by not appeasing it.
Now these ultra-radicals are being released from prison and returning to their old ways, or at least feeling emboldened by the new situation. The article blames the problem on the Mubarak regime which will make it impossible to understand what’s happening.
It continues:
“Egyptians have been shocked by news that Islamists cut off the ear of a Christian man in the southern city of Qena over allegations that he had a relationship with a Muslim woman. In the same week, hundreds of religious conservatives in a northern Nile delta town were reported to have ejected a woman from her flat and burnt it down because of rumours about her conduct. Salafis have also been accused this week of attacking and destroying the tombs of local Muslim saints in several small Nile delta towns. Salafis view the veneration of saints as a form of idolatry.”
This is only the start. Here’s what journalists miss: the key question is whether the army, police, and later an elected government will undertake the difficult, somewhat unpopular task of shooting it out with these people, catching them, and throwing them into prison, even if they “only” kill Christians or rough up women who don’t conform to Islamist norms. For ideological and electoral reasons, I don’t think this is going to happen.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at http://www.gloria-center.org
First was Russia, then Iran, now Egypt, and if the “secular reformers and twenty-something urbanites”, full of righteous indignation, youthful enthusiasm, piss and vinegar, but with absolutely no idea of “what to do once they’ve caught the car” then you can expect to see it repeated over and over, and likely quite rapidly. Useful idiots to those who have kept their powder dry awaiting the opportunity to fill the vacuum and take over.
Media on Egypt: Mubarak supporters` stones wounded the great nomber of demonstrators.Camera showed the adult men crying of pain.I remember the flying stones of Palestin Arabs in Intifadas showed by dashing reporters who never showed the victims of the thrown stones.I have sent this comment to the 3 websites of different political orientations! The result was=0.
Great article! Barry Rubin points out that the media knows little about Egyptian politics. Or maybe they DO know and just spin it so that “radical, extremist conservatives” are the bad guys.
That tactic sounds familiar . . . where have I seen that before? Hmmm . . .
Egyptian prisons are notoriously brutal. And there’s already something of a tradition whereby Islamist political prisoners develop advanced levels of Nihilistic blood lust while locked up by Egypt’s strongman of the day. Sayyid Qutb (more here) penned Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones) in an Egyptian prison. Al Queda co-founder Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri is said to have become unusually bloodthirsty and desensitized to violence after his imprisonment and subsequent torture — at 15 years of age — for conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Egyptian government. And Fr. Zakaria Botros (a Coptic priest) has spoken of living with many other prisoners in a cell that had only a tiny opening on the ground to let air and light in.
You don’t have to be a “xenophobic rightwing Islamophobe” to be slightly disquieted by the fact that scores of newly-released Salafist political prisoners are roaming Egypt’s streets, intent on gaining political power in the vacuum left by Mubarak’s departure . . . after presumably being subjected to years of torture in prison.
Yeah, but what did Qutb and Zawahiri want in the first place? Before they landed in Egyptian prison?
To say that prison moulded them into disciplined and tough people able to endure much more than the average ideologue is Darwinian construction of the cause and effect variety, but it doesn’t answer what it is they want, and it is risible to extend the blanket of “suffering servant” by virtue of harsh political repression onto the likes of Qutb and Zawahiri (it’s post facto revisionist man/myth making, same thing we have here w/ 0bama admin). They always wanted power, and they wanted power over people, so how on earth are they to be considered exceptional compared with a regime or regimes that have to deal with nutcase power/control freaks such as muslim brotherhood, an where mb will brook no dissent once they wield the absolute power they have coveted for so long anyway?
A more important question is how they will feed the people of Egypt, since rising food prices are the driving factor behind these “pro-democracy” demonstrations. I doubt tourism is going to do it (it’s Egypt’s only operating natural resource), unless tourists have bought into a western media narrative that has sided with mb ambitions before, during and after this entire “pro-democracy” fiction?
All good points. Qutb and Zawahiri (even a 15 year old Zawahiri) were religious zealots before they went into prison. Both became angrier and more militant after their prison experiences, but plenty of American prisoners become angrier and more militant in prison too (and no serious person would contend that American prisons are on par with Egyptian prisons in terms of brutality). An it’s no doubt true that Qutb and Zawahiri — both of whom were affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood at the time of their respective imprisonments — craved the same power over people that everyone from Assad and Qaddafi to the Brotherhood and the Salafis thirst for today.
So why mention the belief that Al-Queda is more sadistic than other Islamic terrorist groups because Zawahiri became more blood thirsty than the average blood thirsty terrorist after being tortured in prison? Because it’s been something of a meme in polite liberal circles (well, at least among liberals who are honest enough to recognize that sadistic Islamist terrorism does exist, and isn’t merely a “push back” to Western imperialist oppression). It was probably popularized by Lawrence Wright, who put it forth in “The Looming Tower” as a hypothesis (though Wright treats it as a known fact) to explain the purportedly more-sadistic-than-your-average-terrorist violent nature of Al-Queda.
Is there any truth to the belief? Maybe, maybe not. There’s probably some level of truth to it, but it may be just as likely that it serves as a mechanism by which liberals, ever inflicted with white guilt, allow themselves to recognize Al-Queda’s sadistic and violent nature without attempting to blame that nature on Western ills (for once), but also without having to place the blame on Islam (conveniently blaming secular Muslim dictators instead).
You probably won’t like this, but here’s the impetus for putting forth the comment you object so strongly to: it’s intended to be a buffer for a typical well intentioned, but under informed young American audience who, upon reading Mr. Rubin’s post, are likely to have their Mainstream Media-created rainbows-and-unicorns fairytale beliefs about the Egyptian revolution challenged for the first time. And to be specific, the audience in mind are friends, acquaintances and associates of yours truly who, on occasion, ask for suggestions on what to read to be better informed, or who object to non-polite liberal positions of mine and challenge yours truly to provide sources for such heretofore unheard of non conventional wisdom. These are regular people who get their information from “mainstream” sources like the Daily Show, Colbert, Yahoo, Google News and the Huffington Post. They frequently say things like, “hey ‘T.S.,’ you know a lot about all kinds of stuff … where can I learn more about _____________ (fill in the blank),” or “I don’t know if I agree with that … cite your sources.” They’re people who’d likely be put off by your average “ObaMao is a Marxist Chicago thug” blog comment, but who might be open enough to the Lawrence Wright hypothesis to click on the Qutb, al-Zawahiri and Fr. Botros links (and thus, learn something). You’ve deconstructed that hypothesis fairly well. More power to you. But that’s beside the point, at least insofar as it relates to the ultimate purpose of the comment in question (though, the cat’s more or less out of the bag now). Say what you will, but comment #4 was put together with a specific audience in mind — namely, the two or three people who received a link to this post and who, by reading Mr. Rubin’s non-conventional viewpoint and (hopefully) reading through the links in the comment above, are being exposed to new information.
Wow! The writers at the Times are really cognitively slow. I’ve seen high school students more intellectually alert than this.
1917 revisited. March – overthrow of Tsar, disorganised liberal democrat regime installed. October – highly organised Bolsheviks overthrows democracy in a putsch.
I’m not the only one familiar with history. This is a replay. And yes, it was obvious in January.
“Is it too much to ask that highly trained, expensively educated, and well-paid people who make decisions and report or analyze events understand the previous two paragraphs?”
There’s your problem. These people are highly indoctrinated, not highly trained or educated.
“There’s your problem. These people are highly indoctrinated, not highly trained or educated.”
Exactly. Journalism is the new default major in college. If you don’t know what else to study, and you can’t pass art history or even women’s studies, try journalism. You don’t have to actually know anything, you just have to have the correct political slant.
It’s worse than the media. It seems there’s evidence that Obama Administration “people” (Powers?) met with and encouraged the “secular reformers” (helped them plan? caused?) the “revolution.”
Did those “savvy” pols not know that the Mus. Brotherhood would swamp the “secularists?” Hmmm.
Why then, I wonder, did our pres. invite them to his speech in Egypt?
Well DUH. This story isn’t just an interesting side story about those wacky Libs in the MSM and infotainment MOB coming late to these realizations only when they actually happen and cannot be easily dismissed. This is about the professional Leftists (Making a difference!) weaving a complete balnket of lies which they use to smother and kill the truth in the service of the Great Liberal Enterprise. Those 70-80% of US citizens who get their news through the passive osmosis of absorbing unavoidable sound bites and above-the-fold headlines believe they have an accurate understanding of world events. Those same disinterested and easily manipulated sheeple do not want to hear anything about how they allowed themselves to be duped or how their foolish and self-involved attitudes were central to the Lefts ability to manipulate them. The Journolist conspiracy is alive and well, just don’t expect the average citizen to care about it or to try and educate themselves beyond the Leftists scripted and manicured blanket of lies. I mean, if you did someone in the MSM might call you “racist” or “hater of the poor”, ad nauseum. No self-centered satisfaction in that!
In a world where stupidity and style are seen as virtues and vigillance, self reliance and wisdom are seen as archaic throwbacks to the horrid, regressive and unfair world of Dead White Men (our founders) there is little chance of any change which will deter us from our current path of self-centered self destruction. The important thing is, that self-destruction will be done in style!
By definition, western media in its current incarnation is incapable of ‘spotting’ Islamists alongside their tent.
Why?Because western media is rife with radical revolutionaries-of the socialist/Marxist persuasion.The fact that their end games are radically different is of no consequence.However, what IS of consequence is that BOTH want to destroy capitalism and upend the world order.
So, IF anyone still has a doubt how it was possible that western media missed the jihad, the answer is not too complicated.
As they watched events unfold in Egypt(and beyond)they saw them through their radical left prism.To wit, whatever destroys US/Israel interests in the region becomes something to rally behind, even if hard core Islamists are the winners.
United in their hate, they plot the west’s downfall.
yes it was obvious. I had many here at pajamas tell me I was wrong. (I lost a lot of respect for many posters on these pajamas media essays)
now I hope some of them can see that the so-called conservatives (RINO’s) are lying scum like obama is.
Yes, everything is obvious to people with extremely large brains who sit in the dark and wait for the sun to come up and then declare an epiphany us ‘great unwashed’ never had a chance at cuz we are too busy sitting in front of giant black monoliths and waiting for clues.
Precisely what is it that you were so right about and everyone else was so wrong about?
I can’t wait to have the ‘obvious’ revealed to me since precisely nothing of note has happened in Egypt since Feb.11 that will decide anything one way or another. What HAS happened is that Egypt continues to slog ahead with the plan of a new Presidential election, new parlimentary elections and introducing an entirely new Constitution. Nothing has ‘failed’ yet and success is on the road using a rule of law to do so.
Exactly what about that did you predict? What has happened that is so bad and that you predicted. Did you predict the referendum happening so quickly or any referendum? Do you know what it was about even after the fact? Did you predict the army declaring there will be no religious based political parties. I can’t wait for this.
If laying in the weeds and waiting for something to go wrong and then to declare it obvious when something actually does go wrong was the only argument in the first place then that is not actual reasoning; reasoning acknowledges positives and does not wait for events to swing around until it fits a negative agenda. This situation is fraught with difficulties and failure easier than success given the institutions still in place. We should be congratulating these people for what they have done so far and not giggling at every misstep.
There is waiting and seeing and then there is seeing and then waiting for events to match your entirely negative vision while ignoring everything else in the meantime.
I hope many of the people here are not motivational speakers.
Excellent and very accurate, James May. Thanks for this – and your other comments. At least there’s someone here who doesn’t live in an imaginary world but in reality!
nice …looks like alisnky tactics weren’t lost on you.
you provide an insight to the mindset of the left and socialists (sheep) …say the democrats in Wisconsin.
insults do not make great arguments but do tell a lot about the individual making them.
regards
show me some good news out of the middle east …there isn’t any unless you are anti-Semitic.
the reference to “obvious” comes from the author of the essays title. but that might be hard to get if you are only trying to slap some one down because you don’t like what they say …you have mastered troll speak well.
islam is incompatible with democracy, so I would be curious as to where so many people think democracy will come to islamic countries.
I actually do not expect an answer and I will not reply to you again since in my opinion it is pointless.
…the esay below does an eloquent explaination of how I feel on this.
http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/articles/080121jb_en.html
Barry,
Welcome aboard and thanks for pointing out just how naive, foolish and irresponsible most of the reporters and editors were about the reporting on the Egyptian revolution.
What happened there is an old story. It happened in Moscow in 1917 and Tehran in 1979, the organized force crowded out the less organized political competetors. If you are somewhat educated about these things, it is easy to predict what will happen. The media completely fell down in their assessment that democracy would take hold in Egypt. It’s what happens when ideologues with no appreciation of history work for and run newspapers. Their foolishness becomes evident for all to see.
Please do more stories where you post game evaluate as you did in your column above. It is very instructive. The media as a whole needs to be held accountable for the poor quality of its scholarship and product.
“If you are somewhat educated about these things, it is easy to predict what will happen.” he said with an airy wave of his hand.
Yeah, you predict and the other can do a post-game wrap up and maybe it’ll get a Hugo Award for best science fiction novelette of 2012.
By cherry picking rhetoric, Mr. Rubin, you are ignoring several more basic realities.
First – rhetoric, both extreme and moderate, is found in all societies. You can find extremist rhetoric about ‘races’, ethnicities, gender relations, religion etc…in the US, in Britain, in France, in the Netherlands, in Israel, in….
It doesn’t mean that the rhetoric runs the nation.
Second, you are ignoring the basic operating structure of a society, which is not rhetoric, but…a triad-of-realities. The size of the population, the economic mode, the political mode.
Extremist ideologies, because they are selective in their membership, and repressive and controlling of their members to retain purity of type, can only operate for any lenght of time in small populations. They cannot last in large populations without extreme repression..and they cannot ‘energize’ the repression without extensive energy costs..for more than a generation in large populations.
Islamic fascism, like other extremist ideologies, is parasitic on the basic operating structure of a society. That is, extremist ideologies are not capable of enabling a modern economic mode; they can only function in no-growth, no innovation, no entrepreneurship economic modes.
The basic problem in the ME – is that their population has outstripped the carrying capacity of their old economic mode; a statist socialist redistributive mode. This old system simply doesn’t generate enough wealth to support the massive doubling of population in the last generation. The economy must move to a system that generates more wealth: capitalism, which is private small/medium businesses run by individuals. A middle class.
And that means: constitutional democracy – because all political systems must empower their most productive class.
So- the rhetoric that you cherry picked won’t necessarily go away, just as extremist rhetoric in other countries won’t disappear. The focus has to be on whether this rhetoric is linked to a productive reality. Can it function to economically strengthen the society? If yes – OK. But if no..then, it remains..rhetoric.
Give it up ETAB. People simply do not act the way you want or think they should.
And what is that supposed to mean? My point is that the Orientalist mindset of so many in the West, which is that ‘All Muslims/Middle Easterners are either primitive savages and/or Islamic terrorists’ is a figment of the Western mind. Not reality. And that reality requires that one acknowledge what is REALLY going on in the ME.
It certainly does not seem to be any majority demand for Islamic fundamentalism! Do you seriously consider that the people in the ME simply want to exchange one repressive dictatorship for another? Prove it.
They want neither; they want freedom to live and be economically productive. That’s what their actions and rhetoric are declaring. To cherrypick, as Mr. Rubin is doing, from fundamentalists, can be done in any country in the world – including the US. Focus on the actions.
And, you cannot, no matter how much ideology you speak or listen to, ignore the economic infrastructure. Take a look at what is happening in the US, with Obama and his Gang focusing on rhetoric rather than reality..and they do it everywhere – in the economy, foreign affairs. But reality is stronger than rhetoric.
The FACTS of the ME are its population explosion..which has gone beyond the capacity of its statist economy and left the majority of the population in static poverty. What is there to say about that? Hopeandchange? Fling more statist money at the people (Obama has done that here and is forcing the US into near bankruptcy). Or face reality – and energize the middle class?
To reduce reality to words…as you, Obama, Mr. Rubin and other Orientalists are doing..and ignoring the basic infrastructure…is naive. Obama lives in an imaginary virtual world of words. How’s that working out?
ETAB: “And what is that supposed to mean? My point is that the Orientalist mindset of so many in the West, which is that ‘All Muslims/Middle Easterners are either primitive savages and/or Islamic terrorists’ is a figment of the Western mind.”
Lara Logan believed what you believe.
The great majority of Muslim vote Islamic values, meaning the vast majority of Muslims vote for terrorism, war, mass murder, and rape, vote for people who promise to walk in the footsteps of Mohamed.
No Muslims anywhere should be allowed to vote. It is dangerous for themselves, and it is even more dangerous for everyone else.
Sorry, but “constitutional democracy” won’t do it. But a simple Republic, and it’s body of laws, applicable to all, that will do it.
“Democracies are ever as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths” -Madison.
A republic is a constitutional democracy.
The term ‘republic’ refers to the mode of organization of authority: elected vs hereditary. You can have a republic whose leader(s) is elected, more or less by the citizens. Or, one whose leader is elected by a small group, or one whose leader is elected by an unelected set of authorities.
The term ‘democracy’ refers to the method of coming to decisions in the society: majority vote vs…power of wealth (the rich landowner alone has the vote); fights; full consensus of all elders; consensus of all family members, consensus of ..
The term ‘constitutional’ refers to the legal restraints on both the organization of authority (that elected leader(s))…and the method of coming to a decision. So, ‘constitutional’ applies both to the form of govt (republic vs monarchy vs dictator etc)..and to the method of coming to a decision (democracy vs authoritarian..) …
So – a constitutional monarchy and a republic can both function as constitutional democracies..and manage quite well. The UK, Canada, Australia etc..are constitutional monarchies and constitutional democracies. Same with a number of other European countries.
Democracy is invariably an overlapping, brief transitional period during and on the way to central controlled dictatorship. In democracy, it’s majority rule so privately owned property can be seized and appropriated by the government. There’s a supreme court ruling on this, Kelo vs, new London, and the supreme court ruled in favor of the governments avarice, and against property owners.
The populism of the argument is that in Kelo, government argued that it would be putting the land seized in Kelo to “good and productive use” or some such. Nothing has been built or developed in the house seized in New London. But who cares? The government said it would be for good reasons, and they wouldn’t act in their interests only, against the citizenry, now would they?
Thieves in government, have scrapped our Republic and it’s laws in favor of this transition, and democracy is used to spin populist fantasies of “social justice”, but meanwhile none of the thieves on Wall Street have faced a single indictment from the Justice Department. Voter intimidation in Philly? Forget about it!
This government is bought and paid for by these crony capitalists, and corporate welfare (paid for by taxpayers) is used to stifle competition from small business and is the club used to beat down any dissent against this practice. the big banks get help, but the smaller ones are on their own, and will get gobbled up by the big one’s anyway.
We’ve seen this europe many times, and it is playing out now again. The only reason it took so long this time has been previous Warsaw pact security provided by U.S. against europe’s prime enemy Soviet Union, but now the threat has changed, and now the welfare/pensions state is going bust.
…As we will too, inevitably
Islam is pretty good at extreme repression. They’re been managing quite well with it for about 6 or 7 centuries now. Some folks might call that, “lasting”, I suppose.
Of course, reality is no match for your theories, is it?
Islamism hasn’t operated in large populations but in mid-size populations (hundreds of thousands not millions) – and it has operated in tribal economic and political modes that are No-Growth. It can’t function in economies that require growth in wealth production. That’s reality.
How many people lived in Iran at the time of the revolution and since then? Hundreds of thousands? We all know it is millions.
Clearly there is less fantacism now in the population but the initial fervor helped create the police state that cannot now be easily overthrown.
This fact seems to point to the idea that those that see a pattern of fanatics/bolsheviks or whatever seizing power and then ruling are right
“One of Egypt’s leading ultraconservative sheiks, Mohamed Hussein Yacoub, influenced by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi strain of Islam, was quoted as saying after the referendum had passed: ‘That’s it. The country is ours.’”
It is becoming very clear that the Obama administration screwed up big time in Egypt. Remember when the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said to Congress with a straight face that “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.” Remember that gem? So I guess he was wrong, huh? OK, so now what? Does the Obama administration just say “Ooops, we made a mistake?” And where was our much vaunted Secretary of State during all this, Hillary Clinton? So we just chalk one up to experience and hope for the best in the future? Is this any way AT ALL to run a foreign policy?
Never, ever, back a revolution unless you know who is going to replace the person you’re overthrowing. There was no pro-democratic, pro-western leader in Egypt that was leading the rebellion, so now there is nobody to carry on the cause for democracy in that country. All you have now is the Muslim Brotherhood that is going to step into the vacuum and take over the country, probably turning it into another Iran. Great going, champ. You just took the largest arab country in the Middle East and handed it to the radical Islamists.
This is what you get when you have a president that is driven by an anti-Israeli ideology and doesn’t have a clue on how politics is run in the Middle East. Our country, as well as Israel, can’t take four more years of this. Obama has to go in 2012.
Even as the Mass Media admits the reality hitting them in the face it is interesting how they frame Islamists.
Financial Times reports “Attacks against citizens by ultraconservative Muslims…”
“…followers of Salafi Islam, a purist form of religion whose conservative message…”
So does the Mass Media believe violent Islamists are “conservative” because they are holding to fundamental core tenets of the Koran ? Does that mean also that the Mass Media believes moderate Muslims are breaking with the Islamic belief system ? Are moderate Muslims apostates ?
that’s just insane to do that to people it is just plain wrong
By not publishing my comment you have showed clear how much differens exists between “mass media” and Pajamas media.Thank you.
Ben,
Your previous comment was published above, chill out.
Pajamas has been one of the leading web sites for disseminating the truth about Islam and Israel. They are to be commended, not condemned.
There’s often a gap of time between posting and publishing. I think it’s usually a cache issue. If I look on the computer I use for the posting, I sometimes can’t see my post for several hours. If I use another computer, I see it very quickly.
In other words, it’s a technical problem, and probably one on your end.
MSM/”progressive thought-holders” = “Useful Idiots,” yadda yadda yadda.. And the point is? Mr. Rubin carefully documents the obvious–the very fact of the necessity of his doing so being a sad commentary on our current sociocultural condition indeed..
No one will ever go broke betting on the perfidy, delusion and intellectual laziness of the liberal media and the clowns at the State Department. Unfortunately, blood will run in the streets because of their folly. That’s old news now though, There’s a bigger game in town, re-electing the One.
Is it too much to ask that highly trained, expensively educated, and well-paid people who make decisions and report or analyze events understand the previous two paragraphs?
Yes. those highly trained, expensively educated etc. people will continue to fit anything and everything into the preferred narrative, a version of “events on the ground” that exists between their ears.
When the Brotherhood prevails in Egypt, those putative analyzers of events will have some collectively acceptable meme to explain it away.
“We were wrong” won’t be in play.
On any topic, it is the preferred and continuously embellished narrative that ekes through into the story we read or hear in the lamestream media, a story that has little or nothing to do with facts on the ground, which reporters don’t understand and might very well ignore even if they did.
(somewhat like reporters in the United States en masse ignored, even suppressed, the truth in the Duke/dancer saga)
It’s pretty pathetic that a Financial Times lamestreamer has written that Al Z’s and Osama’s favorite brand of Islam doesn’t focus on “politics”…
“The attacks are being ascribed to followers of Salafi Islam, a purist form of religion whose conservative message was allowed to spread through society in the Mubarak years because it focused on morality rather than politics.”
The free press isn’t free and, apparently, is too stupid to realize it’s in chains of its own making.
Or it’s intentional and they really are the fifth column of the fourth estate.
(I look forward to reading more of you, Mr. Rubin)
I love it when people claim things as ‘blindingly obvious’ and take on for themselves the status of a fortune teller when there was no sign in Jan. from anyone of what the particular and specific mechanisms that were at work and which would subsume Egypt from within were anywhere in evidence.
Rather, what we are seeing is a default position that was already in place and never goes away which is touted as observation.
If it was ‘obvious’ in Jan. that the Muslim Brotherhood was ‘determined’, then why did they openly state they would not participate in the uprising which itself only occupied the last 7 days on that particular month?
The hostile intent of the Muslim Brotherhood is hardly any kind of a surprise to anyone, however the ability to carry out that intent as some kind of a done deal IS a surprise considering the MB has failed to take power in Egypt in 83 years or anywhere for that matter.
This is wishful thinking wrapped up in a straw man argument and fueled by the idea that willpower is particular only to a group one thinks of as dangerous or can’t stop thinking about and that other groups have no willpower or ability. When are these magical abilities based on the idea wherein a head start on organizing is posited as being the be-all and end-all when it comes to seizing power going to manifest themselves? Where are the vaunted political skills of the Muslim Brotherhood that have been no where in evidence since 1928? Where are their sheer numbers?
Talking and intent is not a fait accompli, an event is. Journalist’s report on events as they happen and do not attempt to score points by pretending that the ideas they have feared and advanced for years as a basic premise are in fact that, “I told you so!” moment. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and chicken little crying ‘wolf!’ together with cherry picking what seems ripe is not my idea of observation.
What is this, a Las Vegas betting parlour where one predicts the outcome of games? What prize does one collect? Anyone who predicted that Connecticut would win the NCAA Basketball Championship would deserve credit. If however it turned out that they pick that team year after year, I would start to see something else emerge.
No one in this country is particularly keen on defending Christians or women and their treatment recently is only more of what has been happening in Egypt all along. The idea the Christians have now been expelled from a safe zone which existed under Mubarak carries no weight.
No one had the faintest idea of what would happen on Jan.25 or Feb.3 or Feb.11 or the events that have taken place since then. No one knows what will happen in the future and there are enough story threads in place to project many different outcomes. I see the now old and trite stories surrounding Islamist’s in Egypt a safe bet based on an obsession; everyone is seeing Egypt through their own lens and this is revealing more about a given observer than anything about reality. Constantly seeing and expecting the worst in people is not a threat assessment but paranoia and I see no reason to brute it about as any form of journalism; when something good happens it is ignored until something bad comes along and something bad always come along and then alarm clocks go off and lap tops are opened.
You write: “Another factor ignored generally has been the upsurge by “Salafi” Islamists” Who has been ignoring this and where? Certainly it has been reported on in Egypt. Islamists may very well take over Egypt which would not be all that strange in a country whose official laws are based on Islamic religious codes but if that happens I will certainly not be giving credit for it to people who never argued anything else in the first place.
James,
Understanding history and applying its lessons is a “default position”? Me thinks not.
A number of readers have a serious disagreement with you. Like me they have taken the time to study history and look at the exploitation of political instability that has occured in the past. Several of us saw the similarity of the Moslem Brotherhoods politically superior position when the streets filled. We saw similar events occur in Russia and in Iran. When largely identical circumstances presented themselves in Egypt we all saw the same thing based on experience and anaysis. The ones who didn’t were the clueless fools in the American media. The Jerusalem Post had this outcome pegged less than a week after the protests commenced.
We can’t predict what will happen next in Egypt exactly, but it is a safe bet that elections soon will likely lead to a further consolidation of power by the fundamentalists. After that elections won’t matter.
It’s all up to the Egyptian army now. Obama and Clinton are going to look like the naive fools that they are as Egypt becomes more and more hostile to the west and more antagonistic to Israel. A wise and educated President would have quietly backed the army real quick and would have avoided pushing Mubarak. International relations ain’t some theoretical parlor game. Mistakes lead to instability, shifting alliances, and war.
I hope your references to a ‘number of us’ who have studied history include me – because I certainly have – and my studies include population demographics, and societal organization within economic and political modes.
And I disagree with you. I do not agree that the unrest in the ME is due to the people there wanting fundamentalist Islam as their government. There is absolutely no evidence for this.
Are you aware that no ME nation has voted for repressive Islam and that when it has emerged (Iran, SA, Taliban) it has been used as a cover for political power of a tribal elite?
Are you aware that such a two-class infrastructure is no longer economically viable in the ME?
What astonishes me is the ignorance of so many who comment here, and their indifference to – the economy and the population needs. All we ever read about are ‘those Islamist fundamentalists’ …Well, there are fundamentalists in every nation – and that doesn’t mean that they can or will take over the nation. Why not? Because they cannot economically sustain the population!
The ME is in an economic crisis! How is that to be addressed? By praying? That’s an Obama solution – hopeandchange words. It won’t work.
ETAB, your eyeballs are stuck so far back in your skull you can’t see anything but the inside of your own brain. I’ll bet you are a professor.
Louis – your comment is a conclusion..but, where is your reasoning, where is your evidence that leads you to this conclusion? After all, anyone can say anything. …but it’s pure coffee shop sophistry unless you can support your conclusions/opinions..with something of substance: reasoning and evidence.
I have an opinion too. I believe that there are unicorns eating the leaves off the trees..and they become invisible and fly away when people turn to look at them. So there.
Oh, really! “Understanding” history is taking Iran in 1979, slapping a little make-up on it and babbling an incantation and slapping it on top of Egypt – that’s understanding history?
“Understanding” history is taking a Islamist group like the MB that has been around since 1928, accomplished exactly nothing outside of murder and then touting its venerablility and superior organization? Make me a list of all their success stories in the history I don’t understand – particularly the success stories based on their superior organization and decades long experience.
And what is this about the “Moslem Brotherhoods politically superior position when the streets filled”. You mean the streets I was in and the MB was not? Those streets? Or do you mean later when the fat MB spider surveyed the situation with its keen eye and decided to join. The fact that the MB was so weak it didn’t want to join the uprising out of fear and a misreading of and disconnect from the situation and couldn’t have pulled this off on its own is history too – why ignore it?
And what’s this: “The Jerusalem Post had this outcome pegged less than a week after the protests commenced.” What outcome is that? The one that has yet to occur but everyone is hoping will because they are locked into their bracket choice default position unmoved by history, events or the likelihood of events? That ‘outcome’? The one already set in cement in nodding heads full of historical parallels?
As for pushing out Mubarak who was a part of the army mechanism and not its ruler, you have one mask taken off and an attempt to put on another with opponents trying to ferret out what is window dressing and demanding real change and not the appearance of one.
This is why ending the emergency laws and making a new Constitution from the ground up were such big deals and look who’s in charge. If you think the MB is the biggest player left in Egypt as they calmly survey all their competition laying prostrate on the ground then you’re crazy. In fact the MB is splintering from within along political lines and also along age lines and the women within are saying, “Wait a minute” too.
The biggest players in Egypt are sitting in giant sand colored tanks with VCU fans behind them in Ray-Bans holding the keys while they discuss how to turn the NDP into the PDN or DPN or whatever the hell else works once fresh paint and room freshener have been applied.
Is “understanding” history completely swallowing the old story that the MB ‘won’ 20% of the seats in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary election in a country with a totally fictitious voting system and a regime utterly opposed to them who controls that voting system? Gee, how in the world do you imagine they pulled that bit of ‘history’ off?
This is precisely what I mean by a ‘default position’. If it supports your view that the MB is flexing its muscles then it goes unchallenged. Anything that supports the opposite view is ignored and its supporters relegated to the arena of people who are simply too stupid to understand history. When it suits your position, voting is crooked, when it doesn’t voting is fair and you can extend that logic to surrounding events in ever widening circles.
The default position is that the MB is as good as in power and an army is at Israel’s borders. That was the position if Mubarak fell 5 years ago and from day one of the uprising and still is – events have nothing to do with it, its just a senseless chant with no meat on its bones and that is why I have to read I don’t know how many articles which are basically just one with the words rearranged.
The MB won 20% of the votes IN SPITE of the regime’s repression. That’s why in the latest election in November last year the regime’s rigging of the election was worse than ever before, which resulted in an *apparent* near “disapearance” of the MB from the poltical scene. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post links here, but you should read Khaled Abu Toameh’s article from December 3, 2010 called “Egyptians Blame Obama”. Here is a quote:
“Egyptians blame Obama for failing to fulfill his commitment to spreading democracy. Obama’s reluctance to send a strong message to the Egyptian regime encouraged Mubarak to launch a massive and brutal crackdown on his political rivals and critics long before the election was held.
“Radical Islam will one day take control over most of the Arab and Islamic countries, whether through free elections, as was the case with Hamas, or through a revolution, as Khomeini did in Iran. But one must not be naïve: Muslim fundamentalists will rise to power also because of their growing popularity in the Arab and Islamic countries.
“The Arabs have a proverb, “If you have no shame then do whatever you want.” Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who has long been presiding over one of the Arab world’s most corrupt and repressive regimes, has once again shown that he has no shame by stealing the vote in Egypt’s parliamentary election.
“But one would be doing injustice to Mubarak by singling him out; the proverb applies to nearly all the corrupt dictators in the Arab and Islamic world.
“Yet even by Egyptian standards, the feeling in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is that Mubarak this time exaggerated when he virtually wiped out the opposition. It would have been better, for example, had Mubarak allowed the rest of the world to see the real power of the Muslim Brotherhood in his country.
“The Egyptian dictator is actually deceiving the world by pretending that Muslim extremists do not exist in Egypt.”
So what’s he’s saying is actually the oppostie of what you’re saying – you insinuate that Mubarak rigged the election to make the MB look stronger so he’d get Western support, and Abu Toameh said it was rigged to reduce the power of Mubarak’s opposition including, we can safely assume, the MB. Which one of you is right? I think Toameh is because in the last rigged election the MB lost much of the power it gained before. If your theory was the correct one the MB should have at least retained its power. Now the MB says it expects to get 30% of the vote.
And yes, the internal conflict within the MB is intensifying exactly because they understand they now have a real chance to take power, whether it’s in the next election or gradually within several years, so there’s a conflict within the movement about how each faction would like to shape the reality when they do get this power to effect changes, and who will be the leaders individually. However, it’ll be inaccurate to portray the younger generation as fundamentally different from the old gurad. If they had suddenly turned into liberal democrats they would have left the MB for a liberal democratic movement.
In the end it doesn’t matter that much how many different Islamist parties will run for power in Egypt since the variation of opinions between different Islamist groups is not as dramatic as we would like it to be. And the fundamental problem in Egypt is that the majority of the population agrees with many of the Islamist values and goals, whether they’ll vote for the MB or for someone else.
Those were very interesting remarks and I am familiar with Khaled Abu Toameh.
First of all, 2005 is not 2010. Events ebb and flow and alliances shift and change.
What I am insinuating is that Mubarak formed an alliance with the MB wherein the MB would be allowed a certain percentage of the vote in return for the allowing of vote rigging in favor of Mubarak to go on unhindered in areas that the MB could have circumvented; whether it was smart or stupid is another issue or even whether it actually happened.
This is why I believe the later crackdown happened. If Mubarak felt the MB was no longer useful or willing to play ball as he wished, perhaps having them all in jail was more useful. Mubarak was constantly rounding up MB and arresting them.
I am in no way saying my views are facts but merely what I infer. What is good in all of this is that we are no longer blindly accepting that the MB miraculously had an honest vote available to them in a country without an honest vote. Mr. Toameh may be entirely correct on his version of this matter – I don’t know.
The reason this analysis is so important is because it goes to the heart of the matter when trying to ferret out exactly how much support the MB has in an honest election. By putting aside the blind acceptance of the events of 2005 by the mass media in the West, at least the road is open to a more enlightened view of events and the inner workings and shifting alliances. Today, El Baradei is a good example of this.
I am in no way saying that fundamentalists could never come to power in Egypt; it is an extremely conservative country in many ways but mixed in with contradictions like divorce rates that are high for the middle east. Many in Egypt are illiterate but with the power to vote; there are many obvious problems with that scenario as they will be easily manipulated politically but so will realities having to do with food in their mouths
The problem with coming to a conclusion on this matter is that there are so many players and forces at work here both internally and externally. It doesn’t lend itself to snap judgments.
My view is generally that you will have a collision, orderly or no, between religious ideas and the realities involved trying to feed and employ over 80 million people living on a river. You will have fundamentalists, constitutionalists, liberals, socialists, economists, the army, the former regime, youth, students and even women all jockeying for a position. Right now the trump card is held by the army and the former regime as 80% of Egypt’s governors are former army and with lucrative franchises. There are many more army enabled franchises held. Some of these are being picked off one by one and it is hard to determine whether they are lambs being sacrificed by the NDP for expediency while they retrench and put on a different face of whether the uprising is taking hold.
The big question in all of this is whether religious elements or the army will resort to brute force somewhere down the line against which is the very real threat of the brute force of street demonstrations that crossed most of Egypt’s societal lines.
The one vote/one time scenario has no traction whatsoever for me in all of this because it is the same as brute force in the end with the same triad involved. Army members on the side of the fundamentalists will tend to be younger men with no money but the presence of such people or lack of them is a very hard read right now. The head of the army council just now encouraged members of the youth part of the uprising that they could effectively compete against religious elements. If you want to say that general will have his head on a wall at some point in the future then that is your opinion.
Egypt’s future is not even close to being decided because the musical chairs game is still very much in play. It is certainly not foolish to assume that a kind of balance will be struck and that is a form of democracy, sharia or no. Egypt is already sharia and not in Al-Queda mode despite what many say. Reality will have its say in the form of tourism, foreign investment and many secular opponents, if they are smart, will be keenly questioning the MB about how they propose to address unemployment, education and much, much more because you cannot eat a Koran, even if it is your dearest wish in life. At some point reality makes you hit a wall.
Middle East Democracy:
One Person / One Vote / One Time
Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum Om Mani Padme Hum
Try it. Saves time actually thinking.
All this was very obvious in January, and it’s reasonable to assume that it was just as obvious to those
highly trained, expensively educated, and well-paid people who make decisions or analyze events, too.
It’s likely that when the mass media and the Obama administration told us that the secular reformers and
twenty-somethings at the vanguard of Egypt’s Jan. 25 revolution “would run the country and transform it
into a liberal, modern democracy,” they were not being stupid or ignorant, but were lying to us instead.
In short, Obama understood the Brotherhood would attain legitimacy and power, facilitated that result by
insisting Mubarak had to go, and the media as usual backed him up all the way.
The only thing that was ‘obvious’ to anyone on this story is the superiority of their own minds and now they’re calmly waiting for reality to catch up.
Most of the articles about the de facto takeover of the MB in Egypt could have been written 5 years ago and were. You only have to change them from “If Mubarak falls…” to “Now that Mubarak has fallen…” but the story is essentially the same one.
It’s a broken bracket oblivious to facts, now hoping their team makes it to the finals and waving MB pom-poms.
Gooooooooooooooooooooooo MB! M-U-S-L-I-M B-R-O-T-H-E-R-H-O-O-D!!!!
What’s that spell? J-O-U-R-N-A-L-I-S-M!!!!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
And whaaaaaaat’s JOURNALISM? P-R-E-D-I-C-T-I-O-N!!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
All that’s obvious to you is the superiority of your mind. Your contempt is ‘obvious’ to all.
If that was intended as a rebuttal to the vote the MB wrangled from the Mubarak regime in 2005 it lacks discourse.
Go ahead and lead a cheer – this ain’t Twitter.
It disturbs me that you cannot distinguish between what you want to believe and what there is to be believed.
Even when I was a kid I learned that a man not in possession of all the facts who presents an emphatic view of those facts is not revealing anything at all about the external world.
They are only revealing the inner workings of their own minds.
How hard is that to grasp? Dude, if you want to show your backside then by all means let it hang out. Please don’t try and convince me it has anything to do with what’s happening in Egypt.
pffffffft! what facts?
Exactly! What facts? Mr. May’s doing all the cheerleading, too, and that’s a fact.
There’s plenty of facts, you just ignore them. You prefer lies that fit your agenda. If I hear how Qaradawi amassed a million people in Tahrir Square in the largest crowd of the uprising one more time I’ll pass out from amusement.
And yet those are the ‘facts’ you prefer. They meet up nicely with your informed view from I don’t know how many miles away and you amass more ‘facts’ like the above and before you know it the Loch Ness Monster has just killed 100 tourists on the Nile River and you are licking your lips at the sheer joy of how your massive intellect trumps any other considerations; you simply figure stuff out with sheer brain power.
This is why you don’t need facts; everything is distilled through the simplistic refrain of Iran and jihadists and Israel. Considering how much Egyptians don’t like Israel and that Israel is right next door, the Egyptians couldn’t be more oblivious to them right now if they pointedly tried.
Their is no youth movement, they are not organizing neighborhood groups that in turn are hooking up all over the country. You haven’t heard of it and so it isn’t happening. The salafis, sufis and Muslim Brotherhood are all going up against each other but you haven’t heard of it and so it isn’t a consideration. You don’t even know what it means to be a salafi in Egypt as opposed to elsewhere and feel all three groups are just one group and that that one group wants to cut people’s hands off.
You don’t have any facts and don’t need any cuz you wouldn’t recognize them anyway and so it’s no surprise that your views on Egypt are as relevant as they are to Iowa. As I said to some other clueless trolls in a dark alley on Jan.27 an hour before the internet went down, “See ya on the barricades, chump.”
It’s first light; I am going to Tahrir and see who was shooting at who and I am not going to tell you about it. I’m sure you have figured it out by closing your eyes, grunting and coming up with the answer as beads of sweat form on your forehead. Say ‘hi’ to Dr. Watson.
James May and ETAB are devoted to selling a conventional wisdom that has been punctured, ruptured, shredded and…how did they write it on tests when were kids? Folded, spindled and mutilated.
There is nothing left, almost, of this (likely paid) attempt to keep steering American and int’l public opinion into 1) support of Jihad-bearing ‘activists’, 2) negotiating with ‘Islamists’ 3) abandoning Israel in stages.
I think the public is both smarter than both of you and smarter – by a good measure – than you think it is.
You’re kidding! Are you? Surely you are joking?!! You actually say that my focus on the triadic infrastructure of a society being: population demographics, economic mode, and political mode..is ‘conventional wisdom’? If only….
From what I can gather, conventional wisdom knows zilch about the relation of population dynamics to economic mode…and even less about the relation between the political and economic modes. Heck, most people don’t even know what ‘tribal political mode’ means..much less the nature of a ‘middle class’. They know nothing about the difference between growth and no-growth societial organization, the difference between societal organization that enables change and adaptation…and ones that prevent this and focus on stability and no-change.
You, Larry, seem to, like so many countless others, have little to no knowledge of these areas and seem to believe that societies function by and only by..religious ideology. And your view of the people in the ME, is basic Said’s Orientalism – All Muslims are either savage brutes and/or terroristrs.
You seriously think that I am paid? Paid to write? Heh…if only. What a sanctimonious statement of yours…that you claim that someone cannot actually believe the theories I do (that triad of population, economic and political mode)..and use it to analyze societal change…? And that someone can only write these things..not out of researched analysis..but because they are ‘paid’. How arrogant and patronizing of you.
As for Israel- as I’ve said, the current implosion in the ME has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with Israel. I know that you think that the day begins and ends with Israel – but its existence is totally and utterly irrelevant to the deep societal changes that are going on in the Islamic nations of the ME. Sorry to take down your egoism a notch.
Right now as I write this I can hear the massive gunfire coming from Tahrir Square through the window you don’t have. I am devoted to looking out that window and seeing what there is. The fact that you are so hapless that you actually think I am paid is amusing.
No one has punctured, shredded or accomplished anything else in the way of taking me down when it comes to the situation in Egypt; in fact, lighting you up is so easy that I considered it a casual hobby. Your views on the state of affairs in Egypt are so myopic, one-sided, simplistic, agenda driven, uninformed and ignorant that it is laughable. Your analysis of the political state of Egypt is that of a child.
You see everything through a lens of jihad, islamists and Israel. So what? Reality doesn’t care anything for your particular concerns and nor do I.
You are so utterly arrogant that you think you can see more from a distance than I can when I am on the scene. You get your reports from news outlets. I get mine from stepping outside. It is your ‘wisdom’ that is conventional since it represents a hopeless stereotype based on false information presented in a very narrow sense.
Go ahead an order a pizza and don’t forget to regale the delivery man about how that pizza business should be run based on the box it came in.
“there was no sign in Jan. from anyone of what the particular and specific mechanisms that were at work and which would subsume Egypt from within were anywhere in evidence”
That’s what you think based on the media reports you read. If you had followed Barry Rubin’s work all along you would see it coming, and it wasn’t an uneducated guess as you try to portray it. In order to get an accurate reporting on the events in Egypt the ones providing the reporting and analysis should be familiar with Egyptian politics for decades, familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood, their activities, writings and sermons in ARABIC, and not what selected representatives choose to tell the West in Western languages and Western concepts, investigate the groups and individuals invloved in the revolution that were mentioned in the news and their connections, and be familiar with the range of opinions in the general public in Egypt and not just the photogenic urban youth in the more sophisticated capitals of Cairo and Alexandria. If several opinion polls from different sources in the last decade indicated that an overwhelming majority of Egyptian Muslims support values, ideals and goals that are similar, if not identical, to those of the Muslim Brotherhood then it should give you an idea about the direction this revolution is likely to eveolve in.
In his blog Barry Rubin predicted the revolution will result in a decade long battle of the MB to take over Egypt. Maybe he was too optimistic and it’ll take far less than a decade, we shall see. But he didn’t only predict the revolution will go the MB’s way. In October 2010, before all this started, he wrote, based on a sermon of the MB leader, that the MB had moved from the recruiting phase to a revolutionary phase, and that what we are likely to see in the coming years is an effort by the MB in different countries to take over their countries, as well as a surge in terrorism effort in the West. Unfortunately, most Western journalists covering the Middle East don’t even speak Arabic, or Farsi or Kurdish or any other local language, so even if they were able to grasp what the Muslim Brotherhood was saying in Arabic in spite of the differences in culture and concepts, they didn’t know what they were saying in Arabic because they can’t read Arabic.
First of all, what media reports? I was on Mohammed Farid Street getting tear gassed and on Talaat Harb Street getting arrested so this is not reading.
Secondly, what does it matter if a man who has every doctorate in mathematics there is says 2 plus 2 equals four or a six year old says it? It is still a true thing.
Experience does not alter reality, reality alters experience and one must listen to the words coming out of a person’s mouth and not be overwhelmed by credentials; credibility is not reality, it’s just credibility. When a debate steers away from pure information and into experience it is not a debate, not when an opportunity to speak a truth is still available.
Keyboards, plus sheer intellect plus moral posturing does not equal credibility and rarely equals reality unless one factors in the stopped clock scenario.
Unfortunately it is the rare journalist who is not swayed by an an agenda, either wittingly or otherwise. The reason I used the 2005 vote in Egypt is because it is a picture perfect example of people being swayed and manipulated by their own perceptions rather than being swayed by what is in front of them.
That single instance of a vote reveals one hell of a lot about how much actual ‘thinking’ is going on; it reveals how much people are willing to blithely accept information if it nicely dovetails with what they already thought, although it contradicts and violates their own already firmly laid down belief pattern they use in quite the opposite way when it suits them.
There are wheels within wheels within wheels going on in Egypt and their secrets are not amenable to being opened with urban myths and false narratives.
I am not going to do people’s thinking for them. Look at my example and open your eyes about how people allow themselves to be fed info because it hits at their vulnerable blind spot. Multiply that example by many more and what you get are generalizations repeated over and over again that play into what one wants to see and without an ounce of nuance to them. That doesn’t mean the fundamental core of that nuance cannot be taken out and presented in a simple manner.
Let’s face it: people make money and get attention from polemics – no one is interested in a balanced story that allows them to make up their own minds.
I still like to hear arguments based on specific mechanisms that don’t include the sometimes useful but overused idea that people are always simply lying either in English or Arabic. Those ‘liars’ are quoted as truth tellers when that is suitable and as mendacious when that suit fits.
Egypt appears to be following the Turkish Model–a strong Army guarding a secular constitution and democracy.
It is not perfect–but it better than the alternatives in the region.
There are 3 historically and current important states in the area.
Egypt–Turkey and Iran/Persia. We have 2 out of 3 on the US side–
Turkey is a member of NATO and has been since 1952.
The Egyptian Army has very strong links with US Military and Egypt s revolution is driven by young people who want the American values of the 50s with the technology of 2011.
The MB in Egypt is now strongly influenced by young men and women and is evolving into a Muslim Democratic party–like the EU Christian Democratic parties.
The sky is not falling.
Maybe to your points. We’ll know soon enough. I’m not hopeful. A pleasant surprise would be nice!
You’re not following events in Turkey. The AKP has been gradually moving Turkey to the Iranian side. It has been gradually taking over the media. It’s reppressing the opposition. The amendments to the Turkish constitution, lauded as democratic reforms in the West, reduced the power of the army and the independence of the judicial system. If the AKP wins the next election we might have to say goodbye to Turkey for the moment.
Isn’t this like..a little to late? The harm has been done and the people are suffering. They should be searching for solutions, not loosing time with regrets.
Obama’s loving it. And they can barely contain themselves over at the NY Times, dancing in the aisles, slurping champagne, back slapping. Another major step in the destruction of the West, party time. You might call it, celebrating Death. Necrophilia, self hate, Progressivism[?] in a nut shell.
“Now these ultra-radicals are being released from prison and returning to their old ways, or at least feeling emboldened by the new situation. The article blames the problem on the Mubarak regime which will make it impossible to understand what’s happening.”
I would add this to your initial paragraph as another function of the media: to muddy the waters to a level of such confusion that it’s impossible to tell right from wrong, truth from falsehood, fact from fiction. Whether they do this through ignorance about a subject or as a deliberate attempt to shape the “narrative” is a case-by-case issue.
I think most of the hysteria surrounding the nuclear crisis in Japan has been jinned up through pure ignorance of the nuclear power industry and how it works. People hear “nuclear” and immediately picture mushroom clouds and bodies turned to ash. It’s a misconception that the media has perpetuated and actively subscribed to for decades.
The situation in Egypt, on the other hand, and the whole Mid-East, is one of WILLFUL ignorance on the part of the media. Sure, there were rumblings about the Muslim Brotherhood grabbing power in Egypt, but that couldn’t be SERIOUS. The people pressing the “revolution” in Egypt weren’t ISLAMISTS. They were democratically-minded young people who wanted a better government! They were the Egyptian equivalent of the long-haired hippies of the media’s beloved 1960′s generation! Speak truth to power! Rise up against The Man! Peace, love and apple sauce for all! Surely such a grassroots movement of true believers would mean that Egypt would become a TRUE democratic republic all on its own, unlike Iraq which required the intervention of the Evil, Blood-lusting American military under the reign of George “Duuuh”bya Bush. No, this glorious revolution was homespun and true, given it’s first spark by President Obama’s immaculate Cairo speech two years earlier. Yes, this would be the first brick of many in rebuilding the Middle East into a calm, stable, sustainable region. At last!
That’s how liberals think. With their emotions, not with rational thought. It FEELS good to get rid of a dictator; it sounds good, too, and makes a good headline. But the media refused to seriously contemplate the question of what would happen AFTER the fall of Mubarak. Who would take his place? How? What would happen in the interim? If extreme Islamists move in to fill the vacuum, what does that do to the Mid-East? How does that affect stability in the region and worldwide? And how does it affect the United States?
See, those questions are HARD, and require actual THOUGHT. It’s much easier and nicer to talk about wonderful uprisings against “evil” dictators. So long as the dictator isn’t named Saddam Hussein.
I was with you until you gave credit to Obama. There is quite a bit of people in Egypt quoting the “yes, we can” aspect, but let’s not give Obama the credit for people working towards this moment since before the world even heard his name.
any critical thinker would know that the muslim brotherhood were going to be the only winner in this.
the islamists will win in every one of these middle east countries.
it is no surprise that their ascent comes with at time when a marxist/progressive/socialist/lair occupies the presidency of the USA.
I’m a critical thinker, and I strongly disagree with your assertion that the MB/Islamism will be the ‘winner in the ME’. I disagree because Islamism is a fundamentalist ideology, a utopian ideology bereft of any economic infrastructure. It cannot enable a robust economy and instead, is parasitic on other economies.
The ME cannot sustain its population within statist socialism, which it now has, and must move into capitalism…which rejects utopian ideologies. Why? Because utopian ideologies don’t work unless everyone is reduced to homogeneity! And capitalism won’t work unless there is diversity and individual free enterprise.
So- your claim is pure rhetoric; you have no empirical infrastructure to support your rhetoric.
“Because utopian ideologies don’t work unless everyone is reduced to homogeneity! And capitalism won’t work unless there is diversity and individual free enterprise.”
I am a simple guy in fly over countty. With respect, you are obviously an honest, knowledgeable, critical thinker. I enjoy your comments. Still the quotes I noted above are totally at odds with one another. So it looks for now like nothing is going to work? If I am clueless, please explain further.
IMHO I suspect that we may not be seeing the final act in the play unfolding in the ME. That is, there may be mulitple uprisings (revolutions) until they get it right. For now I would put my money on the Islamists to move into the vacuum. I can’t imagine, and I have a great imagination, a true representative republic rising out of this morass anytime. Would that it could.
We need to get out of the way and hopefully find some way to support those who truly are interested in alternate plan ‘B’ a functioning representative republic with a capitalist economic system.
Just like we haven’t done in Iran. That should work.
“Islamism is a fundamentalist ideology”
Perhaps another way to say this is “Islamism is a totalitarian political movement with a religion attached to it”, more or less fascism on steroids.
Just because it won’t work in the end doesn’t mean the ME revolutionaries won’t give it a go. The 1920′s,30′s, 40′s and later are a great examples of this never ending failed experiment.
Thank you.
You quoted me:
“Because utopian ideologies don’t work unless everyone is reduced to homogeneity! And capitalism won’t work unless there is diversity and individual free enterprise.”
What this means is that..an ideology that is utopian is focused on ‘the perfection of purity’. It operates within the imaginary realm of ‘what it would be like if and only if EVERYONE did such and such’. Utopias have to be universal..If there is someone dissenting, then this puts a wrench in the whole operation. So…everyone has to accept The Way. No questions, no dissent. No individual ideas or agendas.
Utopianism..which is a purely intellectual activity..can be found within political and economic agendas that aspire to statist socialism. Socialism, after all, is a political/economic mode that rejects individual free enterprise, rejects individual free thought..and operates within a redistributive economic mode where the state owns all the means of production..and you are simply a mindless worker…and you receive whatever the state gives you.
Capitalism is an economic mode based around private enterprises, the individual development of unique modes of wealth production. So, one person sets up a shop to make bricks; another will set up a shop make better and cheaper bricks…and this keeps the price affordable. Another person makes shoes, another imports them; another has a chicken farm…and so on. Capitalism goes with constitutional democracy..where these free individuals debate, question, analyze..and make legislative laws.
Utopianism and capitalism do NOT work together. Yes, Islamism is indeed a totalitarian political movement…and disguised as such by defining it as a religion.
The question to ask is: can it support the ME population economically? The answer is: No. And that’s why it won’t succeed in the ME. The crisis in the ME is economic.
So what you’re saying is that Islamism as a governing system will eventually fail to sustain its economic viability, with which I agree.
However I don’t agree with any of the following:
1. That the crisis in the ME is *exclusively* economic and has no other aspects, such as political and social aspects, even if the always bad economy did reach a crisis proportion and even if that was what sparked or was used to spark the revolution.
2. That if you think capitalism is the answer, and even if you’re right, that this is also what the majority of Egyptians, or even the army or the elites, think. Economic crises were used before to spark revolutions that ended up with non-capitalist non-democratic powers offering their own theories and their own solutions. For instance, that things are bad because the rich who own the means of production exploit the poor workers, and therefore the solution is for the state to take over the means of production and redistribute the wealth. Or that things are bad because the Muslims strayed too much from the “correct Islam” and angered god, and therefore the solution is to introduce more and stricter Islam into the system. Or that things are bad because of the still continuing forms of Western colonialism and therefore the solution is to expell the West entirely from the Muslim world. Or that things are bad because there is a Crusader-Zionist conspiracy to destroy Islam and because the Jews rule the world, and therefore the solution is to destroy Israel, kill the Jews worldwide and fight America and the West. All the above theories do exist in the Middle East. Furthermore, large numbers of people in the West itself believe that the finacial crisis in the US is a proof for the failure of the capitalist system and that there’s a need to move towards more regulation and state control. I think they’re wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact they believe that. So why do you expect the Egyptian elites to reach the opposite conclusion from many in the Western elites?
3. That if Islamism (or socialism or communism or any other Utopian ideology for that matter) is bound to fail it’ll prevent it from being installed in the first place. History refutes this notion since all these systems have been installed in several states where apparently the people who installed them thought differently than you do. And they lasted for at least decades, causing a lot of death and mysery. In the Muslim case several caliphates existed for centuries, and the Muslim caliphate is seen through rosy glasses in the Muslim civilization as its golden age, compared with their relatively subdued present. The ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood are not new at all, but reactionary. The MB was founded only a few years after the Kemalist revolution abolished the caliphate, or sultanate if you will, for the purpose of restoring the caliphate. They attributed the defeat of the Muslim empire to the Western infidel empires to the loosening of Islamic principles and the invasion of Western ideas, and therefore advocated a return to the Islamic fundamentals that led the Muslims to their success in creating a vast empire that was successful for a while. How many people in Egypt believe these ideas? Certainly not everyone, but I think more people than we would like according to opinion polls.
I don’t think of you as a critical thinker. you are way off on the middle east.
I don’t see any point discussing it with you. like I said many times …history is proving me correct and you incorrect. and if you were critical about your points you might learn from that. seeing that you still say the same things in the face of the evidence tells me all I need to know.
How is history proving me incorrect? Has the MB taken over any nation in the ME? Is it even close?
Is the crisis in the ME due to the people wanting to get rid of their ‘secular’ dictators and wanting Islamic fundamentalism? Did such an request ever occur during the demonstrations in any of these nations?
Or is the crisis economic? Is it about jobs and economic opportunities (both of which are lacking in the ME) and about individual freedom to debate and participate in their own national agendas? Well?
I said before and I will say one more time for you. there will be no democracy in egyppt or any muslim country.
I am well aware that many people wish to be free …and like I said before they wont get freedom ..with the possible one vote one time. or vote many times with no choices but they will not have what I call freedom. I have no idea what you mean by freedom given your recent posts.
you claim the author cherry picked his news items. well here is you opportunity to cherry pick some democracy news items coming out of egypt tunisia or libya. maybe Laura Logan can help you out with it.
I could easily write about 50 different instances of Democracy being addressed in Egypt but there is no room and why bother since you are not moved by facts in any way that I can see. You live and breathe in a world of urban myths.
Your utterly decontextualized remark about Lara Logan in the face of the thousands of rapes that take place in the U.S. every year shows how much a fact is quite useless when it comes to you.
They claim to be basing their views on historical paradigms but this bewilderingly means the MB has never overrun a country and so it will overrun all countries from here on in because the democracies they say can never come to power will be overwhelmed.
Right, that all makes sense. I myself could extrapolate all human events from this moment forward from the “Night of the Sicilian Vespers” but I just don’t want to cuz I like to keep my secrets to myself and release them in dollops as I see fit.
Pfffffft! What evidence?
Mr. Rubin,
Thank You. Many of us out here were riding shotgun with you during the Tunisia, Egypt and now the rest as the “Arab Spring” began to unfold.
There was little or no doubt to the outcome of these events when it is known that well over 80% of the populous in Egypt, for instance, believe apostasy is cause to be killed, adultery by females is a stoning to death offense, as two expamples.
The simple fact that a functioning Arab representative republic has never existed should be about all any intelligent Havaad grad or other elite Einstein should need to conclude that where we are at was pre-ordained.
My suggetion remains the same. Pull all American troops out of all Islamic countries, bring them home and prepare for the caliphate. A nuke is coming, and then we will see if Allah and/or the 12th imam arrive to save the day.
What a sad moment in a world where the progressives in the West have declared “Human Nature has changed and we did it, SEE”. I’m thinking we are in for a wild ride and it won’t be pretty.
Some are simply slower on the uptake, refusing to see the clues right in front of them. Consider just a few of them:
- the return of the first Islamists to Tunisia following the overthrow of Ben Ali
- the cutoff of gas supplies to Israel (and Jordan) and the repeated delays in restarting it
- the return of Qaradawi from exile and his celebratory rally – bigger than any previously in Tahrir Square – from which the famed “Google Executive” was barred
- the ongoing pressure to “amend” or revoke Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel
- the constitutional referendum which reaffirmed Islam’s role in Egypt
- the sexual assault on journalist Lara Logan to cries of “Jew, Jew!”
- the presence of veterans who fought the US in Iraq and Afghanistan among the Libyan rebels
- Iran’s hand in the protests in Bahrain
Seriously, what will it take? And apropos, has Roger Simon finally recognized that Sandmonkey was not as he assumed?
“his celebratory rally – bigger than any previously in Tahrir Square”
Obviously this lie has been repeated so often that it is now history.
Any other questions about how urban myths begin?
Or why so many comments are completely off the mark since they are working with nonsense as a starting point?
Is anyone really surprised that there is so much writing as if the Muslim Brotherhood is already in power?
A really fine analysis! What is it about our Western elites who always equate media-friendly mass demonstrations with “liberal reform?” Our sclerotic media is so caught up in the playbook of the 1960′s that they cannot realize that “power to the people” movements are almost always about “power to CERTAIN KINDS of the people.”
I am no expert on Middle East affairs as is Mr. Rubin but I have read enough history to know that whenever there is widespread social disorder it is the most disciplined, focused and well-organized element that will eventually come to power. Those “young urban professionals” that look so swell on CNN are going to either be ground underfoot or swallowed whole by the Brotherhood and the fundamentalists. The latter are determined and unwavering in their desire to erect a fundamentalist state. The more that the latter look like a winner the more the “Eqyptian street” will be drawn to their side.
It is the “most disciplined, focused and well-organized” army that will come to power. This is history and it has defined how societies relate one to the other.
Look at just about any country today and you will see the result of good and bad armies and the limits of how far military force can be extended. America was defined by armies and re-defined by armies. The Soviet and Allied Armies defined the map of Europe in 1945.
I ask all PJM readers to consider the following. Read it slowly -
” Our civilization is threatened today by those unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. ”
* * * * * * *
” The rapid changes on both a technological and sociological level will result in a great social upheaval. The cataclysmic changes will result in considerable suffering, often referred to as the Hevlei Mashiah or Birthpangs of the Messiah. If the Messiah comes with miracles, these “birthpangs” may be avoided, but the great changes involved in his coming in the manner adopted by Maimonides may make these terrible travails inevitable.
Since in a period of such accelerated change parents and children will grow up in literally different worlds, traditions handed from father to son will be among the major casualties. The Talmud describes at length how there will be general dissatisfaction with the values of religion-in such a rapidly changing world, people will naturally be enamored with the new and dissatisfied with the old. Thus, the sages teach that neither parents nor the aged will be respected, the old will have to seek favors from the young, and a man’s household will become his enemies. Insolence will increase, people will no longer have respect, and none will offer reproof. Religious studies will be despised and used by nonbelievers to strengthen their cause, the government will become godless, academies will be places of indiscretion, and the religious will be denigrated.
In the generation when the Messiah comes, young men will insult the old, and old men will stand before the young [to give them honor]; daughters will rise up against their mothers, and daughters-in-law against their mothers-in-law. The people shall be dog-faced, and a son will not be abashed in his father’s presence. It has been taught, R. Nehemiah said: In the generation of the Messiah’s coming impudence will increase, esteem be perverted. [Sanhedrin 97a]
The Wisdom of the learned will degenerate; fearers of sin will be despised; and the truth will be lacking. Youths will put old men to shame. [Sotah 49b]
Judaism will suffer greatly because of these upheavals. There is a tradition that the Jews will split up into various groups, each laying claim to the truth, as the Talmud says, “Our truth shall be divided into flocks” (Sanhedrin 97a). This will make it exceedingly difficult, almost impossible, to discern true Judaism from the false. This is the meaning of the prophecy, “Truth will fail” (Isaiah 59:15).
Maimonides, in his Epistle to Yemen even predicted that many will leave the fold of Judaism completely, without mali ciously intending to do harm to the Jewish people, and the nation shall suffer immensely as a result of their actions. This is how our sages interpret the prophecy, “The wicked shall do wickedly, and not understand” (Daniel 12:10)..
Of course, there will he some Jews who remain true to their traditions. They will realize that they are witnessing the death throes of a degenerate old order and will not be drawn into it. But they will suffer all the more for this, and be dubbed fools for not conforming to the liberal ways of the premessianic age. This is the meaning of the prophecy (Isaiah 59:15), “He who departs from evil will be considered a fool” (Sanhedrin 97a).”
http://www.moshiach.com/topics/what/the-moshiach-in-our-time.php
” Our civilization is threatened today by those unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. ”
That is so ironic considering what follows that I am at a loss as to how to improve on it.
My great-grandfather lassoed a tornado once but credit for it was stolen by another and the thief became famous; that is truth versus falsehood within a closed system.
I’s say our civilization is threatened by those unable to properly distinguish “democracy” from a Republic, and keep the two separate in their minds.
I posted my response several hours ago; it didn’t show up; I’ll repeat my points.
The definition of ‘republic’ is an elected vs hereditary MODE of government.
The definition of ‘democracy’ refers to the METHOD of coming to a decision within a government. It means that decisions are decided by majority vote rather than…by lot, randomly, or by reference to various status values (age, gender, class, clan, tribe, money).
The definition of ‘constitutional’ means that the MODE and METHOD operate within the constraints of a legal document that sets out powers and limits of powers.
The US is both a republic and a constitutional democracy. Other countries, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, are constitutional monarchies and democracies. Some nations are republics but lack democracy; some are monarchies but lack democracy.
I don’t think our civilization is threatened by your lack of understanding these terms.
hmm..So, if the MB gets any kind of political representation in Egypt, it’s all doomed?
Yes, there are Salafis in Egypt’s closet, but Egypt is not going to follow the Salafi trend. You are right to look at that surge, but you are completely giving it the wrong spin. Egypt is not going to be any more Islamist than it has been. What is more likely to happen, with a number of Salafis returning, is that the new democratic Egypt is going to find itself under attack. Egypt is the front line of the ideological war as of Jan25.
What gets me is this bizarre attitude on this website that almost sounds like happiness over the possibility. Instead of planning on how we are going to take advantage of this situation and turn the tide of war back into the Salafists (and, by default, the Islamists like MB) again (as in Iraq), we are doing what? Pining for the good old days of a dictator that was not ending anything, but simply keeping it bottled up and everyone else under the very auspices of authoritarian government that spawned it in the first place.
As for the NYT (and this website for that matter) they are far behind the news. I wrote on this website about the returning Salafists over a week ago, linking to an Egyptian paper. Apparently, it isn’t news until the old gray lady writes about it. What does that say about you all and your information gathering?
Further, somebody over at Tatler couldn’t even get their quotes right, conflating an MB statement on top of a Salafi statement, not identifying it as such and acting like it was from the same source. What kind of BS is that?
If you are waiting to get your news from the US media on Egypt, media that is running 24/7 on US budget and Libya, you are almost a week behind the news cycle in Egypt. Worse, you denounce them and yet still link to their untimely New York Times.
Now, if you want some actual news on the subject, the heads of Jamaat al Islamiyya (which absorbed Egyptian Islamic Jihad when Zawahiri finally traipsed off to Afghanistan one last time), Ibrahim and Zuhdi, just resigned. Depending on which source you read, it is either because a struggle between those who want to participate in politics and the ones that want to remain theological proselytizers or because they advocated non-violence after reconciling (to a degree) with the Mubarek regime.
At the same time, preachers from groups like the Salafi Call in Alexandria are denouncing the violence and claiming that it is not part of an over all scheme, but acts of individuals.
What does that mean? What that means is that these groups are going to be either breaking up with proselytizing going one way and the hard core jihadis going the other or a few of them are going to have some nasty internal cells wreaking havoc inside Egypt. Now you know probably as much as the CIA knows and more than the NYT.
The answer here seems to be that Egyptians should have kept Mubarek in charge so he could stomp out the terrorists (as you believe happened, but apparently didn’t since they are coming back with or without their released brothers) so the terrorists wouldn’t kill them while the regime and it’s thuggish security forces were randomly picking people off the street and out of their homes to torture, imprison and kill for his own reasons (and they weren’t all about stopping terrorism). As if it is better that a known SOB kills them in random attacks as opposed to an unknown SOB.
Somehow, I think these people would rather be free and fighting the terrorists directly, than living another moment under the Mubarek Muhkbarat That is our default position here, I am continually surprised that no one accepts that will be the default position there.
As for the “others”, no one working for the NYT must be working on the ground and doing anything that resembles actual coverage. Instead, they are practically copying stories from Egyptian and Arab news agencies a week after they occur. Then you all finally discover it?
So, if you are lucky, you might find a report in a week or two about the twenty liberal and leftist groups that are forming a group to contest the elections. Or that the wealthiest guy in Egypt just started Egypt’s first “free market party” (likely to attract all sorts of money). Or, even that the two largest and oldest liberal parties in Egypt have seen a resurgence and formed an alliance to contest parliament seats (because everybody over there already figured out that is where the power will lay in the next election).
You probably missed all the reports about the MB losing people left and right and is about to be split into the “old man’s camp” and the “youth brigades”. Not that MB will break apart, but it is getting whittled back down to it’s proper size.
How about that the Salafis are both giving the MB a boost and a major headache? They’ve issued three opeds, two withdrawals from public events and had Qaradawi give a speech saying that the Salafis are stagnant and extreme. Qaradawi of all people. In short, the MB is being embarrased by the Salafis very conservative Islamic ideology that they fear will start turning people in Egypt to look at their ideas askance.
Others think that this will give the MB some cover the same way Mubarek used it: Vote for the MB, less Islamists than the Islamists.
Meanwhile, all over Egypt Students demand that the deans and presidents of university resign from posts given the Mubarek regime and a better education. Strikers are sitting in demonstrations every day and every Friday there is a new call to go down to the square for something.
Egypt is not the one dimensional sand box of the MB or Salafist strains.
Excellent comments. Thank you for living in and speaking of reality and not within the rhetorical words of the imaginary world.
The Make Believe Media acts nearly identically to little lenin.
Regardless of what they say, there is only one thing you know for sure; there is an ideological agenda behind the words. And it’s nearly certain that what they say is a lie of one form or another, even in the rare cases where the raw facts of the situation are reported accurately.
When Obambi was pressuring Mubarak to step down, the Egyptian President chided Barry Hussein Soetero for “not understanding Egyptian culture.” Neither does the lamestream media.
This admission is just a warm up for what the MSM will have to admit to by the time Trump gets through with them.
Trumps interview on the today show on msnbc was posted on the drudge report thismorning. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/42469716#42469716
The significance of this is that most of the policical class in DC checks in on Drudge and much of the bureaucracy.
Mr ETAB
Please explain. So the current that is driving the changes is the growth in and unrest in the greater populations in these countries. The old paradigms of religious or secular dictatorships can no longer work? Why? havent these countries grown in population before. Is not Islam the only common understanding that all of the people have (the basis of Islamist gvt) and tribalism the basis of the secular states?
I really want to understand what you are saying.
I thought I’d reply since ETAB didn’t.
This isn’t about “all countries”. Every country is different with different demographics. At the heart of the situation, demographics plus lack of political rights plus economy equals instability. Second, this isn’t 662AD or 1562. There is a new information highway that, regardless of how strict or controlled a government attempts on this system, it cannot control it. Further, our global economic network not only means that an economic problem in one country effects another, it means that products, people and ideas still manage to flow into even the most controlled nations and people.
Now, there is an advantage for the fanatical ideologies to formulate on the ground and have greater face to face access, but it depends on the nation and it’s connectivity. Second, that ideology still has to compete with outside information. This isn’t 1929 or 1979 where closed borders and stagnant economics can resist the flow of information simply by distance and inaccessibility. Those borders are now broken.
It is, unfortunately, one of the reasons that we see radicalization on an individual basis within the US. However, by far, information has been flowing out of this country and the west via the information network that we built, populated and essentially own (ie, English, western views). Arabic, Farsi, etc languages have only recently become forms for internet communications. That means that western ideas have dominated a major form of communication for decades. IT is the most important subversive tool ever invented.
And, no matter what they try, no country can keep it out. Every attempt is met with frustration as new tools and methods for by passing their road blocks is either adapted on the ground or created by us, the creator.
So, what is happening here is that the idea of democracy and some form of freedom has penetrated into once “dark corners”.
That does not mean that every revolution we are seeing will have truly free outcomes. Not in the manner that we practice it. Even in Egypt, as people protest against the ban on protests, insisting on their right to free speech, some have called for parts of society (the Salafists) to be be silenced and the army continues to round up people (Then quickly release them) for saying things they think are subversive. Such as a young blogger who refused to do his mandated stint in the Egypt military and said he would not fight against Israel. People are protesting the government for his release right now.
There is a learning curve on what freedom truly means, even with the flow of information, people who have traveled to other nations, etc.
In this learning curve, there is a possibility that some unfree trend can use the instability to come to power by seeming to offer people a unified, stable and seeming secure environment.
What ETAB is saying is that, even if they do, they will either be unable to take complete power or they won’t exist long after as a governing body. Largely because a)they cannot provide economic sustainability; b) they cannot eradicate the flow of information that challenges them (see all dictators gone or teetering); c) parts of their society have become inculcated or resistant to their ideology and are supported by this flow of information. Meaning that they can never be certain of their long term control.
The flow of this information and the speed of the economic network means that the speed at which society, governments and their own economies must respond is increased by, basically, the speed of zeros and ones in a binary system (as fast as a computer). Those who cannot, die suddenly and at nearly incalculable speeds (18 days in Egypt).
In the past, borders and space allowed for more control of fairly large populations. Information was smuggled in through books and newspapers, but was much slower than modern times. That is why such events have been slower in growing in the past. Even that, though, could never stop the people or the flow of information and, at some points, created a tipping point. For instance, the Iron Wall falls, Germany is free, then Poland and Czechoslovakia and so on in quick succession.
That means, any trend that comes to the fore that is not able to provide these basic necessities and are repressive, will find themselves moving out smartly and in a hurry from governance.
Thanks to Kat-Mo for a lucid and excellent comment on the new ‘networked global information society/societies’. He’s right; the only thing I’d add is that I am also considering the basic ‘organic’ or ‘energy-content’ of a population. (Information is energy, of course, but I am considering the material energy of a population).
That is, if I consider a population a kind of ‘organic entity’,..think of it as a cell and then, think of it as a giant massive collation of cells.. then I have to consider: what keeps this massive organism alive and capable of continuing into the future (both its metabolism capacity and its reproductive capacity).
My basic axiom is that the organization of a population, of this massive collation of cells…is very important. Economic organization gives this organism the capacity-to-live. Political organization gives it the power-to-live.
Most people aren’t aware of the direct integral connections between the size of a population, the economic and political modes. Most people think there’s no connection and also, that political mode is a matter of choice. No.
A small population can sustain itself with local family owned farming. Stability in this mode is assured by the political mode of tribalism..which privileges the Owners of the land. That is, the elders/owners have inherited authority. This is a two-class political infrastructure; those who own the economic means of production (land, cattle)..and those who are dependent on them. This is also a no-growth society. It can’t expand its means of production (get more land???).
The ME retained this two-class political infrastructure when the WEST moved its resources or means-of-economic production from local village horticulture..to oil. The same organization meant that an unelected dynastic leader – whether as monarch or military take-over dictator…controlled the wealth and redistributed some of it..to the population.
Something important to note about a two-class political infrastructure. It has no internal capacity to adapt or change. Its strength is its no-change stability. The elite/aristocrats always own the land, the rest of the population relies on their ‘noblesse oblige’ to sustain them. This is great..as long as the population doesn’t outstrip the capacity of that land to support them.
But..things changed. The population didn’t just increase on a normal level; it exploded. It DOUBLED in size in a generation. No stable economy, no non-growth economy could deal with this massive increase. AND – it moved off the village lands and to the urban centres. The fact is: the ME single source means of wealth production (oil/Suez tolls) is unable to sustain this size and location of a population.
Result? Poverty, life at near-sustenance levels, no opportunities. AND then, there’s that information network that Kat-Mo is discussing. You can’t keep out the realities of what life is like elsewhere and what life could be like here, in the ME.
So -because the population has increased beyond the carrying capacity of its old single-source wealth producing mechanism, and because a TRIBAL political mode has no capacity to change or allow any other means of wealth production…it will implode on its own. All it needs, when it has reached a critical threshold, to move into that implosion is a spark..
And that is what is happening in the ME. Notice that this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with idealogy. And nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. It’s all about that internal imbalance between: population size and location, economic mode, political mode.
And as Kat-Mo says..even if an ideological power tries to move in (the MB) they cannot last, for they operate, also, in a two-class political mode. What the ME needs..is a free middle class. It needs to empower the rapid and vast growth of a middle class capitalist economy, made up of privately owned small/medium businesses. This is where flexible and growth-oriented wealth production is located. And, to empower this class, it needs a constitutional democracy.
No choice. It’s all about population, economics and political mode. And keeping the information about this ‘brave new world’ out of the ME…is, because of our new informationally networked globe..impossible.
I knew the Muslim Brotherhood was saying nothing and waiting. Obama threw Mubarak under the bus, he should have left our dictator alone and let Mubarak deal with the unrest. The kids would have settled for reforms but once Obama threw him under the bus, it was over for that man. We owe him our gratitude for keeping the peace with Israel.
Does anyone know where Hosni is now? I remember reading on Drudge a few days later that he had cancer and was expected to die but wanted to die in Egypt.
The army is saying he is under house arrest at his home in Sharm-el-Sheikh and will go on trial but have not set a date.
Man if i ever saw two racoons fighting over a blogs itd be this one, nicely done my friend. Keep it up.
Hey everybody listen up! After 104 days they finally burned an Israeli flag in Tahrir Square today – and you were right on top of it! There was a slight delay do to a lack of brain cell synapses clicking but what the hell – a victory is a victory.
Hail, hail, the gangs all here…. dum de dump de dump dee.
I wish I had a picture but they tried to kill me with knives and kept asking if I knew some guy named ‘yehudi’ whoever that is.
People who complain about “Orientalism” have simply swallowed and regurgitated a leitmotif from Edward “Prince of Resentment” Said’s grievance soap opera. An orientalist is merely someone who studies the orient. Such a person can be well or ill informed, beneficent or malevolent in intent, and have something to say…or not. The Saidian assumption that no one from the “west” can understand the “orient” is bunkum, on a par with the Koran enthusiasts who say their book cannot be understood in translation.
Don’t trip over semantic irrelevances. You know, or ought to know, that Said’s term of ‘Orientalism’ has nothing to do with the neutral term of ‘someone who studies the orient’. It has a specific meaning that defines a point-of-view towards the Middle East – namely, that all people in the ME are homogeneous and that all are either brute savages, oil potentates and/or terrorists. And of course, like all savages, must be Ruled with Force.
I’m certainly not a fan of Said (because I’m not a fan of postmodernism or postcolonialism and his key work was in that area)…but I think he’s right about the common perspective of so many in the West towards Muslims. You can see it in many of the comments in this thread.
The notion of a ‘finite or closed cultural identity’ is hardly novel. We in the West have our own stereotyped views of ourselves and others. And most certainly, so do peoples in other cultures…they too have stereotyped descriptions of themselves and of Others. That’s the way of the world. But, both we and they, have to allow ourselves and them..to change. That’s the key issue – that we allow an Open rather than Closed Society.
“The Protection of Citizenship and National Unity” conference, organised Thursday by a slew of the country’s opposition parties and political movements, demanded that the government create a unified law for the construction of houses of worship. The conference also called on the government to protect the right to equal citizenship, as stipulated in the first article of the Egyptian constitution.
The conference was organised in response to the New Year’s Eve attack on the Two Saints Church in Alexandria.”
I looked this up in a Thesaurus – it’s called ‘good news’. It is not bad news. It is from Al-Ahram today.
I could paste these everyday but this is not my purpose on Earth. However it is as valid as anyone else’s quotes, the ones that already have the Muslim Brotherhood in power and marching on Israel despite not one single shred of evidence that it will come to pass. It could come to pass, but give me the shreds, all of them.
Any way, this is what good news looks like which I know looks exactly like a lie. You can take a screen shot of it and print it out and put in on your fridge with a Garfield magnet next to the articles about how salafist’s are going to blow up the Sphinx cuz it’s a statue and how the Earth is going to end in 2012 cuz Mayans who scratched their heads and decided to use their own bodies in place of the wheel said so.
Personally I would place my bet on morons who can’t get along together and who have nuclear weapons but I am an Islamist who is so stupid that I am unaware of it so what do I know?
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great articular he barry rubin has pointed about the media in egypt
All of your sparring back and forth is very interesting…I mean that in a positive sense.
But what I think is missing here in all of these Pajamas Media comments on the Middle East is that we Westerners (Occidentals) have a different mindset, we are indeed wired differently than those living now inside what Ariel and Will Durant cited as the area of “Our Oriental Heritage”.
So we are spinning our wheels in arguing about what has happened, or what will happen there because we can’t know these things. We simply must deal with the facts as they emerge. Occidental analysis of Oriental (….substitute the words “Western” and “Eastern” or “Asian” if you will…) events is beyond us because they stem from different bases/routes of original thinking.
Our vital Occidental (Western) problem right this minute is defendinng our turf from subversion and the slow encroachment of Islamism as has happened in Londonistan and Amsterdamistan. Let Britain and Holland be lessons to all of us.
Easier said than done, I suspect, but this is why I argue repeatedly for Cold-War-style containment of belligerent Islamist countries.
Barry Rubin’s obvious truth should be apparent to anyone on the receiving end of a missile emanating from Gaza. But its not. It is my experience that ideology is not damaged by facts, even though those facts kill the ideologue’s son or daughter. As proof I offer the elected chief councilman of the Western Negev, whose Kibbutz is daily bombed by Hamas, who still thinks that the Itamar massacre of Jews could have been avoided by the Jews not being there, east of the so-called Green Line. He denies the possibility that the same logic applies to his own home. Under conditions of such warp, how can we blame Western journalists for misuse of brain
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I think another person desires to be v isited in h is sleep by the ghost of Paul Rand so he can see the error of h is ways.
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