“I don’t know if you have been to Egypt or any muslim dominated country. I think if you had your comments might be a bit different.”
I lived in Tunis for two years back in the late 70′s and have been a merchant seaman for nigh 25 years before the mast.
Been through Suez half a dozen times, dumped off 50k tons of wheat at Damietta, was a flotational SCUD target at Jubail in Saudi in 1991, dumped off another 50k tons of wheat in Karachi in ’88, (right when General Zia’s airplane went “BOOM” and fell out of the sky), sat at anchor off of Bahrein on a 10 days “on the hook” and 2 days at the dock in ’95 on a military cargo ship helping to keep Saddam in his cage while most of the US population thought we were at “Peace”.
Sailed LASH ships diddy-bopping around the Red Sea, (and other places with “interesting” plumbing fixtures),dropping of full and picking up empty barges at Jordan, Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti, (sea temperature in Sudan in August was 91′ Fahrenheit…fun being in the engine room of a steamship, that).
Started my seagoing career in ’87 on an LNG tanker shuttling between onloading ports on Borneo and Sumatra in Indonesia and offloading in Japan.
So it is what it is and “I yam what I yam”, (as Popeye would say).
“the brotherhood have been working on this for years ..they have a significant following.”
Sure they have, is this surprising? The Communists fished in troubled waters also. One of the reasons that the M-B was able to survive was that “our bastards” in ourder to be perceived as “ours”, had to go after the Marxists, who were notably secular…incurably so in fact, and so chaps like Mubarak and Bourguiba and King Hussein could afford to ignore what was going on in the mosques while putting the Internal Security “Eye of Sauron” on the Reds agitating for Moscow in the unions.
Now that the Communists are on the ash-heap of history, (everywhere outside of the DemocRat Party, the US Liberal Moonbat Sweat Lodge and George Soros’ wet dreams), the threat is coming out of the Islamist side…simply since that was where any kind of opposition could survive.
Let’s go back to Iran in 1978 for a minute. The riots that overthrew the Shah were a popular uprising. Ayatollah Buttplug didn’t get off the plane from Paris until the Shah had absquatulated and SAVAK were bolting for the exits. The common people of Iran did all the “heavy lifting”, (and bleeding), and then that schmuck floated in on Air France to pick up the pieces.
What if Khomeini’s plane had developed engine trouble and crashed into a Yugoslavian Pig Farm collective’s waste pond?
How would history have been different?
But, alas, we had Jimmeh Cartuh as Preznit then, and he made a fetish out of Yooman Rites and playing “hands off” about foreign nations’ domestic politics.
We have to strive real hard to not ensnare ourselves in a self-fulfilling prophecy of Epic Fail here.
Yes, the Muslim world doesn’t “do” revolutions very well, but we have to recognize our inherent pessimism about their politics for what it os and try to see what is going on in Cairo for what it is…people are pissed at Mubarak, and the M-B’s have been but one of the voices calling for him to go, (but not the ONLY voice).
If there wasn’t widespread anger, the M-B’s agitating could not have generated 5 days and nights of demonstrations and riots, could it have?
