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Arabica Robusta

Egypt During the Reign of the Lunatics » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...ring-the-reign-of-the-lunatics

social movements arab multinational mncs corporations intervention egypt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 22 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Mohandseen would have been one of the zones where the army had an overwhelming majority, because many of those that benefit most from the patronage system that is the Egyptian state live there, whilst the army lies at the apex of this food chain.
  • It is rather unfortunate that many reports call our demonstrations ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ protests, because when we last did a count at al-Nahda square of the proportion of Muslim Brothers there, they came to about 20-25%. This is in fact a representative proportion across all protesters at the moment.
  • The Front for National Conscience is headed by ex-diplomat Ibrahim Yusri, who was ambassador for Egypt in Algeria during the political crisis of 1991-2 over the role of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) in political, and talks here to al-Jazeera Arabic of his experience at that time and his strong opposition to the removal of Morsi as duly elected president and to the annulment of the legally binding constitution.
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  • What Morsi has done will go down in history as one of the major turning points in Middle-Eastern history. Political Islam, which has traditionally been a one-dimensional creedal culture, has now been repositioned in the wider consciousness in terms of democratic legitimacy. This is entirely against the interests of a military régime that has, since 1973, built its power and reputation, not on fighting wars to protect its people, but on running a protection racket.
Arabica Robusta

Religion and politics in post-coup Egypt | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...nd-politics-in-post-coup-egypt

arab intervention egypt mubarak religion

shared by Arabica Robusta on 04 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Immediately after the July 2013 coup, Gomaa jumped into the picture again, eclipsing the current Mufti of Egypt (rumours had it that he opposed the coup) and even the Grand Sheikh of Al Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyib, who was present at and blessed General Sisi’s announcement of his roadmap, including the immediate suspension of the constitution and the appointment of an interim president. Gomaa had established a reputation as an important scholar of “moderate” Islam, calling for dialogue with other religions, and issuing fatwas that supported the rights of women and minorities. Understandably, he enjoys much popularity among the more “liberal” segments of the Egyptian society and the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds.  
  • Apparently appalled by the unexpected release of the video clip, Gomaa was quick in denying that he was talking about the MB or the protesters and asserted that he meant the “terrorists in Sinai and elsewhere”. Hardly anybody took these claims seriously given Gomaa’s frequent references in his speech to President Morsi’s (lack of) legitimacy. In fact, Gomaa has kept a low profile since that incident a few weeks ago, and it is likely that he would not be playing a significant role in Egypt’s future even if the current regime succeeds in holding onto power.
  • The new Egyptian Constitution (now under preparation by an appointed committee made up of almost exclusively “liberal” figures) will determine the new relationship between the ruling military elite and “official Islam.”
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  • Their own decision to take sides in the conflict between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood was both dictated by their traditional understanding and has at the same time confirmed this understanding. By siding with the state, al-Azhar has adhered to its traditional views, failing to realize that their position contradicted the discourse they propagated for political reasons in the last few months prior to the coup.  In other words, the fight against “politicizing religion” in Egypt (the main perpetrators of which were taken to be the Muslim Brotherhood) may prove even more detrimental to both politics and religion in Egypt and beyond.
Arabica Robusta

The Economics of Egypt's Coup » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...the-economics-of-egypts-coup

movements social arab intervention multinational egypt mncs corporations mubarak

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The GCC oil sheikhs ‘paid’ $15bn in aid for the July 2013 coup in Egypt, but the handouts were quickly used up on buttressing the Egyptian pound and on a dismal $4.9bn stimulus package. The Egyptian pound has continued its slide, economic growth has stalled (at best its 1% in the first quarter of 2014), the budget deficit stands at14% of GDP, unemployment is 13.4%, inflation is 10%, while public debt and foreign debt are accelerating. GCC aid is not just monetary, and includes fuel and natural gas, which Egypt was cavalierly exporting until last year.
  • Investors want to have their cake and eat it: no more corrupt Mubarakite officials, and at the same time no more challenges to corrupt investment deals (which often strip a state company of its assets and lay off workers, spiriting any profits abroad).
  • The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government tried to square the circle. It allowed the illegal privatisations to be challenged, turned back the massive corruption, and encouraged a new class of small and more devout businessmen to build a new Egypt, emulating the Turkish miracle which unfolded under the Islamists there. Egypt is ripe for such a development, but the paranoia of the secular elite and their unwillingness to make room for a less corrupt, more dynamic, more home-grown, non-Cairene strata of entrepreneurs means that the only way forward for Egypt has been crushed “in the near term”.
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  • The Egyptian military saw the MB as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, in particular, Hamas in Gaza, and feared the MB was distancing itself from the Egypt-Israel peace treaty
  • The MB were also beginning to move the Israeli mountain by refusing polite negotiations, working directly with Hamas (and mediating Hamas-Fatah talks) and developing an ambitious plan to transform the Sinai, including building civilian infrastructure, creating industry, and strengthening its internal and military security, in defiance of the US-Israeli assumption that it was a no-man’s buffer zone.
Arabica Robusta

Violence comes home: an interview with Arun Kundnani | openDemocracy - 0 views

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shared by Arabica Robusta on 24 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama continues to rely on the authorization to give his drone-killing programme a veneer of legality. This is the old colonial formula of liberal values at home sustained by a hidden illiberalism in the periphery – where routine extra-judicial killing is normalised.
  • colonial history teaches us that violence always ‘comes home’ in some form: whether as refugees seeking sanctuary, whether as the re-importing of authoritarian practices first practised in colonial settings, or indeed as terrorism.
  • What results is a mutual reinforcing of the militarized identity narrative on both sides: the jihadists point to numerous speeches by western leaders to support their claim of a war on Islam; and western leaders legitimise war with talk of a ‘generational struggle’ between western values and Islamic extremism. What is striking today is the tired rhetoric of military aggression – Hollande’s “pitiless war” – once again recycled, despite the obvious failures of the past 14 years.
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  • Empirical evidence does not support either of these assumptions – witness the European ISIS volunteers who arrive in Syria with copies of Islam for Dummies or the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was reported to have drunk whisky and smoked cannabis
  • Yet radicalisation theories have been officially accepted and popularised. This is because they provide a rationale for surveillance (it is easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to find ideologues than terrorists). And they conveniently disavow the cycle of violence we have entered.
  • What radicalisation theories ignore is that violence in the ‘war on terror’ is relational: the individuals who become ISIS volunteers are willing to use violence; so too are our own governments.
  • These recruits are not corrupted by ideology but by the end of ideology: they have grown up in the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”, of no alternatives to capitalist globalisation. They have known no critique, only conspiracy theory, and are drawn to apocalyptic rather than popular struggle. Nevertheless, for all its lack of actual political content, the narrative of global war against the west feels to its adherents like an answer to the violence of racism, poverty and empire.
  • The intellectual reaction to the Paris attacks has continued these patterns. The dominant feature is a narcissism that describes ISIS as simply the polar opposite of whatever we value in ourselves. For liberals, ISIS is intolerance, racism and oppression of women. For conservatives, ISIS is the ideal enemy: fanatical, non-western and barbaric. In this mode, ISIS is merely the absolute ‘other’ that enables the construction of a positive image of ourselves.
  • This means that the most appropriate response to ISIS is to see it as a symptom of the ‘normal’ functioning of the modern, global system, rather than as an external element corrupting the system from outside or from the pre-modern past. Its use of social media, its rejection of the national borders of the twentieth century and its linkages to the petroleum economy all demonstrate that ISIS is a child of globalisation.
  • ISIS is certainly a monster but a monster of our own making. It was born in the chaos and carnage that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its sectarian ideology and funding has come from the Saudi and Gulf ruling elites, the west’s closest regional allies after Israel. Russia and Iran have also played their role, propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime – responsible for far more civilian deaths than ISIS – and prolonging the war in Syria that enables ISIS to thrive.
  • The left should be much bolder in asserting that only an anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics can provide a genuine alternative to jihadism; that more radicalisation, in the genuine sense of the word, is the solution, not the problem; that terrorism thrives in environments where mass movements advancing visions of social progress have been defeated.
  • We must therefore defend the spaces of radical politics, for the right to dream of another world.
  • there are two broad approaches to making sense of ‘Islamic extremism’: there are conservatives who regard Islam as an inherently violent culture defined essentially by its founding texts, and liberals who think the enemy is a totalitarian perversion of Islam that emerged in the twentieth century.
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