Middle East/North Africa Uprising 2011

They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the “white” man and as masters of the “natives”, like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time. The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.

The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of “Islamist” fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse. Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous “Islamist” regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.

perhaps the political vacuum of non-military alternatives arising from the politics in civil society started with the Nasserites, as independent Egyptian scholars such as Samir Amin have observed.. Under President Hosni Mubarak the repression intensified to include not only the secular democrats, socialists and communists but also the Islamicists.

The Egyptian military, if it negotiates with the people (whatever exactly this would mean), will want to do so in the framework of the existing constitution, in which a national assembly dominated by the NDP (National Democratic Party–Mubarak’s organization) is supposed to remain in power until 2015. If the January 25 movement is not able to assert the sovereignty of the people and its special role as their representative, the chances of real democratization are minuscule.

Les Gelb, so apt a spokesman for the U.S. foreign policy establishment that he almost seems a self-caricature, sums up the reasons for worrying about any precipitous removal of Mubarak:   “The worry on Mubarak’s part is that if he says yes to this, there will be more demands,” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And since he’s not dealing with a legal entity, but a mob, how does he know there won’t be more demands tomorrow?”   When the people have been excluded from being a legal entity, then it is impossible for them to be one. This is a problem insurrectionaries have always faced and will always face. But it is up to those people to decide whether they are, in Gelb’s charming term, a “mob” or whether they are the legitimate expression of the popular will. If they do so, they will get no support from the United States, Europe, the United Nations, other Arab states (except perhaps Tunisia), the bien pensants of the “international community,” or Mark Zuckerberg. The will need support from the one place they may actually get it–what the New York Times dubbed the “other superpower,” global public opinion.   Of course, Gelb, reprehensible as he is, has a point. Who will the military negotiate with and how? Tunisia and Egypt are striking because they belong to that class of revolutions where, suddenly, as if out of the blue, “everybody” is on the same side. Seemingly, the whole country unites and wants the dictator out. Of course, this is not literally true; there are always, if nothing else, the pampered security forces, cronies of the dictator, and a small paid-off subgroup of the elite. But if a vast majority of all sectors of society outside the dictator’s small group is on one side, revolution can come very swiftly.

What is a strength in the tumultuous phase of rapid mobilization becomes a weakness once the question becomes, “What is to be done?” It is difficult and tiring to protest, deal with the disruption of daily life, see people be beaten and killed–at some point, it can be comforting to accept the word of some source of traditional authority that you can go home now, the problems will be fixed. I hope that will not happen in Egypt, but there is no use in anyone telling the people who are so heroically making this revolution what they should want next.

The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices.

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation.

When it became clear last week that the Ministry of Interior's crowd-control forces were adding to rather than containing the popular upsurge, they were suddenly and mysteriously removed from the street. Simultaneously, by releasing a symbolic few prisoners from jail; by having plainclothes Ministry of Interior thugs engage in some vandalism and looting (probably including that in the Egyptian National Museum); and by extensively portraying on government television an alleged widespread breakdown of law and order, the regime cleverly elicited the population's desire for security.

The stage was thus set for the regime to counterattack the opposition through a combination of divide-and-rule tactics, political jujitsu, and crude application of force. The pledge by Mubarak not to offer his candidacy, the implied succession to Suleiman rather than Gamal, the commitment to revising constitutional provisions that govern the presidential election, and the decision to suspend parliamentary sessions until courts have ruled on contested candidacies from the November election succeeded in convincing some opposition elements that they had gained enough to call it a victory and go home.

The military will now enter into negotiations with opposition elements that it chooses. The real opposition will initially be ignored, and then possibly rounded up

it's hard to tell how widespread and successful the crackdown has been. There was at least one report of BlackBerry users finding a way around the blocks. One Internet service provider reportedly held out for days before shutting down by Monday. And while cell service had supposedly resumed after the weekend, CNN reports the government has shut it again temporarily.

It's also unclear whether the Egyptian government had a legal basis for its actions, as Vodafone claimed. But Wong said that if even if there were some law that allowed the crackdown, it would run counter to international human-rights principles. "There are a set of human-rights norms around when governments can restrict free flow of information," she said. "I would say this is pretty close to a violation."

Did they have any choice? "We don't know," said Cynthia Wong, of the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Certainly it shows how much leverage governments have over mobile phone companies in particular."

Having become a democracy activist in the 1990s, Ibrahim helped make films instructing peasants how to vote. In Egypt’s class-ridden, hierarchical society, the elite around President Hosni Mubarak viewed these activities as seditious.

But Ibrahim’s most serious infraction was to indirectly slam the increasingly obvious moves by Mubarak and his wife Suzanne to install their son, Gamal, as the future president-for-life. In an interview on satellite television, Ibrahim was asked about the tendency toward dynastic rule in the Arab world, with longtime Syrian dictator Hafez Assad ensuring he would be succeeded by his son Bashar. Ibrahim joked that the Arabs had invented a new, heretofore unknown form of government. It joined the republic (in Arabic, jumhuriya) with the monarchy (mamlakiya), creating the ... jumlukiya! We might translate the term as “monarpublicanism.”

Ibrahim was often cited by the neoconservatives who backed the Iraq War, but he did not return their esteem. He denounced them for cynically using the Sept. 11 attacks “to advance hegemonic designs” and complained that the Iraq debacle had turned the world against the U.S., causing the original sympathy generated by the attacks to evaporate.