In an excellent piece on Al Jazeera, Lisa Hajjar notes that ‘Suleiman has long been favoured by the US government for his ardent anti-Islamism, his willingness to talk and act tough on Iran – and he has long been the CIA’s main man in Cairo.’
Category: Egypt
Ayman Mohyeldin on his detention by the Egyptian military
Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Cairo who was held by the military outside Tahrir (Liberation) Square on Monday, has spoken to the network about the experience following his release.
Continue reading “Ayman Mohyeldin on his detention by the Egyptian military”
Egyptian Blogger Sandmonkey will Continue on Despite Brutality
by Dennis Bernstein
To call the ongoing people’s revolts in Tunisia and Egypt FaceBook revolutions is certainly overstating the case.
In both countries, the time was ripe for revolution and social upheaval. Poverty, repression and hopelessness were enforced by greedy U.S.-supported despots who were deaf to the needs of their people.
But there is little doubt that the recent street-protest revolts in Tunis and Cairo were assisted by new social media: Facebookers, tweeters and a new generation of Internet bloggers.
In Egypt, the blogosphere has been on fire with young activists planning meetings, sharing information, planning actions and sending emergency messages about government attacks.
Mahmoud Salem, known in the blogosphere, as “Sandmonkey,” is among the most famous and savvy young Egyptian bloggers, now working at the edges of Liberation Square.
Sandmonkey, who describes himself as “a pro-democracy, free-speech, women’s rights activist,” has been blogging since 2004. His blog is now read around the world and has become part of an alternative information flow, carrying the message from the street to the 24-hour-a-day rush hour on the information super-highway.
What Sandmonkey’s blogging had helped bring about was brought home to him this week when he moved from the blogosphere to Liberation Square where hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have been demanding that longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak resign.
Continue reading “Egyptian Blogger Sandmonkey will Continue on Despite Brutality”
Democracy in the Arab world?
The protests that overthrew half a century of autocratic rule in Tunisia are spreading. The governments of Egypt, Algeria, and Yemen are feeling the wrath of decades of repression as people take to the streets and demand freedom.
Egypt Burning
This film tells the story of five days in January 2011 when the people of Egypt broke through a barrier of fear they had known for a generation and rose in revolt against their president. Egypt Burning captures those critical moments as history unfolded through interviews with Al Jazeera correspondents on the ground. Their coverage of this popular uprising, which has once again proven Al Jazeera’s indispensable role in today’s global media landscape, made them the target of a state campaign to get their channel off the air.
Departure Day
a poem by Naomi Foyle
for Egypt
Everywhere, the revolution
nods off in the wings, misses its cue
and the long-scripted farce bangs another door
in the face of the people
Here, the people resist
each other, the television flattens
and expands against the wall
until it is the wall
and its cold grey plasma
seeps like damp into our lungs.
There, it is blood that rises
in the back of the throat
spills on the pavement
with the little girl’s mango juice
and as she cries, the revolution
jerks awake, not too late
to bring the house down.
Democracy in Action
The Guardian publishes Ahdaf Soueif’s dairy from Cairo. “What we have here,” she writes, “is the opposite of a vacuum; we have democracy in action on the ground in Tahrir Square. We are full of hope and ideas, and our gallant young people are guarding our periphery.”
As you start reading this, you will know something I don’t: you will know how this day – Friday 4 February – has turned out for us. I’m writing this at 7am. I slept in my brother’s house last night, so now I’m hearing different patterns of birdsong and muffled conversation from the street. The renewed pro-democracy protests are set to start soon and we shall all make our way to Tahrir Square. We shall be families – with the young people in the lead. We’ve called friends who’ve spent the night in the square. They say everything’s quiet.
On Thursday the new vice-president said the protests had to end. And the new prime minister stated he had no idea how violence came to happen on Wednesday in Tahrir, but that it would be investigated and, meanwhile, he was apologising to the people. And meanwhile, also, the government’s battalions of violent-crime-record personnel and plainclothes security forces were being moved around the city, yelling and brandishing banners and weapons and confronting protesters.
But let’s do this in sequence. These are short extracts from my diaries of these days …
Egyptian unrest and US media bias
The coverage of Egyptian uprising in the TV Channels across US have been criticised for being both pessimistic and superficial. Since the pro-democracy protests began, the mainstream American media has focused sharply on what it all means for the U.S. and its allies in the region.
Zizek and Ramadan on future of Egypt
Zizek is in fine form on the Riz Khan Show. In a recent op-ed he noted that
the most shameful and dangerously opportunistic reaction was that of Tony Blair as reported on CNN: change is necessary, but it should be a stable change. Stable change in Egypt today can mean only a compromise with the Mubarak forces by way of slightly enlarging the ruling circle. This is why to talk about peaceful transition now is an obscenity: by squashing the opposition, Mubarak himself made this impossible. After Mubarak sent the army against the protesters, the choice became clear: either a cosmetic change in which something changes so that everything stays the same, or a true break.
The revolutionary chants on the streets of Egypt have resonated around the world, but with a popular uprising without a clear direction and an unpopular leader refusing to concede, Egypt’s future hangs in the balance. Riz Khan talks to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the power of popular dissent, the limits of peaceful protest and the future of Egyptian politics.
The Dogs of The State
At 0.50 a police vehicle drives into a peaceful crowd, eliciting cries such as “the dogs of the state!” This is the regime apparatus that co-opted sections of the Egyptian elite and their international backers are trying to save, with or without Husni Mubarak.
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