[lbo-talk] NYT: Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking No Dissent

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 10:31:55 PDT 2013


Were there 33 million people protesting as some reports said ? What were the demands of the People ,literally ?

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/world/middleeast/egypt-morsi.html<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/world/middleeast/egypt-morsi.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fworld%2Fmiddleeast%2Findex.jsonp>
>
> The New York Times
> July 15, 2013
> Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking No Dissent
> By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
>
> CAIRO — In the square where liberals and Islamists once chanted together
> for democracy, demonstrators now carry posters hailing as a national hero
> the general who ousted the country’s first elected president, Mohamed
> Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. Liberal talk-show hosts denounce the
> Brotherhood as a foreign menace and as “sadistic, extremely violent
> creatures” unfit for political life. A leading human rights advocate blames
> the Brotherhood’s “filthy” leaders for the deaths of more than 50 of their
> own supporters in a mass shooting by soldiers and the police.
>
> A hypernationalist euphoria unleashed in Egypt by the toppling of Mr. Morsi
> has swept up even liberals and leftists who spent years struggling against
> the country’s previous military-backed governments.
>
> An unpopular few among them have begun to raise alarms about what they are
> calling signs of “fascism”: the fervor in the streets, the glorification of
> the military as it tightens its grip and the enthusiastic cheers for the
> suppression of the Islamists. But the vast majority of liberals, leftists
> and intellectuals in Egypt have joined in the jubilation at the defeat of
> the Muslim Brotherhood, slamming any dissenters.
>
> “We are moving from the bearded, chauvinistic right to the clean-shaven,
> chauvinistic right,” said Rabab el-Mahdi, a left-leaning scholar at the
> American University in Cairo.
>
> Many Egyptians are overwhelmed with dual emotions: relief at the end of an
> Islamist government that many called arrogant and ineffective, and thrill
> at their power to topple presidents. The voices on the left who might be
> expected to raise alarms about the military’s ouster of a freely elected
> government are instead reveling in what they see as the country’s escape
> from the threat that an Islamist majority would steadily push Egypt to the
> right.
>
> Many on the left are still locked in an battle of semantics, trying to
> persuade the world — and perhaps one another — that the overthrow of Mr.
> Morsi was not a “coup” but a “revolution.” The army merely carried out the
> popular will, they insist. On Sunday, one private satellite network in
> Egypt was running commercials of citizen testimonials proclaiming as much.
>
> Some have begun to voice doubts. Amr Hamzawy, a political scientist who
> held a seat in the dissolved Parliament, was among the first to condemn the
> military’s shutdown of the Islamists’ satellite networks, the arrest of
> their staff members, and the detention of Mr. Morsi and hundreds of other
> Islamist leaders.
>
> Mr. Hamzawy objected in a recent newspaper column to “the rhetoric of
> gloating, hatred, retribution and revenge against the Muslim Brotherhood.”
> After the mass shooting, he called the celebration of the military takeover
> “fascism under the false pretense of democracy and liberalism.” Fellow
> intellectuals who said nothing, he wrote, were “the birds of darkness of
> this phase.”
>
> But he was almost alone. A chorus of liberals and leftists rushed to
> denounce Mr. Hamzawy for defending the Islamists.
>
> Khaled Montaser, a liberal columnist, declared that the Islamists were
> worse than “criminals and psychopaths” because they could never reform.
> “Their treason, terrorism and conspiracies are an indelible tattoo,” Mr.
> Montaser wrote. “They do not know the meaning of ‘homeland.’ They only know
> the meaning of ‘the caliphate’ and their organization first.”
>
> Ahmed Maher, a founder of the left-leaning April 6 group, initially joined
> a small volunteer team who tried to enlist Western support for the ouster.
> But after the arrests and shootings of Brotherhood supporters, he began to
> recall the generals’ long hold on power after mass protests drove President
> Hosni Mubarak from office two years ago.
>
> Mr. Maher put his worries about the generals in an online message to
> another activist: “If we assume it’s not a coup, and I tell people it’s not
> a coup, when they screw us again like they did in 2011, what would I tell
> people?”
>
> His allies responded by trying to drum him out, not only from the volunteer
> team but also from the April 6 group. Esraa Abdel Fattah, a prominent
> activist, campaigned against him in the media and circulated a list of his
> statements questioning the “coup.” And Ms. Fattah insisted that the Muslim
> Brotherhood, whose political party won the post-Mubarak elections, amounted
> to a foreign-backed terrorist group. “When terrorism is trying to take hold
> of Egypt and foreign interference is trying to dig into our domestic
> affairs, then it’s inevitable for the great Egyptian people to support its
> armed forces against the foreign danger,” Ms. Abdel Fattah wrote in a
> newspaper column.
>
> In the turbulent period of military rule after Mr. Mubarak was ousted, many
> liberals and leftists stood shoulder to shoulder with Islamists to demand
> that the generals relinquish power to elected civilians. Now the liberals
> appear to have joined in a public amnesia about the abuses and scandals of
> that period — the forced virginity tests of female protesters; Coptic
> Christian demonstrators shot by soldiers or run over with armored vehicles;
> the videotaped stripping and kicking of a female demonstrator who became
> known as the Blue Bra Woman.
>
> The activist Hassan Shaheen was captured in the same video, bleeding from
> the head as a soldier stomped on his chest. But this spring he helped lead
> the petition drive asking the military to remove Mr. Morsi. And he joined
> in the rejection of Mr. Maher, saying that by calling the ouster of Mr.
> Morsi a “coup” he was “following the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
>
> “We will stand together, the people and the military, in the face of
> terrorism,” Mr. Shaheen wrote in an online message, arguing that the
> Brotherhood’s political party “must be dissolved and all its leaders must
> be arrested.”
>
> “No negotiation, no reconciliation, no going back,” he added.
>
> Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Right, said
> that the liberals’ goal — an Egypt governed by an inclusive civilian
> democracy — appeared to be further away than when Mr. Mubarak fell. Now, he
> said, the old institutions and elites from the Mubarak era are emboldened
> to push for a full return of the old order. “There is a powerful and
> well-resourced player now trying to push Egypt back to 2010,” he said.
>
> Even those on the left who are critical of the military overthrow fault Mr.
> Morsi and the Brotherhood for their actions in power, for excluding other
> groups from decision-making, accusing critics of treason and exploiting
> religion as a political tool. They say that in recent days some Islamist
> leaders have told their supporters to prepare to use violence to defend Mr.
> Morsi, as they did during a crisis in December.
>
> Brotherhood leaders say their organization has not condoned violence in
> Egypt since the days of British rule. They say that private media outlets
> have worked for months to stir up nationalist sentiment against them, for
> example by circulating false rumors that they were considering giving away
> the Sinai or selling the Suez Canal. Over the last week, many news outlets
> have claimed that Brotherhood leaders invited foreign interference by
> appealing for help from Washington to hold off the military takeover.
> Television hosts even assert that the crowds at pro-Morsi rallies are
> actually full of Syrians and Palestinians.
>
> The military has set the mood as well. Before the takeover, it broadcast
> aerial images of the protests against Mr. Morsi, set to soaring martial
> music. On Sunday, it released another 30-minute broadcast depicting
> soldiers protecting the public, set to a similar score.
>
> State and private television channels also broadcast images of Gen.
> Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi in his trademark black beret, explaining to admiring
> soldiers the military’s obligation to intervene in the national interest.
> “Egypt is the mother of the world, and Egypt will be as great as the
> world,” he declared.
>
> Much of the public, fatigued by revolutionary turmoil, has embraced him.
> “The people had been saying ‘down, down with military rule,’ but Sisi
> completely changed them,” said Mohamed Mofeed, 38, a barber in downtown
> Cairo. “They love him.”
>
> Mr. Morsi “should have been tougher with the media,” he added. “They were
> disrespecting him all over the place.”
>
> Osama Mohamed, 20, a student sitting with a group of friends, said they
> wanted General Sisi to “leave his office and elect himself president.”
>
> Mohamed Abdel Fattah, 24, an advertising manager, agreed. “For Egypt,” he
> said, “democracy is chaos.”
>
> Mayy El Sheikh and Asmaa Al Zohairy contributed reporting.
>
>
> --
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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