The military, i.e. _the_ state, the special repressive apparatus, has good democratic sense. They are taking direction from _the_ People. That's what it's looking like. Any evidence to the contrary ?
Wouldn't respect the NYT to get this.
Charles
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Robert Naiman
<naiman at justforeignpolicy.org> wrote:
> It's true that the Nour Party is supporting the military-appointed
> transitional government. But I don't see how that fact undermines anything
> in the NYT piece. It's a description of how Egyptian liberals have changed,
> and not only how most are supporting the coup, but how most have gone over
> to a very illiberal point of view more generally: celebrating the military,
> celebrating repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, denouncing the Muslim
> Brotherhood as a foreign conspiracy, celebrating the exclusion of the
> Muslim Brotherhood from politics, etc.
>
> This is a very different vision from January 25.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 10:09 PM, ken hanly <northsunm at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> The problem with this article is that it describes the situation as the
>> Islamists against liberals. It ignores that fact that most of the more
>> radical Salafist Islamists are supporting the military-backed transition
>> government. The Nour Party that came second in the elections seems content
>> to see the Muslim Brotherhood trampled on by the military. The liberals not
>> only will confront the army but a growing and more radical Islamist force
>> within the transition government.
>>
>> 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.”
>>
>>
>>
>> Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html
>> Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Robert Naiman <naiman at justforeignpolicy.org>
>> *To:* Progressive Economics <pen-l at lists.csuchico.edu>; lbo talk <
>> lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>> *Sent:* Monday, July 15, 2013 7:07:21 PM
>> *Subject:* [Pen-l] NYT: Egyptian Liberals Embrace the Military, Brooking
>> No Dissent
>>
>>
>> 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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>
> --
> Robert Naiman
> Policy Director
> Just Foreign Policy
> www.justforeignpolicy.org
> naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
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