1. June Revolution, correcting the course of January Revolution
The Revolution of June 30, 2013 is the more profound and mature second wave to correct the path of the revolution of January 25 2011; and to offset the greatest danger suffered by Egypt in its recent history, namely the risk of cultural apostasy, separation from time and threatening the unity of homeland. This danger was posed by forces of fascist religious right, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the forces representing the most parasitic, tyrannical, corrupt, fascist, racist and reactionary segments of large capital; in addition also to the a serious threat to Egyptian national security, represented in takeover by Muslim Brotherhood to governing the country, starting the implementation of the empowerment and control scheme on state joints to plunder the wealth of the country, conspiracy to hijack the revolution and the nation for the benefit of a scheme led by the United States and implemented under the auspices of Qatar and Turkey, in order to break up the national territory and threaten entity and unity of the Egyptian state, by dumping it in the abyss sectarian rivalry and religious conflict to turn into two models of Iraq and Syria, in order to ensure full security for Israel and protect the interests of the United States and global imperialism in the region, through dismantling of Arab countries and destruction of national armies that cast a potential threat to Israel. The Deal-Plot which was made to abort the January 25 revolution was based on enthronement of the Muslim Brotherhood as rulers of the largest Arab country and empowering them politically in the region in exchange for manipulating them to serve American-Zionist schemes and their integration into capitalist globalization policies and the continuing neoliberal approach associated with world monopolies. Muslim Brotherhood has been ready for this, as it was they who secured the unprecedented Armistice Agreement between Hamas and Israel. They kept silent on Obama’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and fell dumb about Zionist violations of Al-Aqsa Mosque after they deceived the masses with their slogans “Khyber Khyber O Jews,” and “To Jerusalem we go Millions of Martyrs.” The most dangerous is what has been exposed of their willingness to compromise the national territory and conspiring with Israel and the United States to implement the Zionist project to the nation swing through resettlement of Palestinians in Sinai, as well as agreeing to grant Halayib and Shalateen to Sudan, and abandonment of national sovereignty in the suspicious project of Suez Canal region, accelerate the agreement with the International Monetary Fund and promulgate The (Islamic) Bond Law. One of the objectives of imperialist projects of in the Middle East is the establishment of states on religious grounds, to serve mainly Zionist plan to declare Israel a Jewish state for all Jews in the world. This is in addition to the important results entailing these religious countries inevitably caught up in sectarian conflict. So, it became strategically required to divide and fragment the Arab countries and bring the Sunni-Shiite conflict, Muslim-Christian conflict and Muslim-Jewish conflict to replace Arab-Israeli national liberation conflict and also replace the social class struggle among the peoples of Arab countries and authoritarian regimes allied with imperialist global and international monopolies. We have seen clear and visible signs in Egypt after the rule of Muslim Brotherhood in a series of attacks on churches as well as the attack on St. Mark’s Cathedral for the first time in history since the introduction of Islam into Egypt, also the brutal attack on the Shiites in the village of “Abu Nomros”, killing and dragging four of them in a precedent first of its kind; and Declaration of Jihad in the stadium, calling for the supply of mercenary terrorists to the war in Syria, as well as proliferation of groups of “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”, and the emergence of types of lynch and suspension of bodies on light poles. If we add to this the continuing series of torture in sit-ins in Rabea and Nahda at the hands of militias, the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies, we find ourselves in front an outlawed barbaric savage scenario without the right to differ. The aim so became that we terminate ourselves by ourselves, and that our
punishment goes to our bodies not to the real enemies. Thus we were destined to get to this miserable fate, but awareness, vigilance and greatness of the Egyptian people saved Egypt and spoiled all these plots. So, the genius Tamarrod campaign was able to mobilize all tributaries of popular rejection of the rule of Muslim Brotherhood through a campaign of signatures exceeding 22 million people signing in less than two months. These were collected by all sects, classes and categories of the Egyptian people, even within state institutions and bodies in all governorates of Egypt. This was followed by the great exit of the Egyptian people on June 30, with more than 30 million citizens rallying in all governorates of Egypt. The Egyptian armed forces siding with the people’s will, adopted the people’s demands and announced the roadmap to drop the Brotherhood regime and their allies of forces of religious right. This put the United States and the European Union in a real crisis. This was the first time the Egyptian armed forces run that contrary to American will since more than 40 years. It was also the first time that the Egyptian people of all sects and political forces and institutions unite to correct the revolution path and begin to develop a civilian and democratic constitution for the country to exit from dependency and groveling. Perhaps this is what explains the hectic movement and shuttle flights of Ashton and Barnes and other officials to Egypt, in a way considered a blatant interference in its internal affairs through the practice of constant pressure to release the deposed president who is accused in cases of foreign contacts affecting the state’s national security. This was also in order not to dissolve the armed sit-ins and terrorist outposts in Rabea and Nahda with the aim of ensuring continuation of Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian political life, maintaining the organization and continuing religious extremist right-wing parties to continue the plot of deconstruction, fragmentation and extortion of the new Egyptian leadership, trying to confuse and disrupt the map of future to abort the June 30 revolution. We regard the Egyptian people’s revolution on June 30 as correcting the path of the January 25 revolution and an extension of all phases of the national democratic revolution that began with the Orabi Revolution in 1881 and continued through the 1919 revolution and the revolution in 1952
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/why-egypts-liberal-intellectuals-still-support-the-army.html?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter
>
> January 8, 2014
>
> Why Egypt’s Liberal Intellectuals Still Support the Army
>
> Posted by Negar Azimi
>
> When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at
> the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation
> of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and
> chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes
> into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of
> Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
>
> One of the Arab world’s most popular novelists, Aswany was a prominent
> supporter of the demonstrations that climaxed with the dramatic fall
> of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. (Wendell Steavenson wrote a Profile of
> Aswany for the magazine in early 2012.) More recently, in his columns
> for the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm (and, since October, for
> the International New York Times), Aswany has been a relentless critic
> of Mohamed Morsi and his followers in the Muslim Brotherhood—and a
> passionate defender of the man who deposed him, General Abdel Fattah
> el-Sisi, whom Aswany has called “a national hero.”
>
> In clips of the Paris gathering posted on YouTube, one can see the
> room erupt into chaos resembling a food fight. The event’s host, the
> translator and former ambassador Gilles Gauthier, helplessly pleads,
> “This event is about literature!” while Morsi supporters in the
> audience stand up to chant “Down with military rule!” and “Traitor!”
> in Arabic. A sea of hands shoots up in the crowd, waving the
> four-fingers gesture that has come to be an emblem for the mass
> killing of Muslim Brotherhood protestors at Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiyah
> mosque in August. (“Rabaa” means “fourth” in Arabic.)
>
> Before long, Aswany, a practicing dentist with the girth of a
> night-club bouncer, is standing up, jabbing his finger and shouting,
> “Down with the dogs of the Morshid … You are traitors … You have
> betrayed the revolution!” As if that were not enough, members of the
> crowd advance on the stage, pushing a security guard back, onto the
> table at which Aswany and Gauthier are sitting, splitting it in two.
> As unidentified objects begin to fly at the author’s head, the two men
> slip through a glass door at the back of the stage and escape down a
> trap door in the floor. It is an unlikely, if not inelegant, exit.
>
> The scene is painful to watch, and yet not entirely surprising. Two
> thousand miles from Cairo, it serves as a window onto the vast
> polarization of the Egyptian political sphere over the past twelve
> months, which culminated two weeks ago with the military-backed
> government’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as an illegal
> “terrorist organization.” The new designation set off an even more
> aggressive crackdown on the group, most of whose leaders have been
> jailed. Protests in several Egyptian cities have escalated into
> violent confrontations between Brotherhood supporters and police; on
> Friday, thirteen people were killed, and almost fifty wounded, in
> clashes across the country.
>
> * * *
>
> Ardent supporters of the Brotherhood have been pitted against
> partisans of the current military government since the events of this
> summer, when protestors filled streets and squares across Egypt to
> demand that the country’s first freely elected President step down.
> (Estimates of their number range from 476,000 to the oft-cited but
> highly implausible thirty-four million.) Morsi, predictably, refused
> to budge, and was kidnapped by the Army, a move his supporters
> protested with prolonged sit-ins—until these were broken up with
> considerable violence in August, killing somewhere between six hundred
> and two thousand six hundred people. (The numbers game in Egypt is an
> impenetrable thicket.) The victors cast their triumph as a
> revolution—merely the next phase in the photogenic uprising that began
> with Mubarak’s removal; the vanquished called it a military coup,
> topped off by the bloodiest massacre in modern Egyptian history.
>
> The fact that no independent investigation has been conducted into the
> deaths of Brotherhood supporters does not bode well for those
> embracing the photogenic version of events. Nor, for that matter, does
> the passage, in November, of an anti-protest law that makes it
> virtually impossible to gather ten or more people in one place without
> a special permit. Dozens of activists have already been jailed for
> violating it; they were joined in prison, at the end of December, by
> three Al Jazeera journalists, who were essentially arrested on charges
> of sympathy for the banned Brotherhood.
>
> The elaborate semantic disputes over the facts of Egypt’s recent
> history can be dizzying. To use the word “coup” in describing the
> events of this summer will invite, in some circles, the suggestion
> that the Brotherhood’s ascendance was the work of a Western conspiracy
> involving an odd troika: two-faced local human-rights groups, flush
> with foreign money; biased anti-military and pro-Morsi journalists
> with the Times and other U.S. outlets; and, of course, the secret
> leadership of Barack Hussein Obama.
>
> Referring to the July events as a “revolution,” on the other hand,
> will lead the opposing camp, consisting of Morsi supporters and
> critics of the military (who are, increasingly, an unpopular
> minority), to point out that there may have been more legitimate means
> of expressing disapproval of Morsi—through, say, civil disobedience or
> a public campaign for early elections.
>
> Many of those who believe it was a “coup” would add that there is
> evidence that the security forces, Army, and even remnants of the
> Mubarak regime helped orchestrate the protests against Morsi. In this
> view, the twists and turns of the past three years were nothing but
> theatrical diversions in an elaborate farce choreographed by the
> military and the old regime: first, let the octogenarian dictator
> fall; appear enlightened by allowing an underdog Islamist candidate to
> win the election; let the country descend into chaos—so the Army can
> once again come to the rescue, welcomed with open arms by the grateful
> populace.
>
> Amid these rival claims, Aswany’s passionate defense of the military
> sits squarely in the mainstream of public opinion, and yet it has
> surprised and disappointed some of his admirers. After all, we expect
> our writers and intellectuals to be moral giants, holding up a mirror
> to the world’s inequities. In Egypt, this expectation has particular
> resonance, as several generations of politically committed
> writers—beginning with Naguib Mahfouz and continuing with Sonallah
> Ibrahim, Gamal Al-Ghitani, Ahdaf Soueif, and Hamdi Abou Golayyel—have
> made vivid the many grinding injustices of Egyptian life. Across the
> decades, one finds a familiar cast of literary types: the thuggish
> politicians who take your bribes, the drug dealers who ply you with
> cheap painkillers, the pimps who sell your sisters, the police who
> beat you to a pulp, the Islamists who censor your books and trash your
> cinema, and—of course—the unacknowledged, but omnipresent, Big Man.
>
> Aswany’s 2002 novel, “The Yacoubian Building,” which had all the
> pyrotechnic melodrama of a soap opera, deftly showcased the social
> ills of Mubarak’s Egypt through the interwoven stories of the
> inhabitants of a once glamorous downtown-Cairo apartment building. One
> of his characters, a young man tortured and raped by the police, turns
> to radical Islam; Aswany uses his story to illustrate how the state’s
> abuses have bred terrorism. An ominous Mubarak-like figure, fearsome
> and never identified, lingers in the background throughout. A
> spectacular best-seller, the book was adapted into a big-budget film,
> and then a television series. Aswany’s new prominence did not diminish
> his criticism of the regime: he was one of the founders of Kifaya, a
> heroically rag-tag anti-Mubarak coalition composed of Nasserists,
> socialists, liberals, and assorted others who, in 2004, began to stage
> protests against the government—usually a hundred people at most,
> ringed by far larger crowds of state security police in riot gear.
> These gatherings, which for so long seemed futile, were in many ways
> among the seeds for the uprising that toppled Mubarak.
>
> * * *
>
> I met Aswany in Cairo last month at the Garden City Club, a
> members-only bar and restaurant on the roof of a faded but regal
> art-deco building. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the incident
> in Paris, which Aswany waved away with a mischievous laugh. (“It was
> very hot,” he recalled.) Turning back to the events of the summer, he
> was less mirthful. “Mr. Morsi cancelled the democratic system last
> November,” Aswany said, referring to the former President’s
> extra-constitutional decree granting him sweeping new powers untouched
> by legislative or judicial oversight. “He cancelled the law, the
> constitution, and put himself above all the courts. He acted like a
> Turkish sultan, you see?”
>
> In Aswany’s view, the November, 2012, decree was only Morsi’s most
> dramatic failure: there were legions of others, from the minor
> (distractedly scratching his own crotch in front of the Australian
> Prime Minister) to the major (bungling the economy; appointing a
> member of the Islamist group Gama’a al-Islamiya, whose militants
> killed dozens of tourists in Luxor in 1997, to be the governor of
> Luxor province).
>
> “You know, I gave him a chance,” Aswany said. “Many of us did.” But
> the writer’s distaste for the Muslim Brotherhood is deep-rooted, and
> long predates Morsi’s election. “They are terrorists,” he said. “We
> had the feeling we were in a room of gangsters. People woke up every
> morning asking, what did these people do overnight? Did they give up
> the Suez Canal? Did they make an under-the-table deal about Sinai? Did
> they ban ballet? They wanted to ban the ballet! Ballet is not erotic!
> At the same time, you have their people in the parliament trying to
> convince us that it is O.K. to marry a girl that is fourteen years old
> … this is a disease; it is pedophilia!”
>
> He grew more animated. “They are like a bad version of Don Quixote
> because they live in history. They believe they were chosen by God to
> restore the glory of their religion. This type of fascism is very,
> very dangerous!”
>
> I pressed him about the killing of Morsi supporters in August. “We
> don’t have the numbers yet.”
>
> About the word “coup”:
>
> “There was a warning, and Morsi refused to step down. The Army
> interfered to protect millions who were already in the street. This is
> not a coup d’état.”
>
> About whether General Sisi, for whom there has been cultish enthusiasm
> in Egypt, should run for president:
>
> “I cannot answer that question until we have a system of fair
> elections.” (This is not a likely development anytime soon.)
>
> And, finally: What if Morsi had stayed?
>
> “They would have controlled the whole country. There would be
> Brotherhood in the media, Brotherhood in the Ministry of Culture,
> Brotherhood everywhere!”
>
> This, I felt, got to the heart of what many secular intellectuals fear
> most. I heard it over and over again this fall: given enough time, the
> Brotherhood would have spread its tentacles throughout the system,
> until it became the system. “We don’t want to turn into Iran,” the
> newspaper editor Ibrahim Eissa told me, explaining why he felt the
> ongoing crackdown on the Brotherhood was necessary. Eissa, a friend of
> Aswany and a prominent Egyptian liberal, faced multiple prison
> sentences for criticizing Mubarak in the aughts. These days, his
> weekly television talk show is a wince-worthy carnival of affection
> for the military. In a landscape in which good choices are few and far
> between, the Eissas of Egypt have attached themselves to what they may
> perceive as the lesser evil.
>
> Aswany and Eissa are not lone wolves: if anything, they reflect the
> views not only of most Egyptians, but of their fellow liberal writers.
> In the past few months, Al-Ghitani and the feminist writer Nawal El
> Saadawi have gone on record defending the military’s role in the
> events of the summer, as has Ibrahim, probably Egypt’s most admired
> novelist, who was venerated for his principled and unyielding
> opposition to the Mubarak regime. Very few prominent writers—among
> them Soueif, who hails from a family of prominent human-rights
> advocates, and Belal Fadl—have rejected the binary choice between the
> military and the Brotherhood. In September, Soueif and others launched
> the Road of the Revolution Front, a group that aims to reject what it
> calls the fascism of both sides. And yet it remains small and, in many
> circles, unpopular.
>
> * * *
>
> A few nights after the Garden City Club encounter, I drove up to
> Moqattam, a desert suburb that hangs above the smoggy city, atop one
> of Cairo’s few plateaus. Aswany was holding his weekly literary
> salon—a tradition that goes back some fifteen years—in a cultural
> center called Shababeek. As I walked in, Aswany was squinting beneath
> an overly bright spotlight, giving an interview to a local television
> station. I heard him exclaim, “I was not afraid!” It took me a second
> to realize he was referring to the incident in Paris, faithfully
> fulfilling the role of a man who would never bend to humiliation.
>
> Upstairs, where he would be talking, about eighty people—a respectable
> cross section of stooped and young, veiled and unveiled, men and
> women—patiently waited for their host, in a room whose walls were
> painted black, as if to communicate a “contemporary” atmosphere. (I
> imagined that many Arabic rap concerts and slam-poetry readings had
> been held there.) As Aswany walked in, he was besieged by well-wishers
> and worked the room like Frank Sinatra. He climbed onto the stage, and
> the room fell into a reverential hush.
>
> The theme of that evening’s session was satire and its importance in
> democracy. Only a few days earlier, the popular satirical show hosted
> by Bassem Youssef—invariably described as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”—had
> been cancelled, ostensibly because Youssef had gone one step too far
> in his jokes about the military. Aswany passionately defended Youssef,
> and then went on to present a short history of satire’s role in
> Egyptian political life. At one point, he had the room in stitches as
> he told joke after joke, including one of his favorites from 2011:
> “Someone tells Mubarak the people are saying goodbye—and Mubarak says,
> but where are they going?”
>
> When it finally came time for questions, a young man in a hoodie got
> up and, with prepared notes in hand, made a series of statements about
> the crimes of the Army, ending with the massacre that took place in
> Rabaa al-Adawiyah. At one point, he said to Aswany, “Ask yourself, do
> they have the right to kill innocent protestors?”
>
> Aswany—probably thinking, “This again?”—seemed taken aback. “I didn’t
> kill anyone,” he said, defensively, “but anyone who kills a member of
> the Army is a traitor … The Muslim Brotherhood has blood on its
> hands.” He reiterated a point he had made earlier in the evening: even
> though many of Egypt’s Communists had spent years in Gamal Abdel
> Nasser’s prisons in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, their party
> never turned to violence. “They didn’t touch a mosquito,” Aswany
> concluded. The Brotherhood, he seemed to suggest, had violence in its
> DNA.
>
> At that point, a well-dressed woman, with elaborately pomaded hair and
> a tight-fitting top, turned to her friend and said, loudly, of the boy
> in the hoodie and his female friends, who were veiled: “They are with
> the Brotherhood!”
>
> One of the veiled women took issue, and soon, everyone seemed to be
> standing, pointing, and shouting. I saw a few elderly people in the
> room slip out, probably anticipating a fistfight.
>
> Things eventually calmed down, and a young veiled woman—from the same
> group of friends—posed another question. Aswany had said General
> Sisi’s duty was to protect the people, she began, but why were those
> who criticized him brought before military courts? Some of her own
> friends, she said, had been jailed for this reason.
>
> Aswany, looking both impatient and dyspeptic, acknowledged that there
> would be no democracy without opposing opinions. Then his face
> brightened, as if pleased by an idea, and he said, happily, that she
> had the right to call what happened this summer a coup if she wanted.
>
> I left soon after, mostly because the tensions in the room had grown
> to the size of a Goodyear blimp. As I walked out, the first thing I
> saw in front of me was an old Morsi poster, worn away by time and
> abuse, so that he no longer had a chin. On it, red spray paint
> advertised “Walid for Real Estate,” along with a cell-phone number
> that was missing two digits. I thought back to my conversation with
> Aswany a few nights earlier, when I had asked him whether he thought
> democracy was simply an electoral process, or if it represented a more
> diffuse set of values.
>
> “Democracy is our homework,” he said. “If in one year we end up with
> military rule, we don’t blame the military. We can only blame
> ourselves.”
>
> Photograph by Jerome Schlomoff.
>
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