Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood: who are you rooting for?

[JimC]

Al Jazeera just showed some interviews with Egyptians where they lamblast the Americans for keeping Mubarak in power and helping to kidnap and torture Egyptians off the street.

Mubarak's day is probably up, and it has been a fairly oppressive regime, though not really up there with the worst. It is also true he has been an American ally.

However, the medieval fanaticism of the Muslim Brotherhood is a very unappealing alternative...

For the record, Gawd, here you are posting on an atheist site, and yet virtually none of your posts have touched on religion. We know you are violently anti-Israel, and anti-USA, and never seem to have a bad word to say about the islamic fundamentalists busily conducting suicide bombings, and stoning infidels and adulterers to death.

Are you a muslim, or an atheist?

None of my posts touch on religion? Then what the hell have I been talking about in the "I hate Israel" sub-forum? And I also haven't talked about African dictatorships. I muuuuuuuuuuuuust be African.

Most of your anti-Israel posts have been about the oppression of palestinians by Israel. Sure, some have been about the nasty side of the rabbis, too, but that is a specific attack which a mad mullah would be happy to agree with, not an anti-religious statement as such...

Are you going to dodge my question, or give us an answer?

I will give you a straightforward answer: I am Muslim. I am the Prophet Muhammed. I am also an imam. I am the son of Osama bin Laden.

As you know well, Gawd, I have been one of the few on this forum to respond to your posts without particular rancour, often finding some aspects of your point with which I can agree.

I think that era is finished.

Perhaps I should take you at your word, and view you simply as one more unattractive, malignant, fanatical muslim troll.

[Ian]

He'll never give us an answer as to who or where he is. Someone might use that against him and actually quantify his biases and ignorance. He seems to prefer us all to think that his viewpoints are the product of detached, educated, objective reasoning.

Personally, I don't think it matters much. People can develop batshit, fanatical biases anywhere.

[redunderthebed]

If you look at these things most of the opposition groups aren't religious extremists but citizens who have had enough much like Tunisia,tbh muslim brotherhood is a thing born out of repression and most of those who supported them at this time would not support them if they tried to implement half of what they say they do. Often they get support by replacing what a govt fails to do..look after its people.

I wish the egyptian people the best of luck in overthrowing hosni mubarak and bringing a bright future for their country.

[HomerJay]

Some muslims on some of the muslim boards have been crowing since tunisia went that an arab uprising will see an almighty war with Israel.

But then they're nutters so their predictive powers may well be suspect.

[Warren Dew]

So, are we pessimistically assuming that these are the only choices, and that the whole "people power" thing won't throw up a genuine, non-fundamentalist, non-military alternative from left field?

I see it as a deduction, not an assumption. The protests weren't anything the government couldn't handle until the Muslim Brotherhood joined in after prayer on Friday. The government may still be able to handle them, but only due to timely and skillful positioning of the army - and the loyalty of the army is not a given. If the army has been infiltrated, you can bet it was by the Muslim Brotherhood and not by some "people power" group.

If there's a successful revolution, then, the Muslim Brotherhood will be able to claim the primary responsibility for it, which puts them in a good political position. Plus, even if they weren't, they are better organized and bigger than the other groups - I would say they're the only really organized group - so it's likely they'd be able to take control anyway. The idea that the "people power" movement could establish a real democracy is, in my opinion, as much a pipe dream as it was in Iran a couple years ago.

None of which is to say I'm a big fan of Mubarak. His regime is repressive, as others have mentioned. It is also, however, stable, something that's in short supply in the middle east - and I'm not a big fan of reestablishment of the caliphate. I'm not sure what the worse choice is here.

If you look at these things most of the opposition groups aren't religious extremists but citizens who have had enough much like Tunisia,tbh muslim brotherhood is a thing born out of repression and most of those who supported them at this time would not support them if they tried to implement half of what they say they do. Often they get support by replacing what a govt fails to do..look after its people.

The same could be said of Hamas, which remains in power in Gaza, of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and of the Iranian revolution that established the current longstanding fundamentalist regime. All of these groups do good works for their people, and they use that goodwill to leverage their less popular initiatives. Some of those places had more of a secular tradition than Egypt does - heck, Iraq had much more of a secular tradition, had the superpower behind establishment of a democracy, and given the current situation they are still on schedule to become a puppet of the fundamentalist Iranians.

[sandinista]

Fear Extreme Islamists in the Arab World? Blame Washington

For decades beginning during the Cold War, US policy in the Islamic world has been aimed at suppressing secular reformist and leftist movements. Beginning with the CIA-engineered coup against a secular democratic reform government in Iran in 1953 (it was about oil), Washington has propped up dictators, coaching these regimes in the black arts of torture and mayhem against secular liberals and the left.

In these dictatorships, often the only places where people had freedom to meet and organize were mosques - and out of these mosques sometimes grew extreme Islamist movements. The Shah's torture state in Iran was brilliant at cleansing and murdering the left - a process that helped the rise of the Khomeini movement and ultimately Iran's Islamic Republic.

In a pattern growing out of what King called Washington's "irrational, obsessive anti-communism," US foreign policy also backed extreme Islamists over secular movements or government that were either Soviet-allied or feared to be.

In Afghanistan, beginning BEFORE the Soviet invasion and evolving into the biggest CIA covert operation of the 1980s, the US armed and trained native mujahedeen fighters - some of whom went on to form the Taliban. To aid the mujahedeen, the US recruited and brought to Afghanistan religious fanatics from the Arab world - some of whom went on to form Al Qaeda. (Like these Washington geniuses, Israeli intelligence - in a divide-and-conquer scheme aimed at combating secular leftist Palestinians - covertly funded Islamist militants in the occupied territories who we now know as Hamas.)

This is hardly obscure history.

Except in US mainstream media.

http://www.truth-out.org/jeff-cohen-fea ... ngton67267

[JimC]

Fair point sandinista; talk about sowing the breeze and reaping the whirlwind...

[Gawd]

That's why I blame the Americans.

[JimC]

That's why I blame the Americans.

They can be blamed for some things, in some historical contexts...

(as can many societies, groups or movements)

But not for all this sorry old world's evils, as you tend to...

[Gawd]

An Arab revolution fueled by methods of the West

So what has happened so far? A corrupt president in Tunisia flees, to cheers from around the world. Protests erupt in Egypt, and gloom descends. Protests are held in Iran, and the world cheers. A prime minister is deposed in Lebanon, to fear and dread. An Iraqi president is overthrown in a military offensive, and it's called democracy. Raucous demonstrations take place in Yemen, and they're called interesting but not terribly important.

Why the different reactions? This is supposedly the new Middle East the West always wanted, but something still isn't working out. This isn't the Middle East they dreamed of in the Bush administration, and not what nourished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wildest dreams. A new, unexpected player has appeared: the public.

Up to now, the world has been divided into two camps: "complicated" countries where the government represents the public and every decision is subject to public oversight, and "easy" countries where business is conducted at the top and the public is just window dressing. The dividing line between the two has always been starkly clear. Everything north of the Mediterranean belonged to the first group and everything to the south and east to the second.

The north had political parties and trade unions, a left wing and a right wing, important intellectuals, celebrities who shaped public opinion, and of course, there was public opinion itself. In the south the division was simple. It was the distinction between moderates and extremists, meaning pro-Westerners and anti-Westerners.

If you're a Saudi king who buys billions of dollars of American weapons, you're pro-Western and therefore entitled to continue to rule a country without a parliament, one where thieves' hands are amputated and women aren't allowed to drive. If you're an Egyptian president who supports the peace process, you're pro-Western and have permission to continue to impose emergency rule in your country, jail journalists and opposition members, and fix elections.

And what if you're the ruler of Qatar? There's a problem classifying you. On the one hand, Qatar hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East. But it has close relations with Iran and Syria. On the one hand, its ruler promotes democratic values and its foreign minister occasionally meets with top Israeli officials. But it nurtures Al Jazeera.

Of course, we love Al Jazeera when it shows us exclusive pictures of mass demonstrations, discloses secret documents, and is open to interviewing Israeli and Jewish spokespeople. But we hate it because it covers Hamas and Hezbollah's successes. The huge challenge of categorizing Qatar shows that the terms pro-Western and moderate have no connection to the universal values the West seeks to export. They only represent the degree of the fear and the threat posed by the values the anti-Westerners send to the West.

And all of a sudden, into the whirlwind, into the era of certainty and the lexicon in which the region's countries are neatly packaged, the Arab "street" erupts, a sophisticated street. It uses "our" methods: Facebook and Twitter - the tools of democracy we have invented - to present us with a situation of disorder. How do you defend yourself against this? This Arab street has already used these tools to depose Tunisian President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, and its ideas have gone viral. What if it manages to establish democracy in Egypt? In Yemen? Look what happened to the Shah of Iran, albeit using now-outmoded cassettes.

And when Al Jazeera's cameras come close to the demonstrators, it also becomes clear that these are not religious radicals. Lawyers, journalists, university students, women with their heads uncovered, high school students, the secular and the religious are taking to the streets. They're not shouting "God is great," but "corruption out," "dictator out" and "we want jobs." Such nice slogans make you identify with them. In the words of "The Internationale": "arise ye workers from your slumber." It makes us want to join them until we remember that, as U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt described Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, he "may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." It's disrupting the order of things.

We don't have to wait for other regimes to fall to understand that the revolution is happening before our very eyes. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will not fall due to demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and Yemen's ruler will also continue to rule by force. But it's a revolution of awareness and of the fundamental notions of what the Middle East is. Most importantly, we need a revolution in the way the West views the region.

By "West", the article means "Americans". It is clear that America is what keeps Mubarak in power.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/op ... t-1.340079

[JimC]

An interesting and worthwhile article, Gawd; much more nuanced and balanced than the bulk of your own posting...

[Gawd]

An interesting and worthwhile article, Gawd; much more nuanced and balanced than the bulk of your own posting...

Praise ALLAH!!!

[Ian]

An interesting and worthwhile article, Gawd; much more nuanced and balanced than the bulk of your own posting...

Now now... clearly the US must be blamed for everything and credited with nothing.

[sandinista]

An interesting and worthwhile article, Gawd; much more nuanced and balanced than the bulk of your own posting...

Now now... clearly the US must be blamed for everything and credited with nothing.

Just blamed when deserved. Feel free to credit when deserved.

[DaveDodo007]

The muslim brotherhood only got 20% of the vote in the last 'elections' and they were the opposition to a vile dictator, the protesters seem youthful and secular. They came to the protests too late to have any real influence and are just hanging on to the coattails. The police have all but disappeared, the army are neutral for now. The protesters want Mubarak out what ever concessions he's willing to make, they don't trust him and I don't blame them. Either there's a bloodbath or a transitional government leading to democracy. 'May you live in interesting times' indeed.