Archive for Egypt

The Southern Bulwark

Posted by: Ion | July 24th, 2008 · 8:20 PM

I didn’t see this report on CNN, but wish I had:

Therefore, when recently the CNN Inside Africa crew went to chat with them on the streets of Cairo, their views were expected as all the respondents rejected the notion of being Africans in the first place. It must be emphasized that this same view is shared by all North Africans from Cairo to Casablanca.
(Friends of Ethiopia)

As a matter of physical and ethnic geography this is roughly equivalent to Colombians claiming they are not South Americans. As a matter of national and political identity, it’s quite close to the truth. Above the Sahel is Empire Arabia, the domain of Islam conjoined at the heart to Mecca and the customs and convulsions of the Arab world, through unified religion and language. Wherever Islam goes in Africa, African identity is riven apart from the land. Such is Islam’s marriage to maps.

One of the interesting things to consider, is whether the modern efforts of Arab leaders in Sudan, Libya and elsewhere to expand the zone of Arabization south into the continental interior –efforts which have met with so much failure– would have proven more successful had the rise of Christianity in the 20th century not been so rapid and expansive beneath the Sahara. For force of effect, here’s a compelling little table illustrating how significant this change has been:

(Christian History Institute)

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Of Dissidents and Dodd

Posted by: Ion | August 21st, 2007 · 9:13 PM

Matt Browner-Hamlin –the ordinarily very competent resident blogger for the Chris Dodd campaign– is offended today that President Bush described himself as a “dissident” against the Washington bureaucracy, in talks with Egyptian-American sociologist and human rights leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

In the course of a rebuke, Matt piously observes that the president is no Vaclav Havel. An unnecessary point, even had the president said as much. But a dissident is of course merely “one who dissents,” not a martyr or saint. The fact that the word has come to possess too much a luster of justice for Matt, is merely a testament to the proliferation of injustice in the world.

If you wish to aptly criticize the president for the remark, you might observe instead the absurdity of a man who has done a great deal to expand and lavishly fund the federal bureaucracy, appointing himself its adversary.

Granted that’s perhaps a point too far for a Dodd blogger, as his candidate seems to believe that the trouble with Bush, is that the bureaucratic state hasn’t been expanding enough these past few years. To confirm that, Matt feels obliged to point out that “Chris Dodd would never be confused for a dissident as President.” No kidding.

Perhaps there’s a vast untapped voting bloc out there demanding less dissent and a defense of the bureaucratic status quo, but I’ve yet to hear from it. Best of luck finding it though, Matt.

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Kill a Kid for Allah

Posted by: Ion | June 25th, 2007 · 10:07 PM

The barbarity of the Muslim terrorist is without many historical parallels of comparable degree. Consider Mohammed Khalil al Hakayma, Al Qaeda’s Egyptian franchisee. He just put out a call for the murder of women and children in Egypt:

“Rise up and pluck out the Zionist presence in Egypt,” he says. “Rise up and inflame a war on them everywhere. Do not differentiate between a military and a civilian person. As they struck against our women and children, we will kill their women and children.”
(JihadWatch via HotAir via ABC)

Conceptual in Egypt, it is practical reality in Afghanistan. Only lacking “Zionist” children to slaughter, they’re content with the murder of their own:

“[The Taliban] placed explosives on a six-year-old boy and told him to walk up to the Afghan police or army and push the button,” said Captain Michael Cormier, the company commander who intercepted the child, in a statement. “Fortunately, the boy did not understand and asked patrolling officers why he had this vest on.”
(HotAir via Weasel Zippers via The Guardian)

Perhaps it won’t be long before the frustration of a lack of Zionist kids to kill, will persuade the Taliban’s Egyptian counterparts to follow suit. Another grand advance for the Islamist cause.

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Police Treatment in Egypt

Posted by: Ion | June 23rd, 2007 · 4:49 AM

Egyptian police question a suspect.

For those who might think that like a man, the longevity of a civilization should increase its maturity. As a nation-state Egypt has lived for 5127 years, since Pharaoh Narmer founded the First Dynasty. The capacity for human barbarity is a permanent condition, which does not diminish with experience.

(via: The Big Pharaoh)

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Six Days to Forever

Posted by: Ion | June 6th, 2007 · 9:17 AM

This week the forty year anniversary of the Six Day War is upon us. That is to say, the anniversary of the death of the Nasserite secular Arab nationalist dream. The implications of the occasion were well captured yesterday, in a sound piece by Jonathan Kay. However, toward the end of it, he gets round to the crucial consequence and leaves a bit on the table:

Forty years ago, it was easy to believe that Jews were simply better fighters than Arabs. But the problem wasn’t that Arabs don’t make good soldiers: It was that few of them were willing to die for corrupt, dysfunctional Arab autocracies. Now that Allah is their inspiration, things are very different. In the next 40 years, the descendants of Joshua Bin-Nun, King David and the Maccabees will face a far tougher foe.
(National Post)

That’s a bit of a confusion, even if he ends up in the right place. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s command to his troops after all wasn’t to die for his dictatorship, but to die for the pan-Arab dream. One might as well say the Hamas militant in contemporary times, is dying for Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. That’s perhaps only true as a spectator.

Yet the new Islamist fighter is dying for another dream of reunification, which not coincidentally, is just as farcical and anachronistic as the old Nasserite mantras. It is only more difficult for being more elemental, as the purposes are little removed: utopia in empire.

But as in 1967, enduring victory for Israel consists of demonstrating to her enemy, that dying for the cleric’s fatwa, is the same thing as dying for Nasser’s decree: pointless. Not an easy task to put it mildly. But it does have the enduring merit of being true.

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The Lost Friends of Strangers

Posted by: Ion | March 19th, 2007 · 12:16 AM

In 2006, a Zogby poll found that the percentage of the Egyptian populace who expressed a favorable view of America was just 14%. 72% of Egyptians also said their opinion had worsened from the previous year. The conventional explanation of the American Left for this, is that the Iraq war is to blame. Inconveniently for them, that meager 14% is actually a substantial improvement despite the war. In 2002, well prior to the 2003 invasion, Egyptian favorability toward the United States was even worse. Less than half of what it is post-Iraq, standing at 6% according to Pew Research polling.

However, there is a strange and pervasive myth which is often parroted by the press and earnestly expressed by most Egyptians, that at some time in the not too misty recent past, Egyptians were all very pro-American. Pervasive anti-Americanism is thus portrayed a very recent phenomenon, the result of some extant US foreign policy. Looking back, we can see that the catalyst for this allegedly “recent” loss of heart by Egyptians in America, is constantly changing. Perpetually being revised to conform to the reality of permanent, historical Egyptian animosity, masquerading as a current event. The myth of this lost friendship, is expressed in its most typical form by a Cairo taxi driver:

“Before the Iraq War, most Egyptians did not have a negative feeling towards American policy. Now almost all are opposed to American policy.”
(NAF)

Of course, this is the myth of the lost friend in its purest expression. “Before the Iraq War” Egyptians were even more negative toward America, as we have seen. In 2007 it’s Iraq. In 2001 it was Afghanistan. In 1987 the First Intifada. In 1986 Libya. 1983, Lebanon. The list is endless, with each item on it set up as some unique turning point that wrecked a halcyon partnership in the past, a whimsical fantasy of a friends who’ve in reality, yet to meet.

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Sexual Frustration in Egypt

Posted by: Ion | March 16th, 2007 · 2:53 PM

When I arrived in Egypt for the first time in 1997, I noticed that the beautiful clerk at my hotel had intricate, dark tattoos running up her arms, which her thin cotton uniform just barely concealed. At first I mistook this for daring in such a conservative Muslim society. But then I noticed the other clerks at the hotel had the same tattoos…as did the waitresses, the casino girls, the cleaning staff, the shop girls and the bartenders. Every woman working in the hotel had them. I was later told, that the Coptic Christians in Egypt tattoo their daughters in part, so that they can never marry a Muslim. Muhammad, you see, expressly forbade tattoos in the Quran and Hadith as marks of evil. Someone was evidently too intimidated to apprise Mike Tyson of this fact.

It’s a wise move by the Egyptian Christians, given that they represent only a tiny fraction of the population of Egypt (collectively, just under 10%) and are constantly under pressure to conform to their Muslim countrymen’s mores. But seeing this, was a reminder that there are deep divisions within Egyptian society that predate the contemporary conflict between the liberal Islamic doctrines of the Cairo and Alexandrian upper and middle classes and the extremism of the Muslim Brotherhood, the poor and the deserts. The Coptic tattoos, can in effect, be a barrier against the wrong sort of sexual expression. Which betrays divisions in sexual identity, sexual possession and the balance of social order in a Muslim society.

Set firmly within these divisions is Hanan Tork. She was the salacious siren of Egyptian cinema known for steamy, provocative roles that challenged conservative Egyptian orthodoxy. Then in 2006, she “went crazy,” as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine puts it. She proclaimed the Iranian mullahs her role models, went on the Hajj and self-repressed herself by donning the abaya (hardly an Egyptian cultural fashion, in actuality a recently imported political custom from Saudi Arabia).

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Toward an Inversion of Petrocracy

Posted by: Ion | March 12th, 2007 · 12:53 PM

There’s a worthwhile piece by Christopher Hitchens this morning in Slate. Two points:

The recent hydrocarbon law, approved after much wrangling by Iraq’s council of ministers, deserves a great deal more praise than it has been receiving. For one thing, it abolishes the economic rationale for dictatorship in Iraq. For another, it was arrived at by a process of parley and bargain that, while still in its infancy, demonstrates the possibility of a cooperative future. For still another, it shames the oil policy of Iraq’s neighbors and reinforces the idea that a democracy in Baghdad could still teach a few regional lessons.

[…]

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East. (Slate)

This is interesting on a number of fronts. First it reminds us of how the antiwar movement managed to get the war in Iraq utterly backwards. While the United States hardly needed to invade Iraq to secure access to her oil (Saddam would have been more than pleased to sell it to the United States at a preferential price), oil was instead, the weapon that the regime held against its own people. It financed the oppression of the Baath, as it finances the oppression of the mullahs in Iran. It builds their prisons, pays the salaries of their secret police, procures their surveillance equipment and insulates their dictators in luxurious disconnection from the blunt end of their crimes. It also buys foreign acquiescence and patronage. Either directly by bribe and/or indirectly through dependency on commodity supply.

By contrast, the American invasion was a war against oil. That is, against what oil had come to represent in the Middle East: the expensive padlock that holds men in their chains. America –with her primary sources of oil supply in the Western Hemisphere– was uniquely insulated from pressures of this kind. And with the collapse of the Saddam regime, has helped put into place through Iraq’s new hydrocarbon profit sharing, a likely permanent block against the reemergence of a petrocracy of this sort.

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The United States of Satan

Posted by: Jason | March 6th, 2007 · 4:03 PM

There’s a shocking BBC poll out today which I found over at MSN.

Pollsters from the BBC questioned 1,000 people in 27 different countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Australia; as well as four predominantly Muslim countries: Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia; and two countries with large Muslim populations: Lebanon and Nigeria.

Of the respondents who participated in the poll, particular countries were given a rating of favorable and unfavorable. According to the poll, Israel, Iran, and the United States were the countries with the most negative image in the global survey of attitudes towards the 12 major nations.

The most evil of all nations, Israel, whose crime of defending itself from it’s racist and fascist neighbors since 1948, was ranked at the top with a 56 percent negative rating, and only an 18 percent positive rating. Iran, who has lately become yet another victim of evil U.S. imperialism, unfairly scored a 54 percent negative rating. And the Great Satan herself, The United States, finished third in the race with a negative rating of 51 percent.

51 percent negative, might I remind you, putting the United States as being a nation more disliked than North Korea (48 percent).

Canada, in all her glory, had the most favorable rating with a 54 percent positive rating and only a 14 percent negative rating.

In further n