Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Interesting Take on Recent Egyptian Politics

Counterpunch has an interesting article by Eric Walberg about newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's power-grab. Given that Morsi's actions are going to be portrayed by the mainstream corporate press in the western countries as "scary, scray Muslim Brotherhood leader assaults nascent Egyptian democracy" (with the sub-text: "We TOLD you that Arabs are incapable of democracy!") and given that this is the same hypocritical bullshit wherein western governments and news media that supported decades-long torturing dictatorships in the past and continue to do so today, I thought it worthwhile to share the article's interpretation of events.
Then, just hours after Morsi, the world’s wise peacemaker, waved good-bye to Hillary, but with his old-guard judiciary poised to dissolve the Constitutional Committee and destroy all hope for carrying the revolution forward, the unassuming president stared them down too, issuing a decree putting his decrees above judicial review. And for the second time, he dismissed the procurator general, Abdel Meguid Mahmud, who has presided over the legal stonewalling of prosecutions of counterrevolutionaries — this time not backing down. The time for dawdling and letting criminals off the hook is over. The new prosecutor general, reformer Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah, has ordered a new trial of Mubarak and police and thugs let off scot-free by the old judiciary.
And watch out, Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court, don’t you even think about disbanding the Constitutional Committee that is so painstakingly putting together a constitution. (Liberals and Christian secularists resigned from the committee, doing their best to sabotage it, revealing where their sympathies lie.) Or about disbanding the Shura Council on some technicality, as you did the lower house in May, in a conspiracy with the generals to sabotage the revolution.
The secularists should look at the writing on the wall. Egypt is a devout Muslim country, where Christians are protected by Islam and cultural liberals are tolerated. These Western-inspired forces will never prevail, so they should work with Islamists, not against them, if they want to maximize social harmony and their own rights. Sadly, the opposition is increasingly siding with the Mubarak crowd. “President Morsi said we must go out of the bottleneck without breaking the bottle,” presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said. The opposition would rather see the bottle break that get Egypt’s life blood flowing again.
Islamic civilization has been endangered for centuries now, battered and undermined by the Western secularist onslaught. Finally, Muslims are doing something about it.
I hate religion as much as the next guy. But it should be killed with kindness, not with NATO fighter-jets, and only as a cover for capitalist imperialism.

And that's my post for today.

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