EGYPT: In Egypt, democracy has taken on a new meaning...

If a revolution aimed at fostering democracy is obliged to ultimately rely on the army’s bayonets in order to achieve its aims, the army will now have to convince everyone that military rule really reflects the popular will.

By Zvi Bar'el | Jul.04, 2013 | 5:48 AM

Egypt has avoided a military coup in the usual sense of the word. Mohammed Morsi is no longer president, and the country will now be governed by the head of the Constitutional Court. The Court will appoint a government of technocrats, who will rule until presidential and parliamentary elections are held. 

The country will embark once again on its first steps toward democracy, as if no presidential or parliamentary elections had taken place and as if no constitution had been formulated and ratified by referendum. It’s as if the Egyptian revolution only started yesterday. From now on, the country will be managed and supervised by the army, through a civilian representative of its choosing. 

Affairs will be conducted following a timetable set by the defense minister, until the army is satisfied that a civilian leadership is capable of assuming the reins of power. 

However, this arrangement is not final. The new arrangement was agreed upon by the army and the secular political parties, as well as some of the Salafist movements who opposed Morsi’s rule. The Muslim Brotherhood has yet to give its approval. 

The party's representatives rejected calls to join the discussions. They view the army’s intervention and the acceptance of demands by the protest movement as a military coup. The Brotherhood could pose a serious challenge to the newly appointed council, just as the protest movements did for Morsi. Constitutionally, the president is not bound to agree to the army’s blueprint for the future. Morsi may hold on to his office, requiring the army to oust him, even by force. This would prove to strengthen his legitimacy, and make the opposition look as though it is resorting to former President Hosni Mubarak’s tactics in order to seize power. 

The army’s blueprint for the future poses serious challenges to the opposition forces as well. If a revolution aimed at fostering democracy is obliged to ultimately rely on the army’s bayonets in order to achieve its aims, a new meaning of democracy will have to be coined. They will have to worry about when and if they will be able to persuade the military to return to its barracks, letting civilians govern the country. Furthermore, they now have to convince everyone that military rule really reflects the popular will. 

The army’s decisions, based on consultations with representatives from most of the political and religious movements in Egypt (except the Muslim Brotherhood) do not clarify whether new parliamentary elections will depend on the formulation of a new constitution, or whether these can be held in parallel to the formulation of a new constitution. This constitution will be drawn up by a committee of experts, and its composition will no doubt be the subject of bitter struggles. Mohammed ElBaradei, who took part in the discussions with the military, stated that a new constitution will precede the elections. If true, ‘early’ elections will not happen anytime soon. The army’s decision also does not set a date for, or name the the legal constitutional underpinnings of new presidential elections. The constitutional basis for any decisions taken by interim president Adli Mansour, nominated by Morsi a few days ago, is also not clear. These are questions of principle, which the Muslim Brotherhood may demand be addressed by an intervention of the Constitutional Court. However, with the suspension of the constitution, it is not clear how the authority of this court will be viewed. 

In the meantime, the protest movements can register a large ideological and political victory. The opposition to Morsi was based on strong ideological grounds and on a political assessment of the election results. Formally, the elections gave the Muslim Brotherhood a victory, but in fact a majority of voters gave the secular parties a majority in the first round of voting. Only in the second round did Morsi beat his rival by 3 percentage points.

In this space, between the formal results and public sentiment, a protest movement and opposition to the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood has developed over the past year.

The secular parties have only themselves to blame for losing the presidential elections. They failed to unite and put forward a commonly accepted candidate. Their candidates were mainly politicians from the old guard such as Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahi. The younger generation’s protest movement had no acceptable and commonly acclaimed candidate who could represent the principles of the revolution. These movements never resigned themselves to losing the elections. The initial euphoric days in which the army, the liberals and the Muslim Brotherhood collaborated, quickly evaporated. The common struggle to depose Mubarak which culminated with success on February 11, 2011 quickly split up into rivalries within the secular movements, as well as between them and the religious movements. 

One theme unified all these movements for the first post-revolutionary year. None of them wanted long-term military rule and they all (except Mubarak loyalists) wanted the supreme military council to give up the reins following parliamentary elections. “The people and the army stand together” was a slogan chanted by the demonstrators previously, using the army as a protective shield despite the fact that it had been part of the oppressive machinery of the Mubarak regime. This apparent partnership quickly dissolved. Some of the protest movements congratulated Morsi for firing the former Defense Minister El-Tantawi and the former Chief of Staff Sami Anan. In those days of August 2012, Morsi seemed a determined leader, a copy of Turkish leader Erdogan, who could stand up to the army, clean its ranks and lead Egypt into a new era. His opponents, as well as his own conduct, have now brought the army back to power. 

Morsi was in too much of a rush to fully wield his powers, as if he too was convinced that his rule was only a dream that needed to be acted upon as quickly as possible, before he woke up. After removing the military from politics and cancelling the addendum to the constitution which was imposed by the supreme military council, allowing the army to veto any legislation dealing with security matters, Morsi rushed forward with a new constitution that would mold Egypt’s new religious character. This gave the protest and opposition movements their chance to make up for their electoral defeat and to at least save some of their secular ideology. However, they found themselves facing a two-fold opposition. They were in a minority at the committee which was formulating the new constitution, which was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

Power struggles developed within the secular movements, leading some to seek compromise with the Brotherhood and others to withdraw from the process. Morsi, who was galloping ahead in an effort to consolidate his rule, claimed excessive powers to himself, placing his decisions above the law and the constitutional court. He subsequently forced the committee drawing up the constitution to terminate discussions and called for a referendum on the constitution. This was the turning point which alarmed the protest movements, who now realized that they were about to lose the ideological struggle as well. The squares of Cairo and Alexandria erupted again, violence flared and the numbers of dead protesters started to rise. Morsi, who also replaced many newspaper editors and made changes in the Ministry of Culture, preferred a dialogue with extreme Salafist elements in Sinai against the wishes of the army. He could not present a suitable economic program that would give hope to millions of unemployed Egyptians, and ended up being a dictator just like Mubarak. 

The fragmented secular opposition again found a common enemy, managing to unite by forming a “Salvation Front” which focused on legal action, without being able to galvanize the masses. Only with the appearance of the hitherto unknown “Tamrud” movement, which overnight became a mass protest movement with its smart initiative of organizing signatures in a petition to remove Morsi, did the political opposition join and lead the street movement. However, just as in the elections for Parliament, this joint movement lacks a commonly accepted leadership, and finds itself yet again requiring the support of the military as the “defenders of democracy”. 

 Long Live, Egypt!

USA: NOAM CHOMSKY: The West Is Terrified of Arabic Democracies”

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is one of the major intellectuals of our time. The eighty-two-year-old American linguist, philosopher and activist is a severe critic of US foreign and economic policy. Ceyda Nurtsch talked to him about the Arabic spring in its global context

Q: Mr. Chomsky, many people claim that the Arab world is incompatible with democracy. Would you say that the recent developments falsify this thesis?

Noam Chomsky: The thesis never had any basis whatsoever. The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy. It’s regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically organized a coup.

False friends: Iran’ democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh during a visit in the US in 1951, two years before the CIA’s coup d’état that ousted him.

In internal discussions in 1958, which have since been declassified, President Eisenhower spoke about a campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world. Not from the governments, but from the people. The National Security Council’s top planning body produced a memorandum – you can pick it up on the web now – in which they explained it. They said that the perception in the Arab world is that the United States blocks democracy and development and supports harsh dictators and we do it to get control over their oil. The memorandum said, this perception is more or less accurate and that’s basically what we ought to be doing.

Q: That means that western democracies prevented the emergence of democracies in the Arab world?

Chomsky: I won’t run through the details, but yes, it continues that way to the present. There are constant democratic uprisings. They are crushed by the dictators we – mainly the US, Britain, and France – support. So sure, there is no democracy because you crush it all. You could have said the same about Latin America: a long series of dictators, brutal murderers. As long as the US controls the hemisphere, or Europe before it, there is no democracy, because it gets crushed.

Q: So you were not surprised at all by the Arab Spring?

Chomsky: Well, I didn’t really expect it. But there is a long background to it. Let’s take Egypt for instance. You’ll notice that the young people who organized the demonstrations on January 25th called themselves the April 6th movement. There is a reason for that. April 6th 2008 was supposed to be a major labour action in Egypt at the Mahalla textile complex, the big industrial centre: strikes, support demonstrations around the country and so on. It was all crushed by the dictatorship. Well, in the West we don’t pay any attention: as long as dictatorships control people, what do we care!

Egyptian riot police beat a protester with batons, during anti government protests in the city of Mahalla, Egypt (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser).

“Efforts to create democracy”: On 6 April 2008 Egyptian workers, primarily in the state-run textile industry, striked in response to low wages and rising food costs. Strikes were illegal in Egypt, and the protests were eventually crushed But in Egypt they remember, and that’s only one in a long series of militant strike actions. Some of them succeeded. There are some good studies of this. There is one American scholar, Joel Beinen – he is at Stanford – he has done a lot of work on the Egyptian labour movement. And he has recent articles and earlier ones, in which he discusses labour struggles going on for a long time: those are efforts to create democracy.

Q: Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, claimed to cause a domino effect of freedom with his policy of the “New Middle East”. Is there a relation between the uprisings in the Arab world to the policy of George W. Bush?

Chomsky: The main theme of modern post-war history is the domino effect: Cuba, Brazil, Vietnam… Henry Kissinger compared it to a virus that might spread contagion. When he and Nixon were planning the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende in Chile – we have all the internal materials now – Kissinger in particular said, the Chilean virus might affect countries as far as Europe. Actually, he and Brezhnev agreed on that, they were both afraid of democracy and Kissinger said, we have to wipe out this virus. And they did, they crushed it.

Today it’s similar. Both Bush and Obama are terrified of the Arab spring. And there is a very sensible reason for that. They don’t want democracies in the Arab world. If Arab public opinion had any influence on policy, the US and Britain had been tossed out of the Middle East. That’s why they are terrified of democracies in the region.

Q: The well-known British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk recently stated that Obama and his policy is irrelevant for the developments in the region…

Chomsky: I read the article, it’s very good. Robert Fisk is a terrific journalist and he really knows the region well. I think what he means is that the activists in the April 6th movement don’t care about the United States. They have totally given up on the US. They know the United States is their enemy. In fact in public opinion in Egypt about 90 per cent think that the US is the worst threat that they face. In that sense the USA is of course not irrelevant. It’s just too powerful.

Q: Some criticize the Arab intellectuals for being too silent, too passive. What should the role of the Arab intellectual be today?

Chomsky: Intellectuals have a special responsibility. We call them intellectuals because they are privileged and not because they are smarter than anyone else. But if you are privileged and you have some status and you can be articulate and so on we call you an intellectual. And it’s the same in the Arab world as anywhere else.

Source: Noam Chomsky

ISRAEL: But it wouldn't sink into their demented brains...

 

MIDEAST DEMOCRACY: ISRAEL’S DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Maidhc Ó Cathail

“The toppling of Egypt’s modern-day pharaoh through peaceful mass protests, aided by Facebook and Twitter, marks a watershed for Egypt and the entire Arab world,” wrote Larry Diamond, in a noteworthy February 14 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Contrary to widespread anxieties in the U.S. foreign policy establishment,” the prominent advocate of American taxpayer-funded “democracy promotion” maintained, “it will also serve the long-term interests of the United States—and Israel.”

Diamond, a founding co-editor of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy, was pleased with initial developments in post-Mubarak Egypt. “Think of what could have happened,” he pointed out. “Many observers (including myself) worried that the growing alienation of young Egyptians might flow in anti-American, anti-Israeli and radical Islamist directions…. So far, none of these have happened.”

Having once co-edited a book on the threat to Israel’s democracy with an Israeli counter-terrorism specialist, Diamond was not surprisingly “reassured” by the dearth of anti-Israeli sentiment in Tahrir Square. “Few protesters are calling for abrogation of Egypt’s peace with Israel,” he noted. “Most protesters … know their aspirations for human dignity and economic opportunity can only be met with far-reaching internal reforms, and that the worn-out theme of anti-Zionism is a divergence from that. Israel and its friends should thus welcome democratic change in Egypt.”

The director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, which includes a program on Arab Reform and Democracy, scarcely expected it would turn out otherwise, though. After all, he had long been advocating such an Israel-friendly democracy for the region. Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California on May 7, 2008, he criticized the Bush administration for having “walked away” from its post-9/11 “forward strategy for freedom” in the Middle East after Islamist parties such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood saw varying degrees of electoral success. Instead, he called for a new policy of gradual democratization which would allow time for a “moderate” party to emerge as “a third alternative” to the region’s “bifurcated playing field” of autocrats versus Islamists. According to Diamond, the democrats he had met in Cairo the previous month told him: “We are only asking for a gradual opening to democracy. We’re not even asking for democracy tomorrow. We don’t even want democracy tomorrow. Because we need time.” Presumably, three years has given NED sufficient time to quietly nurture an acceptable Egyptian democracy.

The well-organized protests hardly came as a surprise either. At the State Department-sponsored Alliance of Youth Movement’s inaugural 2008 summit in New York, which brought together experts in social media with digital activists from around the world, Diamond moderated a panel discussion entitled “How to Begin: Taking it to the Streets.” Just over two years later, when Egyptians did take to the streets, they were organized and directed by the April 6 Youth Movement, which had been well represented at the New York summit.

In a reminder of what a small world democracy promotion is, Diamond was introduced by AYM co-founder Jared Cohen, the then State Department official charged with counter-radicalization in the Middle East, who described his Stanford mentor as “one of the people that’s had the most profound impact on my life.” Interestingly, Diamond is not the only prominent NED figure to have influenced the precocious Cohen, who travelled extensively throughout the Middle East to meet with pro-democracy activists prior to the “Arab Spring,” making sure they had access to “connection technologies.” Referring to one-time NED director Frank Carlucci, Cohen told the New Yorker: “Secretary Carlucci has been a wonderful mentor to me.” Like the former deputy director of the CIA, who had an uncanny knack for popping up in countries where coups were taking place, Cohen just happened to be in Egypt during the street protests that toppled Mubarak.

But if peaceful protests fail to achieve the desired regime change, Diamond is not averse to the use of force—or hyperbole—to bring democracy to the Arab world. In a March 15 op-ed in the staunchly pro-Israel New Republic (which unreservedly endorses the Arab revolution), he invoked the Holocaust in an attempt to shame Obama into aiding Libya’s “freedom fighters.”

The tireless advocate of Arab democracy somehow also finds time for the Iranians. He’s on the advisory council of the Iran Strategy Task Force—a joint initiative of Freedom House and the Progressive Policy Institute, a hawkish pro-Israel “think tank”—which is aimed at shifting America’s Iran policy toward “a more aggressive focus on democracy.” And he also coordinates the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution, whose goal is “to map out possible trajectories for transitions to democracy and free markets in the Middle East, beginning with Iran.”

While many find it hard to believe that the United States could be induced to facilitate regime change in a country ruled by a supposedly pliant dictator like Mubarak, there may be far greater surprises in store. In his October 2, 2010 New York Times column entitled “Third Party Rising,” Thomas Friedman favourably cited Diamond’s suspect, albeit justified, repudiation of both Democrats and Republicans: “We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country.”

With Americans increasingly frustrated with their own country’s “democratic gap,” could Uncle NED be about to bring home its regime change formula in order to co-opt the revolutionary spirit there too?

Maidhc Ó Cathail writes about U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. He also edits The Passionate Attachment blog.

MIDDLE EAST: Two myths about the Middle East the world should do without

By: Nada Tarbush

One collateral “damage” of recent events in the Middle East may be the crumbling of two widely-held myths: one speaks of the “Arab exception” and seeks to explain it through culturalist notions asserting that Arab and more broadly Muslim societies are inherently anti-democratic; the second claims that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

The popular uprisings originating in Sidi Bouzid last December and still spreading to other parts of the Arab world have surely knocked down the first myth.

The myth persisted throughout the years despite the fact that Arab outcries for freedom existed well before the popular revolt erupted in Tunisia. Indeed, for generations, many Arabs have paid with their lives in defense of freedom.  Still today, Arab jails are teeming with political prisoners whose only crime was to oppose the repressive regimes that ruled over them for so long.

But these outcries were often hushed up, sometimes for pragmatic reasons by countries that continued business as usual with those regimes, or dismissed as outliers by some intellectuals whose fanciful theories reduced the culturally rich and heterogeneous Arab societies to a simplistic black or white. Proponents of such models spoke shamelessly of a “clash of civilizations,” of the “Arab mind,” of the “Arab exception.” These notions sometimes made their way into the prose and speech of journalists and politicians, who, not so infrequently, juxtaposed them with yet another dubious generalization: Israel as a beacon of democracy in a sea of darkness.

The painful truth is that there are no true democracies in the Middle East and North Africa, period.

No doubt, Israel is a democracy for its Jewish population, but the fact remains that some 20 percent of its citizens are not Jews. They are those Palestinians who managed to avoid expulsion after the creation of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. In Israeli government parlance, they are referred to as “Israeli Arabs.”

By Western standards, protecting such a minority would be a fundamental tenet of a liberal democracy.

In Israel, however, there has been a chronic failure to protect the rights of the Arab minority.  Worse, this failure did not emanate from some kind of bureaucratic oversight but rather from premeditated government policies, particularly on matters of land ownership, as Ben White has amply documented in “Israeli Apartheid.” Over the years, Israel’s Arab minority saw the bulk of its land confiscated by the State. This expropriation was made possible thanks to the promulgation of arbitrary laws and regulations rich in Orwellian newspeak such as classifying some of these Arabs as “Present Absentees” in order to justify taking away their properties. According to White, about one in four Arab citizens of Israel is considered a “Present Absentee.”

Since the 1970s, Israeli politics has been significantly influenced by hard-line settlers and parties openly hostile to the indigenous Palestinian minority.

While masses of Arabs have now initiated significant movements toward democracy, some leading Israeli politicians are steering Israel in the opposite direction, as recently manifested by the bringing of a series of anti-democratic bills before the Knesset, for instance the Boycott and Anti-Incitement bills which, if passed, would greatly constrain Israelis’ freedom of choice and expression.

Just beyond the Green Line, Israel’s behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories is hardly consistent with democratic values. For nearly 44 years Israel’s conduct there has been notorious for its scornful disregard of human rights and international law with killings of civilians, arbitrary detention, torture, siege, confiscation of land, home demolitions, construction of settlements, a wall, bypass roads excluding Palestinians of the West Bank, random closures and road-blocks.

No, Israel is no island of democracy. And no, the Palestinians, as all Arabs, are no bearers of anti-democratic genes. Like their Arab brethren everywhere, they yearn for a dignified life free of oppression. The struggle for freedom of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is too well known to require elaboration. The 1987 Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation coined the term intifada. Yet, Palestinians are still waiting for long-overdue justice.

By failing to grant the Palestinians their rights, Israel is swimming against an overwhelming wave of change. Not only are we at the threshold of a new dawn in the Middle East, where people stand up against injustice with hitherto unprecedented determination, but there is also a sea change in people’s awareness everywhere, notably in Europe and the United States. One has to look no further than supportive online comments and YouTube to see that.

In this new age, if not out of a sense of morality, then at least out of sheer expediency, Israel should liberate itself from all sorts of dogma, give equal rights to all its citizens, and at last free its neighbors in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Source: The Palestine Center

Nada Tarbush is a graduate student in international affairs at Sciences Po Paris and Columbia University.

ISRAEL: Is the rouge state of Israel really democratic as they say?

How can that be when in 62 years there was not one single Arab village established and illegal settlements are being built on Palestinian lands?

Israel "The Occupier" Approves ANOTHER 900 Illegal Settlement Homes

Do I have to tell how many Jewish towns and villages were established and not one Arab village?

ABOVE: An Israeli settlement. 

BELOW: How Palestinians are living

How can Israel be democratic when researches have shown repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same crime?

How can Israel be democratic when a Palestinian student can hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when the Israelis hear his/her accent or his/her name almost nobody is willing rent to him/her?

SAFED, MOST RACIST CITY IN ISRAEL? November 23rd 2010

How can Israel be democratic when Jerusalem invested 577 shekels a year in a pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem; four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity?!

Every part of Israeli society is racist.

George Galloway - Jews have the rights over Palestine because.....

This is what Israel is.

Egyptian Election

For those who can find the common denominator.

There is a thread that connects these three recent stories on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his son (and possible successor) Gamal. Try to figure it out: 1. Mubarak to Nominate Himself for Elections, Rejects Constitutional Changes. Mubarak has renewed his rejection for the demands set by the Egyptian opposition to amend the constitution to choose the President of the Republic by direct elections among more than one candidate, 2. Egyptian Jailed after Calling for Open Elections. An opposition lawmaker, who had called for democratic elections in Egypt to put an end to decades of unopposed rule by President Hosni Mubarak, was sent to jail for 45 days, hours before the start of a long-awaited "national dialogue" on Egypt's political future. The abrupt arrest of Ayman Nour on forgery charges comes amid a mounting debate over Mubarak's seemingly open-ended run as president, along with a fresh discontent sparked by speculation that the president hopes to pass the job to his son someday. As head of the al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party, Nour had pushed for constitutional reform, an open election to replace the yes-no referendums that have repeatedly sent an unopposed Mubarak back to office, and a freer debate. The government has accused Nour of faking all but 14 of the thousands of signatures he collected to win permission to form his party. The 45-year-old lawmaker's parliamentary immunity was lifted over the weekend, and security officers raided his home, seizing computers and files. He told the judge that his arrest would "hinder the democratic process and reform in Egypt." He told an Egyptian rights group that he had been beaten during his arrest, and 3. Gamal Mubarak Slams U.S. over Democracy at World Economic Forum in Davos. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's influential son, Gamal, supported calls for reform, multi-party democracy and a more open society in the Arab world, including his own country. But he said Washington's failure to tackle the Palestinian issue undermined Arab reformers. "The core problem in the Middle East is the Arab-Israeli problem, the Palestinian problem. We are being accused these days of using it as an excuse to delay reform. But you are not helping reformers across the Arab world, in Egypt and any other countries, if this issue is relegated to a secondary priority.

Putting 2 and 2 together

1. While Gamal calls for supporting reformers in Davos, his father arrests reformers in Cairo, 2. If the Palestinian issue were resolved tomorrow, Ayman Nour would still remain in jail, and 3. Hosni Mubarak has no opponents to beat in the election, but his security forces beat Ayman Nour in jail.

In a nutshell...

1. Simply criticizing Mubarak directly and publicly in Egypt can get you thrown in jail, 2. Gamal Mubarak is insulting his audiences in Davos if he thinks they are stupid enough to buy his line while back home his father is jailing dissidents. 3. Middle East dictators constantly try to distract attention from their own repressive rule by pointing the finger at Israel - both to domestic and foreign audiences. 4. The crowd at Davos probably did buy Gamal's line, and 5. Sounds like an episode of the Sopranos.

1. Do you think that the Egyptian election for renewal of the ruling regime is fixed?, 2. If you think otherwise, do you believe that one person should not be let rule for such a long period of time?, and 3. Do you think that such a length of time discredit the ruling regime, i.e. Egypt is becoming a monarchy in disguise?