Category: politics

tariq ali on the egyptian revolution: this is a movement for national independence, to end colonialism, and for democracy. not like the manufactured uprisings in eastern europe in 1989. more comparable to 1848 when a wave of uprisings against the austro-hungarian emperor and the czar of russia swept europe. the equivalent of that today is the president of the united states.

YES!!! Algerian security forces and pro-democracy protesters are clashing, as demonstrations got underway in the capital Algiers on Saturday. At least 2,000 protestors were able to overcome a security cordon enforced around the capital’s May First Square, joining other demonstrators calling for reform. Full article.

sounds familiar: Inspired by the Egyptian uprising which toppled Hosni Mubarak, protesters chanted “After Mubarak, it’s Ali’s turn” and “A Yemeni revolution after the Egyptian revolution.” Eyeing protests elsewhere in the Middle East, Saleh, in power since 1978, last week promised to step down when his term ends in 2013. He has also promised not to pass power to his son. Full article.

gotta love the people of egypt. check out pictures here.

The uprising in Egypt has discredited every Western media stereotype about the Arabs. The courage, determination, eloquence and grace of those in Liberation Square contrast with “our” specious fear-mongering with its al-Qaeda and Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions, bereft of irony, of the “moral leadership of the West”.

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It is not surprising that the recent source of truth about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven, petty abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers that set the limits of elite liberal debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are worried. Across the world, public awareness is rising and bypassing them. In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation Square must seem an inspiration. “We won’t stop,” said the young Egyptian woman on TV, “we won’t go home.” Try kettling a million people in the centre of London, bent on civil disobedience, and try imagining it could not happen.

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Full article.

Israel’s leadership has believed that security is a function of alliances with the West and military force in the region. They have never sought any meaningful compromises with their neighbors. Their only “friends” in the region are dictators who cooperate with Israel because they fear it and because the Americans pay them to do so. This is not a good basis for long term security.

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Israel is a democracy in the same sense that, say, Alabama was a democracy prior to Civil Rights. Real democracy includes a realistic level of equity under the law for all citizens. That is completely lacking in Israel where 20 percent of the population (the Israeli Arabs) are systematically discriminated against.

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There are, of course, other democracies in the region. Turkey is a viable democracy, especially now that the Turkish military is no longer interfering in politics. Lebanon is, in fact, more democratic than it ever was before the outmoded sectarian system imposed by the French was destroyed by civil war. And even Palestine was a democratic place before the Israelis and Americans decided that having Hamas win a free and fair election was unacceptable. So the claim that Israel is the only real democracy in the region is incorrect.

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Full article.

today, feb 11th 2011, egypt is free! i promised a friend i would put a red flower in my hair when that happened. here it is.

love tariq ali.

“This corrupt government was behind 90 percent of the problems between Egypt’s Christian and Muslim communities, which had coexisted in harmony for hundreds of years,” agreed Rageb. Boutros said “This uprising won’t only bring freedom to Egypt; it will also do much to dispel sectarian tension – of which the ruling regime was the only beneficiary.” Full article.

t’s remarkable how self-righteously our political and media class can proclaim sympathy with the heroic [Egyptian] populace, and such scorn for their dictator, without really reconciling our national responsibility for Mubarak’s reign of terror. Full article.

It is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men [and women] who with bare hands want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us – but more specifically on them… It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane. (Foucault)

glued to al jazeera. waiting for the tyrant to leave…

meet wael ghonim, one of the young people behind the egyptian revolution.