An eight-minute trial, with no arguments for the defence, and one judge sentences 683 people to death.
After an eight-minute trial a judge in Egypt has sentenced to death 683 alleged supporters of the former President Mohamed Morsi who was ousted in a military coup last July. Among those condemned to die is the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared a terrorist organisation despite its tradition of non-violence...
Read MoreAn Interview with Andy Libson
Andy Libson is a member of La Voz, a schoolteacher, and member of United Educators of San Francisco and the reform caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union. He’s been keeping a close eye on Egypt, which he’s written about extensively. Below is an interview Libson did with CounterPuncher Mike Whitney on the recent happenings in...
Read MoreThe second, decisive round of Egypt’s presidential election will be held 16 and 17 June. If former general and Mubarak regime stalwart Ahmad Shafiq somehow wins, it’s almost certain the vote was manipulated. A huge popular explosion in Egypt will very likely ensue. Egyptians are already furious their first democratic election of a president was...
Read More"The Biggest Source of Social Injustice"
Rudyard Kipling's caustic verses denouncing the corruption of state officials sound as sharp and relevant today as they did in 1886. He drew examples from ancient Egypt, though his experience was in British-ruled India where things were supposedly better run. But Egyptians today should see nothing much to complain of in his picture of Egypt,...
Read More“The surprise is not that there is so much violence, but that there is so little.”
Cairo It is a gun battle people in the Shubra district in central Cairo still talk about six months after it happened. In a dispute over a piece of land he had seized amid the small shops and densely crowded streets, Mohammed Shaban, who had escaped from prison during the revolution, challenged the police to...
Read More“What benefits were there from this revolution?”
Cairo The death of Pope Shenouda, who led Egypt’s Coptic Christian Church for 40 years, has increased fears among Copts that they will face persecution and discrimination as Islamic parties become more powerful. Hundreds of thousands of mourners, many crying, packed the streets around St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo Tuesday as they waited to file...
Read MoreThe staff of US democracy promotion NGOs, including the son of Transportation Secretary Lahood, are currently experiencing legal travails in Egypt. The Egyptian junta is well aware that democratic agitation abetted by the National Endowment for Democracy, the IRI, and the NDI is often employed to install new regimes when local strongmen running quasi-democracies (featuring...
Read MoreLast Monday, Egyptians celebrated the first anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the 30-year Mubarak regime. By contrast, America’s reaction this historic event was tellingly muted. Egypt contains a quarter of the Arab world’s people. In Egypt, the US had a golden opportunity to encourage genuine democracy. Instead, it long opposed demands by Egyptians for...
Read MoreCAIRO – Tahrir Square, epicenter of the earthquake that ousted Egypt’s western-backed dictator, Husni Mubarak, is quiet – for the moment. There are banner-wavers, speakers, and youngsters milling about. But the by now world-famous square has a forlorn, leftover look, with more street people than revolutionaries. Violence crackles like static electricity. Heavily armed riot and...
Read MoreCAIRO – Standing at Tahrir Square, ground zero of Egypt’s revolution, is exciting and intimidating. The explosive anger, pent-up frustrations, and yearning for revenge of tens of thousands of demonstrators and onlookers breaks like waves across this vast, unsightly plaza. This is the raw material of all revolutions. The whiff of near-toxic riot gas supplied...
Read MoreIllusions and Reality
Cairo Egypt opened its border with the Gaza Strip last week in a radical move that upends the 30-year-old alliance between the US, Israel and Egypt under the rule of President Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian foreign minister described the blockade of 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza as “disgusting”. Soon Egypt will reopen diplomatic links with...
Read MoreThousands Idle and Discontented
Egypt has opened to the public the tombs of leading retainers of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun at Saqqara, south of Cairo, in a desperate bid to lure back tourists who have avoided the country since the revolt in February that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. Unemployed guides at Saqqara, one of the great archaeological sites of the...
Read MoreCrimes Against the People
The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is to be tried for conspiring to kill demonstrators whose protests brought an end to his 30-year rule. The move by the military government is seen as an attempt to satisfy growing popular anger in Egypt at its failure, since taking over from 83-year-old Mubarak on February 11, to...
Read MoreCopts Demand End to Post-Revolution Sectarianism
Cairo "I shouldn't have told them I am a Copt," says Hani Armanius Agib, recalling how his admission, as he tried to join a Coptic demonstration, that he is a Christian to a crowd of Muslims led to him being beaten up and his wallet and mobile phone stolen. Taken to hospital, he was arrested...
Read MoreThe Great Arab Awakening
Cairo Egypt is filled with signs of an unfinished revolution. Politics and everyday life are in a state of flux. Even the skylight high in the ceiling of the Cairo Museum, through which thieves entered at the height of the uprising, has not been mended. The robbers lowered themselves by rope and stole items discovered...
Read MoreThere has been a revolution in Egypt, but we still don't know what kind it is, how far will it go, and who stands to gain. Last week, deposed president Husni Mubarak and his two sons were arrested and are facing judicial interrogation. Egyptians are jubilant. Few Egyptians believed the man they called "Pharaoh" would...
Read MoreEgyptians on March to Keep Revolutionary Spirit Alive
Cairo Demonstrators fearful that the tide of revolution is on the ebb in Egypt staged a mass protest in Tahrir Square in Cairo last Friday to demand that a less authoritarian form of government be introduced. The protesters appeared to sense that political power is drifting away from them and the old system is reasserting...
Read MoreThree mummies were recently found in an underground temple in Luxor, Egypt. Translated hieroglyphs identified them as the Clash of Civilizations, the End of History, and Islamophobia. They ruled in Western domains into the second decade of the 21st century before dying and being embalmed. That much is settled. Without them, the Middle East is...
Read MoreSo Many Ways to Strut Your Democratic Stuff in a New World
They can’t help themselves. Really, they can’t. Like children, the most monstrous of secret police outfits evidently come to believe themselves immortal. They lose all ability to imagine that they might ever go down and so keep records to the very moment of their collapse. Those records, so copious, damning, and unbearably detailed (which doesn’t...
Read MoreCounterpunch has a remarkable wrap-up of the Egyptian Revolution, courtesy of one Esam El-Amin, that goes beyond self-congratulating and self-justifying spin to deliver just-the-facts-ma'am reporting of what happened, combined with trenchant analysis. Here's the link to When Egypt's Revolution Was at the Crossroads. Here's a taste: February 2: Displaying Courage and Steadfastness in The Battle...
Read MoreThe key slogan in Tahrir Square in Egypt was "the people want the downfall of the regime". When it comes to Saudi Arabia, it's more like "the House of Saud wants the downfall of its people". Which brings us to the US$36 billion question; can an ailing monarch (Saudi King Abdullah) bribe his subjects with...
Read MoreSometimes one has to wonder whether words have lost their meaning when used by neoconservatives. Yesterday’s Washington Post featured an op ed by Robert Kagan of Brookings and Michelle Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment. Together, the two are co chairs to the Working Group on Egypt. The op ed headline in the printed edition was...
Read MoreOne of the least analyzed aspects of the Egyptian pro-democracy movement and US policy toward it, is the role of the influential Zionist power configuration (ZPC) including the leading umbrella organization – the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO) – Congressional Middle East committee members, officials occupying strategic positions in the Obama...
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Egyptians revolted against American rule as well as Mubarak’s.
The Mideast house of cards so laboriously constructed by Washington over the past four decades threatens to collapse. One can’t help but be reminded of the revolts across Eastern Europe in 1989 that began the fall of the Soviet Empire. Now it may be the turn of America’s Mideast empire, an empire constructed of Arab...
Read MoreThis Isn't All About Mubarak
The real story about what's going on in Egypt is being suppressed in the US because it doesn't jibe with the "ain't capitalism great" theme that the media loves to reiterate ad nauseam. The truth is that the main economic policies that Washington exports through bribery and coercion have ignited massive labor unrest which has...
Read More"Plus a change,” say the cynical French, “plus c'est la mme chose." Many thoughtful Egyptians will be recalling this "bon mot" as the watch one ruler, the ousted Husni Mubarak, replaced by a military junta led by Field Marshall Mohammed Tantawi. Egyptians are getting more Mubarakism, sans Mubarak, at least for now. This is not...
Read MoreThe Limits of Social Movements :: The mass movements which forced the removal of Mubarak reveal both the strength and weaknesses of spontaneous uprisings. On the one hand, the social movements demonstrated their capacity to mobilize hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in a successful sustained struggle culminating in the overthrow of the dictator in...
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