Egypt anti-government protests grow

[teqniq]

On an entirely surreal note I feel reasonably certain that in the midst of all the election stuff, some of you must have come across @TawfikOkasha_en on Twitter. If not you should have a look. Since Morsi's win was announced he has sort of imploded (he seemed to think he had a cabinet job all lined up under Shafiq). Now he's not just tweeting semi gibberish English but is enquiring about furnished flats in Germany in semi gibberish:

TawfikOkasha_en
Lieber Beobachter aus Deutschland .. Guten Tag, .. Any news von Mieten möblierte Apartments haben Sie?

along with a series of bizarre vids in which everyone is blue (I wish I understood Arabic):

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lubf_BkXMAs&feature=youtu.be

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GV7LO-8IY&feature=youtu.be

http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnvmhgDsKpg&feature=youtu.be

You have to watch them on youtube itself as for some reason they do not show up in blue here

 

[elbows]

They aren't blue for me on youtube either, so we can lay to rest the rumour that SCAF are dominated by smurfs behind the scenes.

 

[teqniq]

Well they're blue here wow it seems there's something wrong with flashplayer on my machine lol

 

[elbows]

Also it seems his tweets were no more sane before the results, an obsession with masons and penetrating milk!

Although he did invent a ministerial position that I think would be a good idea

Urgent| Breaking| very sure: Mostafa Bakry will be vice prime minister and minister of exit.

 

[elbows]

This is the sort of news the english-language We are all Khaled Said Facebook group are reduced to posting at the moment:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/47944675

Trade on Egypt’s stock market was suspended as stocks were surging on Monday but even so the market closed 7.6 percent higher, the first reaction to the announcement of Mohamed Mursi as Egypt’s new President. The surge places the index among the world’s best performers once again.

 

[teqniq]

Update on @TawfikOkasha_en he is actually a real person and not a spoof. I managed to get an explanation:

he is a Glen Beck style pro-old regime anti-revolutionary tv presenter who rants about conspiracy theories and lies. Was in NDP

I am sooo disappointed he is not actually blue though, it looked so real. (Mr believe anything, me)

I will have to reinstall flash on my other machine tomorrow.

 

[butchersapron]

Presidential loser Shafiq leaves country hours after prosecutor opens corruption probe

​

Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and loser of the presidential runoff, left Egypt Tuesday with most of his family for the United Arab Emirates hours after the prosecutor general opened an investigation into allegations he wasted public funds during his 8-year term as a civil aviation minister in the ousted regime.​

The United Arab Emirates has offered a haven to other members of Mubarak’s old regime. Earlier this month, the most senior old regime figure not jailed or on trial, former spy chief and Vice President Omar Suleiman, left for Abu Dhabi.​

 

[elbows]

Ha thats quite funny, I didn't know Suleiman had gone, did they keep that quiet? Last time I saw Suleiman he was visiting the Saudi's, probably to have a bitching and plotting session about the MB.

Meanwhile I see that ElBaradei still features regularly in rumours about being given a prominent position such a PM, although articles usually fail to mention that he tends to live in Vienna.

 

[elbows]

Ativists in the UAE weren't very happy about Suleiman's presence.

http://bikyamasr.com/70589/egypts-o...activists-fear-helping-anti-change-crackdown/

UAE online activists started a hashtag (Omar Soliman in our homeland) to express their refusal of the family’s visit.
“The Godfather of the Camp David treaty and the social coordinator with Israel over how to oppress the Palestinians and Arab nations, welcome,” wrote Ibrahim ‏@ialyassi.
“We do not accept our homeland becoming a refuge to those who were kicked into the trash can of history,” wrote Asma @Q86.
“The agent of international torture and the engineer of the Gaza blockage,” wrote @ali_Boal7sn.
“The Sheikh who served our nation in under arrest and the traitor who sold Israel gas is a guest … how puzzling,” wrote Yousef Almulla, ‏@YAlmulla.

The UAE is now facing internal and outer criticism over recent crackdowns on reformists, after 7 activits were stripped of their citizenship and arrested, including an influential reformist figure, Sultan Ben Kayed al-Qasimi, in an unprecedented force against calls for change inside the country.

Many UAE activists accused the the state of using Soliman’s “expertise” in oppressing opposition and cracking down on activism, much like the role he played in his home country.

 

[elbows]

Details of some of the easy cosmetic changes being made, via the We are all Khaled Said english facebook page:

#Egypt stock market continue to rise at exponential levels with gains reaching 6 Billion Egyptian pounds following yesterday's record 18 Billion rise.

* New president, Morsi, meets the families of the martyrs of the revolution and the wounded including Khaled Said's mother and Mina Daniel's sister.

* Morsi forbids the hanging of his photo in government institutions. A protocol widely used in Mubarak times where Mubarak's photos used to be hanged on every wall including schools and hospitals.

* Morsi orders his security to limit his convoy number of cars to a minimum and ensure no blockings of the roads (Mubarak convoy used to block streets for hours).

* Morsi orders his security to allow martyrs family access to him at all times.

* President spokesman denies Morsi had any interviews with Iranian media.

* Morsi responded to a congratulations letter from Bashar AlAssad saying he does not regard him as a representative of Syria and Syrians any more.

P.S. It feels strange mentioning good news about Egypt president but I thought I will give the guy a chance. Very soon I will start to criticise his bad decisions, so don't be surprised then.

 

[butchersapron]

Er....
Robert Fisk: President Morsi, a rigged ballot and a fox's tale that has all of Cairo abuzz

Now foxes can be deceitful. But this is a well-connected fox and he claims that Morsi actually met four leading members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) in Egypt four days before the election results were proclaimed and that he agreed to accept his presidency before the constitutional court rather than the newly dissolved parliament – which is exactly what he did on Saturday. He says there will be another election in a year's time, although I have my doubts.

Now behind this piece of Reynard-gossip is a further piece of information – shattering if true – that the Egyptian army's intelligence service is outraged by the behaviour of some members of the Scaf (in particular, the four who supposedly met Morsi) and wants a mini-revolution to get rid of officers whom it believes to be corrupt. These young soldiers call themselves the New Liberal Officers – a different version of the Free Officers Movement which overthrew the corrupt King Farouk way back in 1952.

Many of the present young intelligence officers were very sympathetic to the Egyptian revolution last year – and several of them were shot dead by government snipers long after Mubarak's departure during a Tahrir Square demonstration. They admire the current head of military intelligence, soon to retire and to be replaced, so it is said, by another respected military officer with the unfortunate name of Ahmed Mosad.

 

[elbows]

What the fuck sort of reporting is that? We finally get to hear something about military factions, but for me its ruined by the mishmash of unexplored detail and silly stuff about the fox, he may as well have said the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy SCAF.

I'll probably have more thoughts later but for now I'll just say that a deal between Morsi & SCAF in that awkward week of delayed results is well known, as is the possibility that there will be a new presidential election after they've done a more comprehensive job of knocking up a new constitution. And there were some sympathetic officers at Tahrir at certain points, although publicly the story usually ended with SCAF arresting them rather than them being sniped out of existence.

 

[butchersapron]

Lots of leftish egyptians saying they've had their doubts about his reporting for ages but this the end, fisk jumps the shark etc

 

[elbows]

Yeah, todays bullshit is brought to us by the words liberal and beard.

if he didn't want to show up on peoples radars as a suspicious megaturd then he should probably have mentioned the consistent Morsi lead in individual polling figures that tended to approach the 1 million mark, and the fact that the Christian vote issue wasn't enough to make a difference, and that the electoral commission threw out that complaint because the number of Christians in that area voting in the second round was comparable to the number who voted in the first round.

 

[teqniq]

Yup lots of derision from the Egyptians I follow on Twitter.

 

[elbows]

I've been reading the umpteen other articles about Egypt he wrote in the week before that one. Not too many clues that he would lurch off in the direction of his latest article really, since it was an understandable mix of criticism of what the MB really is, fears that SCAF would declare Shafiq the winner, etc.

Perhaps the biggest clue was too much attention to facial hair:

There were so many beards. Massive beards, goatee beards, knife-pointed beards, Che Guevara beards. In fact, there were even postcards of Che Guevara on sale, along with former Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...therhood-take-over-tahrir-square-7876805.html

 

[elbows]

The piss-taking on twitter has begun.

https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/#TheFoxToldMe

 

[elbows]

Some of them found this article which rather pisses on Fisks credibility when it comes to reporting facts.

http://hughpope.com/2011/11/20/i-dont-read-hugh-pope-robert-fisk/

 

[butchersapron]

That was going round before (during the hari thing i think?), fisk as the next one to fall sort of thing - not enough info, not enough supporting evidence. There was another one about a private letter from a US worker who attended the aftermath of the lebanese camp massacres that was doing the rounds that i checked up on - something about the dates not matching - and found that they did, that people had confused original publication dates with publication in a collection years later. Can't recall 100% off top of head though.

 

[elbows]

Ta for the info. These sorts of incidents seem unlikely to help with discovering the truth about Fisk or anything else really. Some people are pointing out that some of the people now going mad at Fisk were quite happy with him when he told them what they wanted to hear, e.g. criticised SCAF.

Im just sad that my appetite for actual information about factions within the military has been whetted but there is no useful detail for me to chew on.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

I see that there has been an attempt to gather together a lot of different political groups in Egypt to form a new third political force between the military and the MB.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2012/al-monitor/the-third-current.html

 

[elbows]

discokermit posted the following link in the uk thread about lack of left resurgence. Those with an interest in Egypt should probably scroll down it and read the last section which deals with Egypt.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=819&issue=135

And here are some very interesting posts about the labor protests that have been renewed since the presidential election results, including lots of people turning up outside the presidential palace and demanding (and sometimes succeeding) in meeting with Morsi (I seem to recall when dishing out promises he said he would meet with anyone who wanted to meet him).

http://www.arabawy.org/tag/مظاهرات-قصر-الرئاسة/

Theres also a few details mentioned in passing there that I shamefully failed to get round to mentioning here, such as who he was sworn in in front of, and the MB giving up the Tahrir sit-in without various important demands being met (no surprise there). Although last time I checked some of the young MB continued to ignore the official party line on this sort of thing, must not forget the generation game thats quite the part of the Egyptian story.

Trivial name spelling detail: Apparently the new presidents office clarified that in our alphabet the official spelling of his name is to be Mohamed Morsy. I've been using Morsi and the BBC were using Mursi prior to this clarification.

 

[butchersapron]

On those last details:

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Military: a new deal?

 

[butchersapron]

Breaking the silence: Mob sexual assault on Egypt's Tahrir

 

[quimcunx]

3arabawy and Gigi Ibrahim (they got married recently) are in London this weekend for some Marxism conference, btw.

 

[elbows]

Oh, Morsy has reinstated parliament, or at least issued a decree to do so. Although he is also talking about fresh elections so this seems more like a temporary measure connected with rewriting the constitution. Commentators are offering conflicting opinions as to whether this is a challenge to the military or part of a deal (see analysis box of this bbc article). I doubt its a challenge myself, although I wouldn't like to bet any money on it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18761403

 

[elbows]

Lacking time to discuss recent developments much this week. But couldnt resist posting this part of a story about someone whose father got to see bits of his secret police file during the chaos. I dont think the article says much of anything really, but hey...

When my father learnt that he was being watched, my parents decided to get married in a hurry and the nearest they got to a honeymoon was to flee to Libya, which was relatively open and booming in the early 1970s, before Gadaffi had gone completely mad.
I was born in Tripoli (as was one of my brothers) and, though I remember almost nothing consciously of our sojourn there, my birthplace has cast a shadow over my life. For example, exhibiting a comparable level of paranoia to the Egyptian regime, American Homeland Insecurity has quizzed me as to whether my toddler self ever served in the Libyan armed forces, which would give a whole new meaning to infantry.

http://chronikler.com/travel/liberation-of-exile/

 

[elbows]

I'm not really sure what to say about the parliament stuff since it remains unclear to me what they were trying to achieve. The military did stop preventing MPs from accessing the building, but parliament only reconvened briefly, and asked the courts to have another look at relevant decisions. On the same day some courts reiterated that previous decision to disband parliament stood. And despite MB calling for a million man march yesterday, which I didnt end up hearing much about (but then I wasnt paying much attention at the time), it now sounds like Morsy has caved in and issued a statement saying his office respects the decision.

 

[elbows]

http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/47446.aspx

Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Abul-Enein intends to liquidate his business interests in the country, citing the 'stress' brought on by repeated labour disputes with his employees, Ahram's Arabic-language news site reported on Wednesday.

Abul-Enein is the owner of Cleopatra Ceramics, a major player in the Middle East ceramics industry which has been hit by a wave of labour unrest following Mubarak's ouster in February 2011.

Such protests, staged to win improvements in wages and conditions, are now causing Abul-Enein to close his factories and liquidate his investments, letting him concentrate on his personal life, according to a statement from the Cleopatra Group's media department.

Company employees, however, accused the Cleopatra founder of spreading the news of imminent closures to make them fear for their jobs and rethink their ongoing protests.

For his part, Ahmed Salah, the deputy head of the workers syndicate at the company's Suez factory, said employees would "welcome" Abul-Enein's decision if could lead to the nationalisation of the firm's factories, located in Suez and 10th Ramadan City.

Hundreds of disgruntled Cleopatra workers blocked the streets in front of Egypt's High Court in downtown Cairo last Thursday in order to reiterate longstanding labour grievances.

Egyptian prosecutor-general Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud issued a travel ban on Abul-Enein, Egypt's state news agency MENA reported the same day.

Abul-Enein faces charges of unjustly sacking factory workers and failing to pay them their rightful salaries.

 

[elbows]

A pretty realistic-sounding look at the recent parliament stuff:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/11/egypt-s-overhyped-parliamentary-showdown.html