Egypt’s Protests – Moon of Alabama

January 28, 2011

Egypt’s Protests

Demonstrations are planned in Egypt after today's Friday prayers. The Mubarak dictatorship has forbidden all protest so street battles are to be expected. Over night security forces arrested many of the protest and Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

Former IAEA boss El Baradei has returned to Egypt and wants to take charge. Read his op-ed in Newsweek. I do not believe that he has yet the power he feels he has. He should watch out for a single bullet coming towards him.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, will have the decisive role in the demonstrations today and their likely brutal takedown. If the Brotherhood mobilizes its followers, as it has announced to do, the masses can overwhelm the security forces. Otherwise, … who knows?

Egypt is now mostly disconnected from the Internets just 15 minutes after AP published this video of a man getting shot by police forces. Send by someone in Cairo:

"The government can take away my freedom, but if they take away my internet porn, they're going down."

The U.S. has taken the side of Mubarak with Vice President Biden making unmistakeably clear that for Washington the interests of the Zionist is the most important issue:

“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with Israel,” the vice president said. “And I think that it would be – I would not refer to him as a dictator."

The Egyptian military has so far stayed neutral. If it would take sides against Mubarak he would be done with. The Egyptian chief of staff is currently in Washington on pre-planned annual meeting. In December some Wikileaks cable were made public that show some general U.S. misgivings about the Egyptian military. That might have set a not too bright background for any influence Washington now tries to take on it.

For background about the protests and how they evolved from the death of Khaled Said watch this Time video.

Posted by b on January 28, 2011 at 07:33 UTC | Permalink

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Weird: Security Forces Disappear Off Cairo Streets

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian security forces have all but disappeared from the streets in the heart of the country’s capital ahead of planned demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.
Egyptians had expected a huge police presence ahead of Friday’s planned protests.
Instead, there is no sight of riot police on Cairo’s main streets and key bridges, including areas where security forces are visible even in normal times.
Before dawn, the largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said at least five of its leaders and five former members of parliament had been arrested.
The group’s lawyer, Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maksoud, and spokesman, Walid Shalaby, said a large number of rank and file Brotherhood members have also been detained.

Wondering what the plan is …

Posted by: b | Jan 28 2011 8:41 utc | 1

Help Egypt – Join the Cloud!…

It’s happening now. The Egyptian people have called for the end of years of corruption, poverty and political exclusion. The government has responded with water cannons, tear gas and batons. With Facebook, Twitter and Gmail periodically blocked, the channels of communication that the Egyptian people depend on are limited.
Here’s what you can do. Contributing to the Tor network requires a bit of technical savvy and a devotion of your time and your computer’s resources. If that’s you, and you’re willing to learn about the Tor network, help reopen these channels of communication by joining the Global Proxy Cloud (instructions linked on the right). Through a download of Tor, a free anti-censorship program developed by The Tor Project, a computer running a Tor bridge over an extended period can help the network run faster.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 28 2011 10:21 utc | 2

Aljazerra live – pretty intense now

Posted by: b | Jan 28 2011 12:23 utc | 3

Israel’s great friend and bible thumper Blair warns of ‘vacuum’ in Egypt
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9379000/9379415.stm

Posted by: Anthony | Jan 28 2011 12:26 utc | 4

Blair is currently talking about how change in egypt will happen in the future, he doesn’t want to offend his good friend Mubarek. He is also saying how “we need to manage that change, so that things get better not worse”. In Blair’s world, he is speaking from his lord and master’s knees-up at Davos, “we” does not mean the people of egypt, who if given the choice would majorly back some form of enlightened anti-zionism, infused with a dash of islamic/coptic values; that is exactly what Blair doesn’t want. Blair wants a quantitive easing of oppression forcing his good friends to force their underlings to be less corrupt until neo-liberal ‘funny money’ has the middle class so entangled in debt to Blair employers, that they daren’t support a government whose devotion to social justice could give the Egyptian economy a standard and poors downgrade.
The problem is that without the extra cash middle class Egyptians earn through their state sector jobs, they too would starve along with everyone else.
As well, things have got so bad in Egypt thanks to the US printing presses pushing out more dollars, that Blair’s Egyptian friends are refusing to stop creaming Egypt’s wealth off the top.
Stopping now would cause an almost instant decline in their relative prosperity. It must be said that even if they did stop their decimation of Egypt’s net worth, things are too far gone now that a cessation would force the ship to right itself.
Capsize is a certainty, the only imponderable is whether the boat sinks into chaos or manages to achieve a new order.
The next issue then will be whether that order is pro Egyptian people, or pro neo-liberal, and that chiefly depends on Egyptians’ ability to see through lies.
Whatever Mubarek’s generals believe won’t matter. Don’t believe the media take that there is a substantive difference between Tunisian state security and Egyptian, both have been equally murderous towards the citizens they claim to be protecting, when they thought they could be.
Many uprisings have shown that once a certain critical mass has been reached, usually where more troops than the relatively small numbers of elite corps can deal with are needed, the regime shows signs of decreptitude as well as ineptitude.
Less well trained security forces find themselves being ordered to shoot fellow countrymen that remind themselves of themselves and their families. Middle rung officers pick up on that and become less diligent. Already nervous members of the military elite become absolutely hysterical until some less nervous more ambitious generals and colonels decide it is time for their takeover.
US agents will be watching closely. The CIA will be nervous about their informants within the generals circle, and they will rely more on conversations between US nationals and previously sympathetic military brass to try and ensure the man they back wins the fight, by no means a certainty.
There will have been contingency planning for this occasion but no one expected so many countries to go off at once.
The US has been far too distracted by its machinations to destroy the euro. What they didn’t factor in was that sending Europe broke would drag down many far more precarious economies first.

Posted by: UreKismet | Jan 28 2011 14:24 utc | 5

The only thing that matters here is that for b, Egyptian uprising is good, Iranian uprising is bad/sham, because Egypt is an on-again off-again US client.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 28 2011 16:29 utc | 6

Slothrop,
Your attempt to simplify b’s analysis comparing the protests is insulting, not only to b but to all of us.

Posted by: RIck Happ | Jan 28 2011 16:58 utc | 7

there’s quite a bit of evidence that the usual suspects (CIA, NED) stirred up iran’s failed “green revolution”, which is understandable seeing as how 16 or 17 million barrels of oil a day go through hormuz.
…which accounts for neocons’ whining about their failure in iran, and israel’s non-stop belligerence towards iran.
on the other hand, the combination of egypt’s SUMED pipeline and the suez canal account for only a couple million barrels a day going north to europe, so there’s not lots of incentive, either way, for israeli america to get involved in an egyptian uprising, especially when their boy mubarak has been doing such a good job for them.
caroline glick does a hatchet job on elbaradei, insisting that he “shielded Iran’s nuclear weapons program from the Security Council.”
so now that we’re choosing up sides, it’s pretty easy to see where people stand, isnt it?

Posted by: flickervertigo | Jan 28 2011 17:24 utc | 8

one more thing, here… the nobel prizes to elbaradei and aumann… you got to wonder, at some point, how involved aumann was in planning this PNAC caper, starting from sharon’s visit to al aqsa with a thousand cops.
elbaradei, who simply was unable to find iraq’s WMDs, and couldnt find iran’s nuke weapons, and stuck to his guns, is awarded the 2005 nobel peace price three days before aumann and schelling are awarded the economics prize, “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.”
those nobel guys are real cards.

Posted by: flickervertigo | Jan 28 2011 18:06 utc | 9

based on what we know about the Green Revolution and Iran, protesters there (urban educated, young, modern, mostly secular elites) demanded democracy. You’ll recall that b caricatured protesters there as stooges of Freedom House and Western manipulation. b enthusiastically preferred the rule of autocratic religious zealots.
But now, b supports an Egyptian movement that shows far fewer signs of promoting democracy.
Just sayin

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 28 2011 21:51 utc | 10

The Egyptian autocracy, the nepotistic pere et fils Mubarak nightmare, is a dense and hideous evil, that is now being torn limb from limb by the people. The hated Egyptian police, the buggerers and torturers will face justice now.

Posted by: Copeland | Jan 28 2011 23:00 utc | 11

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