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Was It a Mistake to Protest Against Morsi?

By on Jan 6, 2015 in Featured, Politics | 1 comment

On the 30th of June, 2013, we took to the streets to protest the rule of Dr. Mohamed Morsi, a member of the so-called Muslim Brotherhood, and then president of Egypt. We protested against him, and our reasons were as diverse as we ourselves were; some of us were with the revolution and against the Muslim Brotherhood, some of us were clearly Mubarak loyalists who salivated at the chance to depose the Brotherhood, and some of us had, ostensibly, gone down to protect their Egyptian ‘Identify’ from the Pseudo-Islamist fascism that we had all seen crystalized before our eyes in the mostly-Islamist parliament in which we had seen the face of so-called ‘Political Islam’. Since that day, since Morsi was removed, events have taken on their own momentum; the military exploited our protests just as it had exploited the revolution from the very start. The generals took control just as they had...

Imagine…

By on Jul 6, 2014 in Politics | 2 comments

Imagine that your country was run by a corporation. Now imagine this corporation has managed to take over at least a third of the country’s assets. Imagine if this corporation enacted laws that allowed it to enlist most of the young men in the country as slave labor, getting paid peanuts, and having to work all day, sometimes in productive jobs, and sometimes sending men to do nothing more than smoke cigarettes as they stood in a deserted spot of land. Imagine that this corporation was run by a cabal of businessmen who were above all the laws, and subject to none of them – so that they were not held accountable to the country or to its laws. Imagine further that this corporation could not only ignore the law but could actually change laws to suit itself. Imagine if this corporation was not only exempt from taxes, but was actually partly funded by taxes, and received further...

The Hamdeen Argument

By on May 3, 2014 in Politics | 4 comments

The summer of 2011 must’ve been an incredible time for Hamdeen Sabbahi. He was one of the darlings of the revolution, known as a left-leaning Nasserist (whatever that means), ignored only by the hardcore revolutionaries who would only rubber-stamp a batter front-liner, but mostly admired, and generally just liked by almost everybody else. He was tight with what you could, with some effort, call the civil leaders of the revolution, although most of them were not so much leading as doing their damnest to keep up with the street, and with Tahrir – but he was in. Remember this? I have no idea who took this picture, but look at it for a few seconds…this was in the summer of 2011, whatever credit Tantawi and SCAF had acquired at the start of the revolution was already starting to wear thin, and Hamdeen was, literally, riding on a wave of revolutionary youth. Whatever you...

On Sisi’s Latest Speech –

By on Mar 7, 2014 in Politics | 0 comments

Sisi basically told people that Egypt ‘cannot afford healthcare’. So basically, if you get sick, just die quietly anddon’t complain about it. In this incredible Shades-of-Morsi speech, he asked (in that supposedly calming tone of his..but which seems more sinister and patronizing by the day) “How many of you have considered walking to university so that you can save for Egypt?” How idiotic is that? First of all, anybody who’s close enough to walk to his university DOES, because traffic SUCKS, and anybody else is too damn far to travel, and also – how exactly does ‘walking to university’ help the economy? By NOT spending money? By not giving money to cab drivers or the transport buses? He’s either incredibly naive or massively disingenuous. He tells the youth not to expect healthcare, not to expect to be able to afford to get...

Egypt: The Choices We Make

By on Feb 10, 2014 in Politics | 0 comments

Perhaps one of the biggest changes we’ll all felt since Jan 25, 2011 is – the euphoria, and the burden of – choice. Will you go down? What for? Will you risk your life? On which issues? What is the best choice today? What will it lead to tomorrow? Is this what I want to do? What kind of president do I want? What kind of constitution? Yet – in retrospect, and to some along the way – it seems like we’ve had no choices at all – A referendum in March 2011, which asked, or so the Military Council and the Media, and the Islamists would have had you believe – whether you wanted us to proceed according to ‘a’ plan, or whether you wanted CHAOS. So Egyptians chose…you know, the non-chaos option. Then we had elections. Humdrum. Okay. Arguably, even the Morsi win could be attributed to a choice towards stability. Everybody knew that all hell would break loose if Mubarak-Regime Candidate Ahmed...

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