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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...

Egypt: Waiting for Sunset

By on Dec 23, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

How long must we endure? It is difficult to take events in Egypt seriously right now. It has become normal to see legal and judicial travesties on a daily basis; a news story about two people being arrested for speaking English while on the subway, another story about a man getting arrested, or brought by a mob to a police station, for writing the frequency of satellite channels on a bathroom wall, as though it were some sort of political pornography. We are almost used to the frequent violations of the basic legal rights of anybody suspected of homosexuality or atheism, as though those were crimes when even Egypt’s mockery of a legal system has not yet found the time to officially criminalize them. The courts, initially resorted to by human rights activists, have about as much blood on their hands now as the police force does. The army has become, first covertly, but now quite...

Le Morte d’Egypte

By on Oct 30, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

Excuse the title. I like the Camelot myths. I’ve never read the original Malory though and wasn’t quite so interested in it when I was a child. The whole knight in shining armor thing never quite caught my fancy. However, I was lucky enough, years later, to run into The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White’s wonderful take on the Arthurian myths, in the first volume, we see a young Arthur, slowly becoming aware of what Merlin’s oblique lessons were forcing him to understand. It is a key moment, and here it is, brutally shortened, for your benefit. It’s still a bit long for an excerpt, but it’s important, and if you give me your attention for a few minutes, you’ll see why it’s so important that you get a feel for how it unfolds… “I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought...

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...

Egypt & The Delusion of Liberty

By on Mar 7, 2014 in Politics | 0 comments

There was nothing ‘progressive’ about Nasser and his officer’s. The only progressive one in the bunch was Mohamed Naguib, whose prestige they used to legitimize the coup – because at the time Nasser was pretty much a nobody, and then when Naguib wanted to hand over the country to civilian rule, they took him down, locked him up, and he was pretty much never heard of again till he died. As for the set-backs suffered by Egypt’s history of being colonized, all I can say is – look at other countries that were also colonized – most of them have recovered far more than Egypt ever has, because – surprise, Egypt is still under occupation – but this time by a military that just happens to be Egyptian, but might as well be a different state altogether, both in terms of finance and in terms of loyalty. Hell, look at Japan, two nuclear bombs, a...

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