In Egypt, moments of peace amid violence

An Egyptian Army soldier is a handed a flower by an anti-government protesters in 

Tahrir Square in Cairo.   Chris Hondros / Getty Images

An Egyptian Army soldier (center) prays along with anti-government protesters 

during the afternoon in Tahrir Square Jan. 30.  Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Egyptian soldiers read the newspaper as they sit atop their Abrams tank 

as demonstrators begin to gather in Tahrir Square in the capital Cairo

Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images

Egyptian demonstrators greet soldiers as they arrive in Tahrir Square in Cairo, on 

Jan. 30, on the sixth day of protests against long term President Hosni Mubarak's regime.

Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images

Meredith Birkett writes:Cairo remained in a state of flux and marchers 

continued to protest in the streets and defy curfew, demanding the

resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarek. As President 

Mubarak struggles to regain control after five days of protests he has

appointed Omar Suleiman as vice-president. 

The present death toll stands at 100 and up to 2,000 people are

thought to have been injured during the clashes which started last

Tuesday. Overnight it was reported that thousands of inmates from 

the Wadi Naturn prison had escaped and that Egyptians were forming

vigilante groups in order to protect their homes.

Temporary Stay Granted on Targeted Ugandan Lesbian's Deportation

Nancy Goldstein | January 28, 2011

Author's note: The good news, via Melanie Nathan [1], is that Ugandan lesbian Brenda Namigadde has been granted a temporary last-minute reprieve, and will not be deported back to Uganda this evening, as planned. Word came down from the High Court judge as Namigadde was being escorted to the airport this evening. Her lawyer, Abdulrahman Jafar, will be filing a fresh asylum appeal using the tack that so many of us have suggested. He'll argue that Namiggade should be allowed to remain in the UK regardless of her sexuality. "The press coverage about her activities certainly expose her to a real risk if she is to be returned to Uganda," he told the BBC [2].
***
Two days ago David Kato, a gay Ugandan activist, was found beaten to death in his home after a tabloid flashed his picture on their cover next to a “Hang them!” banner. Now it’s Brenda Namigadde, a Ugandan lesbian who has been denied asylum in Britain, with a target on her back. She’s due to be deported [3] from Britain tonight despite the fact that David Bahati, the Ugandan member of parliament who introduced the “Kill the Gays” bill still under consideration there, has singled her out in a chilling statement that parades as accommodation but reads as a threat.
Bahati’s idea of restraint: he said he would drop the clause making homosexuality punishable by death in the “Anti-Homosexuality” bill, and told the Guardian [4]: "Brenda is welcome in Uganda if she will abandon or repent her behaviour. Here in Uganda, homosexuality is not a human right. It is behaviour that is learned and it can be unlearned. We wouldn't want Brenda to be painting a wrong picture of Uganda, that we are harassing homosexuals."
Consider that last sentence before you make the mistake of thinking that Kato’s murder and the attention it’s drawn to Uganda’s full-on hatred of LGBT people will stop Bahati or anyone else there from imprisoning, raping, or murdering Namigadde.  Not if the response of the Uganda police or those who helped target all of the country’s LGBT people for extermination, including Kato, is any indication. The former persist in characterizing Kato’s murder as a simple robbery. The editor of the tabloid that published Kato’s picture alongside ninety-nine other “homos” sees no connection between his actions and Kato’s murder, telling [5] the New York Times: “There is no need for anxiety or for hype. We should not overblow the death of one.” Don Schmierer, one of the American Evangelicals who toured Uganda in 2009 [6] on a Whip-Up-Hatred-for-Homosexuals jaunt that drew packed houses just prior to the introduction of the Kill the Gays bill, considers himself the victim here: “’I spoke to help people,’” he said [5], “and I’m getting bludgeoned from one end to the other.”
This is the country and these are the attitudes Namigadde will return to unless a host of international organizations, first alerted to her plight by blogger Melanie Nathan [7], can convince British Home Secretary Theresa May to stay Namigadde’s deportation order.

You can help by signing All Out’s [8] petition [8] to May’s office—she’s already received 40,000 messages from 160 countries—and sending this [9] message to the Twitterverse. Now. This instant. Before Brenda’s plane leaves in a few hours.
As a final irony, Namigadde’s petition for asylum was denied because British officials, for reasons that are not entirely clear, don’t think she’s a lesbian. That shouldn’t even be the point any more. As Andre Banks, the co-founder of All Out says, "Now that Bahati has singled out Brenda as a lesbian, it should be clear to anyone, including Theresa May, that following through on her deportation will place her in clear and present danger."

Like this Blog Post? Read it on the Nation's free iPhone App, NationNow. [10]

Mona Eltahawy to CNN: Call Egypt an Uprising

by SEHAM on JANUARY 30, 2011
"A historic moment in the history of my people. I urge you to say uprising or revolt and not chaos... [this is the liberation] of the Arab imagination... The future is winning..." -- Mona Eltahawy's stunning appearance on CNN and other Headlines and stories from The Egyptian revolution:

ScarceClips | January 29, 2011 | 

Noted Egyptian journalist and speaker Mona Eltahaway takes CNN to task for their sensational descriptions of the events in Egypt and call it for what it is: an uprising and a revolution.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Horror Show

Katha Pollitt

January 27, 2011   |    This article appeared in the February 14, 2011 edition of The Nation.

Blood-spattered floors. Cat feces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anesthesia. Two women dead, countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor. This was the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. This is what illegal abortion looks like.

That’s right. Illegal abortion. A great deal has been written about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and the shocking conditions and practices at his facility, which was closed last March after a drug raid, and is back in the news because a grand jury has indicted him and nine employees for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven infants. There have been many calls for further restrictions on abortion, much revulsion expressed at post-viability abortions, much blame cast on prochoicers for supposedly doing nothing to stop him. But it has not been pointed out often enough that what Dr. Gosnell was doing was illegal in Pennsylvania. It is not legal to perform abortions after twenty-four weeks. It is not legal to slit the necks of born-alive fetuses at any age, much less at thirty weeks or even more. It is not legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to perform medical procedures.

Now prochoicers are being blamed for this rogue operator. The grand jury report suggests that Tom Ridge, Republican governor from 1995 to 2001, discontinued inspections because prochoicers claimed they were too burdensome. The ones I talked to were skeptical. “We never lobbied against inspection,” Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project, which represents clinics in Pennsylvania, told me by phone. She pointed out that under Ridge’s Democratic predecessor, Bob Casey, who was famously opposed to legal abortion, Gosnell’s clinic was inspected three times, and each time serious problems were found. Nothing was done. Perhaps it’s relevant that Gosnell’s patients were poor, many of them immigrants—like 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar from Nepal, with whose murder Gosnell has been charged—who may not even have known that safe and legal abortion is available here.

On Slate, William Saletan agreed with the grand jury’s criticism of the National Abortion Federation, which rejected Gosnell’s 2009 application for membership, for failing to alert state authorities to the terrible conditions at his facility. In her organization’s defense, NAF head Vicki Saporta says, “What we saw didn’t meet our standards, but they’d cleaned the place up and hired an RN for our visit. We only saw first-trimester procedures.” Others did alert authorities about problems at the facility, though. A doctor from the Children’s Hospital hand-delivered a complaint to the Health Department after numerous patients returned from Gosnell’s facility with venereal disease from unsterilized instruments. The department never responded. As the grand jury report noted, the department was also alerted by the medical examiner of Delaware County that Gosnell had performed an illegal abortion on a 14-year-old who was thirty weeks pregnant. And the department was informed of Mongar’s death at Gosnell’s hands. Brenda Green, executive director of CHOICE, a nonprofit that connects the underinsured and uninsured with health services, told me it tried to report complaints from clients, but the department wouldn’t accept them from a third party. Instead, the patients had to fill out a daunting five-page form, available only in English, that required them to reveal their identities upfront and be available to testify in Harrisburg. Even with CHOICE staffers there to help, only two women agreed to fill out the form, and both decided not to submit it. The Department of State and the Philadelphia Public Health Department also had ample warning of dire conditions and took no action.

It might seem odd that Pennsylvania, where antichoice legislators have laden abortion with restrictions, should have been so uninterested in the Women’s Medical Society. But actually it makes perfect sense. As Carol Tracy put it, “The problem here was that Pennsylvania has always focused on eliminating abortion, not on abortion as healthcare.” In fact, as she points out, the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, the primary vehicle for regulating abortion, is part of the criminal code. “Since abortion isn’t seen as medical care, they didn’t have the appropriate locus for oversight.”

What fueled Gosnell’s business were the very restrictions the legislature was so keen on passing—parental notification, waiting periods, biased counseling and, most important, a ban on state funding for abortion for low-income women. Would women have gone to the Women’s Medical Society if Pennsylvania paid for abortion with Medicaid funds? Would they have had late procedures if they could have afforded earlier ones? Maybe some underage girls went to him to avoid the parental notification rules that supposedly protected them. Only women who felt they had no better alternative would have accepted such dangerous, degrading and frightening treatment. In a way, that’s the saddest part—that women didn’t feel they could turn around and leave.

Will Pennsylvania learn anything from this experience? No, says Brenda Green. As I write, the state legislature has fast-tracked a bill that will ban any insurance plan that covers abortion from insurance exchanges set up under healthcare reform. That means more women forced to pay for abortion out of pocket—and more customers for unscrupulous providers. “That Gosnell was able to get away with his horrific practice does not prove new regulations are needed,” says Susan Schewel, executive director of the Women’s Medical Fund, which helps low-income women pay for their abortions. “It shows we need to enforce the laws we have.”

Koch Brothers v. the Left in Palm Springs

Nancy Goldstein | January 30, 2011

There’s a good chance that readers of this page already have some idea who David and Charles Koch are, and what’s happening [1] this weekend, as the sugar daddies of the Tea Party throw a little party of their own in Palm Springs. Invitees include a pack of their billionaire friends, plus prominent pundits, Republican Party officials [2] and lawmakers, a number of whom benefited from hefty Koch contributions [3] this last campaign cycle.
Together they’ll strategize how to get rid of every regulation or politician that stands in the way of wealthy people becoming wealthier; namely, taxes, healthcare reform, environmental and financial protections, Obama and what little remains of the social safety net. Citizens United will undoubtedly energize the annual end-of-weekend ritual when all the donors—40 percent of them new [4]—whip out their checkbooks to underwrite these adventures in subverting democracy with an eye to their bottom line.
But there will also be, for the first time in the soiree’s eight year history, media attention [5], including a fair number of prominent bloggers, a panel discussion [6] including such luminaries as Robert Reich and Van Jones and a demonstration organized by Common Cause [7]. That’s actually pretty great, as Kert Davies [8], Director of Research for Greenpeace [9], reminded me. For years one of the Koch brothers’ greatest achievements was the fact that no one knew who they were or what influence they had in DC.
Now, thanks to some fine investigative reporting, we know that the brothers—the fifth [10]-richest folks in the United States—are radical right-wingers whose dad served on the John Birch Society’s governing body. Lee Fang of Think Progress [11] tagged them early on as primary funders [12] for the allegedly populist Tea Party, whose coast-to-coast “spontaneous” uprisings against Obama and taxation, were carefully orchestrated by staff. A March 2010 Greenpeace report [13] uncloaked Koch Industries as a “financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” and unveiled their underwriting of organizations like the Mercatus Center, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, whose pseudo-academic “research” and “reports” lobby for the wealthy and powerful from behind the protection of tax-exempt, nonprofit status. Jane Mayer’s August 2010 New Yorker portrait, “Covert Operations [14]” finished ripping the mask off of the brothers mostly known on the East Coast as generous patrons of the arts, and directly connected them to what was happening in DC. (Note: for the uninitiated, this [15] fabulous timeline cartoon provides the least painful account of the Koch family’s political history from the ’30s through today.)
What worries me is that the left’s response in Palm Springs may still be too “insider baseball,” the kind of stuff that riles up the already converted but has no discernible effect on a public still in thrall to the simple us-versus-them mentality of the Tea Party—a dynamic in which one is always, simultaneously, right and wronged. So I turned to some of the journalists and advocates who have been covering the Kochs, energy and the Tea Party for their views.
Greenpeace’s Davies, though cautious, felt buoyed by the momentum on the left’s side: “I think it’s possible to keep drawing scrutiny to the Tea Party Congress by teaching voters to look for the corporate billionaire-backed tentacles behind the scenes. We can also put pressure on those congressmen by finding ways to ask them, very publicly, what they owe the Kochs. And I think it’s huge that Cato and other front groups are now being talked about as ‘Koch funded’ think tanks which should diminish their power in the media.” Kate Sheppard [16], who reports on the environment and energy issues for Mother Jones, also believes that the left has a winning issue with the Kochs: “Most Americans understand that we probably shouldn’t keep depending on oil, even if it’s just that they don’t like what they’re paying at the pump.” 
Fang shared some of my concerns, noting the Tea Party’s power as a catch-all. “In the wake of the war and the financial crisis in these last few years, people who are disillusioned by big institutions are drawn to the Tea Party as intrinsically anti-institution. Democrats and the left haven’t caught on to this psychological shift.”
But John Amato of Crooks & Liars [17] felt less concerned about having a complete picture, or a message that could rival the Tea Party’s. “Let’s just get through the day,” he said. “Info that Supreme Court Justices Anthony Scalia and Clarence Thomas are attending meetings like this is pretty good for now in terms of challenging the impartiality of the court. Why kind of activist judges speak behind closed doors at secret political meetings? We’re raising awareness, saying billionaires are actively lobbying and pouring money in to change legislation to make money for themselves.”

The Mideast Burns

by Eric Margolis

When I wrote my latest book on the way America dominates the Mideast, I chose the title, American Raj, because this modern US imperium so closely resembled the famed Indian Raj – way the British Empire ruled India.

As I predicted in this book, and in a column last April, Egypt was headed for a major explosion. America’s Mideast Raj is now on fire. Whether it survives or not remains to be seen.

One cannot escape a sense that we may be looking at a Mideast version of the 1989 uprisings across Eastern Europe that brought down its Communist regimes and then the Soviet Union. Americans should be uneasy seeing crowds of Egyptians pleading for freedom and justice watched over by US-supplied tanks.

There are indeed certainly strong similarities between the old Soviet East Bloc and the spreading intifada across the police states of America’s Mideast Raj. Corrupt, repressive governments; rapacious oligarchies; high youth unemployment and economic stagnation; widespread feelings of fear, frustration, hopelessness and fury.

But there is also a big difference. The principled Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Communist rulers of Eastern Europe, refused to turn their army’s guns against the rebelling people.

In Tunisia, where the current Arab uprising began, the army has so far stayed admirably neutral.

But in other Arab states now seething with rebellion – Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Jordan – there may be no such reservations. Their ruthless security forces and military could quickly crush the uprisings unless the soldiers refuse to shoot down their own people – as happened in Moscow in 1991.

As of this writing, Egypt’s 450,000-man US-equipped and financed armed forces are poised for action against that nation’s popular uprising, but its generals are undecided whether to shoot down their own people and earn universal hatred, overthrow President Mubarak’s regime, or openly seize power. Mubarak’s newly named vice president, Gen. Suleiman, controls the hated and feared secret police, or mukhabarat, but is unloved by the army.

Somewhere in the ranks of Egypt’s armed forces must be a group of officers like Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Young Officers who seized power in 1952 to end foreign control of Egypt. Nasser, adored by most Egyptians was the first authentic native-born leader in 2,000 years. Look for a resurgence of Nasserism.

Washington is watching this growing intifada in its Mideast Raj with alarm and confusion. Ignore the Obama administration’s hypocritical platitudes urging "democracy." All of the authoritarian Arab rulers now under siege by their people have been armed, financed and supported for decades by the US. The US has given Egypt $2 billion annually, $1.4 billion of which goes to the military. Almost all the tanks and armored vehicles deployed in Cairo’s streets came from the US.

Washington has previously lauded Mubarak for "moderation" and "stability." These are code words for faithfully following US policies and crushing all opposition. Moderate opposition groups across the Mideast have been jailed and tortured, leaving only outlawed underground movements. The same thing happened in Iran.

Egypt’s armed forces were configured to keep Mubarak’s military regime in power, not to defend the nation’s borders. The US keeps Egypt’s armed forces short on munitions and spare parts so it cannot fight a war against Israel for more than a few days.

The brutal, sadistic secret police and other security forces of Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen were all trained and equipped by the US or France. The CIA taught them "interrogation techniques," just as it did to the Shah of Iran’s secret police, Savak. We have reaped the whirlwind in bitter US-Iranian relations.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urges "restraint" on both sides. One supposes she means those being beaten by clubs, raped, or tortured by electric drills must show proper restraint. Washington simply does not understand that this kind of hypocrisy turns even more people in the Muslim world against the United States.

Egypt, as this column has long said, has long been a ticking bomb. Half of 85 million Egyptians subsist below the UN’s $2 daily poverty level. A third of all the Arab World’s people are Egyptian. A well-connected oligarchy grows rich while the rest of the country struggles for basic food.

In fact, the US Congress still supplies Egypt with large amounts of wheat and other foodstuffs. Israel thus holds a whip hand over Egypt by being able to get its supporters in Congress to shut off food aid to Egypt, an act that would provoke massive food riots as occurred in the 1970’s. Small wonder Husni Mubarak is Israel’s closet ally in the Arab world.

Mubarak has ruled Egypt with an iron fist since the assassination of another US-installed leader, Anwar Sadat, in 1981. All violent and peaceful opposition to Mubarak’s regime has been crushed. But now Mubarak’s time is running out. Nobel-Prize Laureate Mohammed al-Baradei has agreed to lead a resistance coalition that includes the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organized movement in Egypt.

The Brotherhood is not an Iranian-style extreme Islamic movement, contrary to alarms being spread by neocons and the often poorly-informed US media.

In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood has long eschewed politics to concentrate on social, religious and educational issues. If anything, it has been ultra-conservative, even stodgy and timid. But it also represents the Washington’s best potential ally if Egypt’s military regime falls. We should not be misled by self-serving warnings about Islamic bogeymen.

So far, none of the intifadas across the Arab world have produced effective leadership. But this could soon change. The most important North African Islamic movement leader and theorist, Rashid Gannouchi, just returned from exile to Tunisia, where the intifada began.

Further inflaming Arab opinion, the bombshell "Palestinian Papers" leaked to al-Jazeera has exposed Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority as an eager collaborator with Israel and its West Bank occupation. The endless Israeli-Palestinian "peace talks" are shown to be a fraud. Israel’s Mossad and its Palestinian Quislings have worked closely to destroy the militant but democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.

We also learn from these papers that in 2008, US State Secretary Condoleezza Rice actually proposed shipping millions of Palestinian refugees to Latin America. This after Israel, financed by the US, imported one million Russian settlers, many of them not even Jewish. One is reminded of British proposals in the 1930’s to move Germany’s endangered Jews to Kenya.

The Mideast uprisings are poorly understood by most North Americans. The US media frame news of the regional intifada in terms of the faux war on terror, and a false choice between dictatorial "stability" and Islamic political extremism. Much of what’s happening is seen through Israel’s eyes, and is distorted. Burning Cairo should show how misguided we have been in our understanding of the Arab world.

Platitudes aside, there is little concern in the US about bringing real democracy and modern society in the Arab world. Washington still wants obedience, not pluralism, in its Mideast Raj, and primacy for Israel in the Levant. As with the British Empire, democracy at home is fine – but it’s not right for the nations of the Arab world.

January 31, 2011

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.

Egypt After Mubarak

Stephen Glain

April 27, 2009   |    This article appeared in the May 11, 2009 edition of The Nation.

Cairo is burning--in installments. It is a distinctively Egyptian joke, resonant as it is with politics, history and resignation. Last year, several of the city's landmark buildings burned under mysterious circumstances. In August, the top floor of the Parliament's Shura Council went up in flames as firemen, apparently short of adequate water supplies, looked on. A month later, the National Theatre was gutted. In November, thugs attacked the offices of the opposition El Ghad party with blowtorches while party members huddled inside and riot police stood by.

Cairo's immolation, the quip suggests, is a parody of the January 1952 blaze that consumed much of the city's commercial district and sparked a revolution. It is a tribute to the past and a morsel of wry humor from a people laid low by President Hosni Mubarak and his sclerotic, oppressive regime. As the country prepares for national elections in 2011, which Mubarak may or may not contest, the suspicious combustions have yet to kindle a popular uprising. But dissatisfaction with his rule and the prospect of a dynastic succession in a country that long ago overthrew a monarchy could make for a messy transfer of power in the Arab world's political epicenter.

The 80-year-old Mubarak has long depended on Egyptians' passivity--not to mention the implicit green light from Washington to persecute and incarcerate with impunity and the billions of dollars in annual subsidies guaranteed by the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. But the former air force chief, who came to power after Anwar Sadat's assassination in 1981, is stretching the limits of his nation's good humor. His estrangement from the citizenry widened with his declaration of war on Hamas during Israel's winter assault on Gaza, and his circle of advisers, like a noose, has drawn tighter.

Mubarak has not announced if he intends to stand for another six-year term in elections scheduled for 2011. He may abdicate to an army general or the head of state security, or transfer power to his son, Gamal. One of the only public references Mubarak has made to the prospect of transition was in 2007, when he assured his former military colleagues that he would die in office.

Political observers are about evenly divided over whether a military man or Gamal will succeed Mubarak. Ibrahim Issa, the outspoken editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al Dustour, leans toward the brass. "There will be a struggle between the generals, the businessmen and the bureaucrats," he says. "The businessmen are hated, and the bureaucracy can't bear the idea of chaos, so the army will win. And why shouldn't they? They rule the country anyway."

Issa is a portly man with black horn-rimmed glasses, a droopy black moustache and kinetic eyebrows. His office walls are covered with life-size portraits of fellow revolutionaries Che Guevara and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and he is possessed of an authentically rapier Egyptian wit.

"Hosni Mubarak would never give up power," he told me. "He'll rule until he drops dead, and then Gamal Mubarak will be Egypt's Prince Charles." What about Washington? "The Americans bought Mubarak twenty-eight years ago because they believed he could maintain peace," said Issa. "But this was the tragedy of the Shah of Iran, when Washington supported him over Mossadegh. The Americans always trade despots for stability, and they get 'extremists' instead."

For Israel and the United States, that means the Muslim Brotherhood, the Cairo-based global Islamist movement. Ikhwan in Arabic, it is by far the best organized and most popular political group in Egypt. Though banned by law--its members campaign and serve as independents--it controls the largest opposition bloc in Parliament. The Brotherhood poses the greatest potential threat to Mubarak's rule, yet it is also his guarantor of survival.

In 2005, in response to President George Bush's campaign for a democratic Middle East, Egyptians were allowed a shaft of political daylight when free elections were held. It was not secular parties that posted the biggest gains in the December polling but, rather, the Ikhwan, which won a quarter of the seats in Parliament. Its triumph was followed two months later by Hamas's election victory in Palestine. With that, Bush's romance with representative government in the Arab world ended. Emboldened, Mubarak administered a pasting of the Ikhwan in fidelity with a tradition of anti-Brotherhood crackdowns that date back to the days of King Farouk. Since then, hundreds of Ikhwan members have been arrested and, it is widely presumed, tortured.

Mubarak cannot afford to neutralize the Ikhwan entirely, however. Islamism is the trump card he plays whenever foreigners call for a democratic Egypt and complain about the country's appalling human rights record. His message is clear: free and fair elections would install a fanatical Islamist government that would shred the country's peace treaty with Israel and, in league with Syria and Iran, open a third front against the Jewish state.

For Mubarak, Ikhwan-baiting is as lucrative as it is cynical. While dissident members have broken off to form radical cells--including Al Qaeda--there is no credible evidence linking the group to terrorist activity over the last half century. "I am convinced they are democratic and nonviolent, and I criticize those who have doubts," says Diaa Rashwan, a terrorist expert at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

In addition, estimates of the Ikhwan's electoral prospects have been revised downward since the 2005 ballot and the government's draconian response. (Ikhwan leaders didn't help themselves by issuing an edict last year that would restrict women and Christians from running for president.) Even the group's senior members say it would be self-destructive to mount a presidential bid in isolation of other parties should Mubarak ever loosen his monopoly on power.

"We want a coalition," says Abdel Monem Abou El-Fotouh, an Ikhwan leader and head of Egypt's medical union. "If there was a free and fair election, we might get 70 percent of the vote. But as democracy goes on and Egypt gets an independent judiciary, freedom of expression, freedom for women and so forth, that ratio would not be sustainable or desirable. In a free society, we need independent groups to become participants in power."

The US Congress is having none of this, of course. Last fall a prominent Egyptian dissident met with politicians and policy-makers in Washington and appealed to them to support a democratic Egypt. He spent a week in New York and Washington, and he was struck by the American obsession with, and ignorance of, the Ikhwan.

"It was all they wanted to talk about," said the dissident, who asked that I not quote him. "Many of them were sure that this was a terrorist organization that would start a war with Israel were it not for Hosni Mubarak. They would not accept that the Ikhwan is a moderate organization and that we should work with them."

The man who would be pharaoh, 45-year-old Gamal Mubarak, has been at the vortex of Egyptian politics since 2002, when his father placed him at the head of the Policy Committee of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Over the next two years, Gamal refreshed a political establishment of hacks and hangers-on, with free-market enthusiasts lavishly praised by the World Bank. The Egyptian economy is one of the strongest performers among developing nations, yet the dividends have yet to reach the country's evaporating middle class. The gap between the top and bottom wage earners, meanwhile, has expanded ominously.

But Gamal Mubarak, who worked as an investment banker in London before returning to Cairo in 2000, is burdened not so much by high-level graft or income disparity--both drearily common in Egypt--as by a lack of depth. "He's lived all his life in the royal court and at the republican palace," says Osama Harb, a political commentator and former Gamal ally. "He has no meetings with working people, no sense of real life. Yet he believes he has a right to succeed his father."

In 2005, President Mubarak amended Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution to allow multiple candidates to vie for the presidency, a move that many analysts interpreted as a prelude to a bid by Gamal amid a field of strong contenders from the NDP-controlled People's Assembly. In this way, say critics, the Mubaraks could have their dynastic succession packaged as a democratic process.

Such a maneuver would still require sanction from the military, however. It is important to remember that in Egypt, perhaps more than anywhere else in the Arab world, politics is very much an ad hoc affair. In Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, new leaders are bred through the monarchy. In Syria, it's done through the Alawis. Egypt has no system for renewal; it has a host of competing constituencies (Arabs, Africans, Islamists, Copts, secularists, the lower coastal dwellers and the upper inlanders) but no institution to emulsify them. Gamal is a political orphan who lacks the influence and authenticity that could sustain a dynastic transfer of authority. So it will likely be the military, not Gamal Mubarak, that fills the void.

In 2007, with Gamal entrenched as the NDP's power center, the president felt obliged to sit down with army leaders and reassure them that he would remain in power indefinitely. For good measure, the meeting was reported in the state-owned Al Ahram newspaper. Without an understanding between President Mubarak and the military regarding the transition, analysts warn, Gamal could be dangerously exposed should his father die before naming a successor. Some suggest an interim junta might be formed. Or Gamal may become a titular prime minister with a military cabal calling the shots and Omar Suleiman, the head of state security, as chamberlain.

It is pleasant to believe the sheer weight of Egypt's cultural and political centrality will, like ballast in the hull of a ship, right the country through an uncertain transition. But Egyptians, a people of irrepressible good humor, are these days known for somber refrains.

"We need a genuine constitution," Harb, the political commentator, told me. "We need a multiparty political system, a free press, a free society. We need real NGOs that are not intimidated by the government, and we need to abolish the security state. Only then can Egypt be reborn." Otherwise, said Harb, "there will be general chaos. The army will be in the streets."

Live From the Egyptian Revolution

Saturday, January 29, Cairo, Egypt—I grew up in Egypt. I spent half my life here. But Saturday, when my plane from JFK airport touched down in Cairo, I arrived in a different country than the one I had known all my life. This is not Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt anymore and, regardless of what happens, it will never be again.

In Tahrir Square, thousands of Egyptians–men and women, young and old, rich and poor–gathered today to celebrate their victory over the regime’s hated police and state security forces and to call on Mubarak to step down and leave once and for all. They talked about the massive protest on Friday, the culmination of three days of demonstrations that began on January 25th to mark National Police Day. It was an act of popular revolt the likes of which many Egyptians never thought they would see during Mubarak’s reign. "The regime has been convincing us very well that we cannot do it, but Tunisians gave us an idea and it took us only three days and we did it," said Ahmad El Esseily, a 35 year-old author and TV/radio talk show host who took park in the demonstrations. "We are a lot of people and we are strong."

In Cairo, tens of thousands of people--from all walks of life--faced off against riot police armed with shields, batons, and seemingly endless supplies of tear gas. People talked about Friday’s protest like a war; a war they’d won. "Despite the tear gas and the beatings, we just kept coming, wave after wave of us," one protester said. "When some of us would tire, others would head in. We gave each other courage." After several hours, the police were forced into a full retreat. Then, as the army was sent in, they disappeared.

The military was greeted warmly on the streets of Cairo. Crowds roared with approval as one soldier was carried through Tahrir Square today holding a flower in his hand. Dozens of people clambered onto tanks as they rode around the square. Throughout the day people chanted: "The people, the army: one hand."

While the police and state security forces are notorious in Egypt for torture, corruption and brutality, the army has not interacted with the civilian population for more than 30 years and is only proudly remembered for having delivered a victory in the 1973 war with Israel.

A 4pm curfew set for today was casually ignored with people convinced the army would not harm them. The police were a different story. Their brutality the past few days--decades in fact--has been well documented.

Saturday, some of the police forces were holed up inside their headquarters in the Interior Ministry building near the end of a street connected to Tahrir Square. When protesters neared the building, the police began firing live ammunition at the crowd, forcing them to flee back to the square. Three bloodied people were carried out. "The police are killing us," one man yelled desperately while on the phone with al Jazeera from outside the building. When the firing stopped, defiant protesters began approaching the building again. In the background, the smoking, blackened shell of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters served as an ominous reminder of their intentions.

At this point it seems clear the people are not leaving the streets. They own them now and they are refusing to go until Mubarak does. They chanted, "Mubarak, the plane is waiting for you at the airport," and "Wake up Mubarak, today is your last day."

At one point, a rumor spread through Tahrir Square that Mubarak had fled the country. A massive cheer rippled through the crowd. People began jumping up and down in joy. One man wept uncontrollably. When it turned out not to be true, the cheers quickly ended but it provided a brief glimpse of the sheer raw desire for Mubarak’s ouster. Reports now indicate that Mubarak’s two sons and his wife, Suzanne, have fled Egypt, as have some of his closest business cronies. Many people believe that is a sign that Hosni will not be far behind.

There is a great sense of pride that this is a leaderless movement organized by the people. A genuine popular revolt. It was not organized by opposition movements, though they have now joined the protesters in Tahrir. The Muslim Brotherhood was out in full force today. At one point they began chanting "Allah Akbar" only to be drowned out by much louder chants of "Muslim, Christian, we are all Egyptian."

As the sun set over Cairo, silence fell upon Tahrir Square as thousands stopped to pray in the street while others stood atop tanks. After the sunset prayer, they held a 'ganaza'–a prayer for those killed in the demonstrations. Darkness fell and the protesters, thousands of them, have vowed to stay in the square, sleeping out in the open, until Mubarak is ousted.

Meanwhile, across Cairo there is not a policeman in sight and there are reports of looting and violence. People worry that Mubarak is intentionally trying to create chaos to somehow convince people that he is needed. The strategy is failing. Residents have taken matters into their own hands, helping to direct traffic and forming armed neighborhood watches, complete with checkpoints and shift changes, in districts across the city.

This is the Egypt I arrived in today. Fearless and determined. It cannot go back to what it was. It will never be the same.

Sharif Kouddous

January 29, 2011  

A lot of Americans can't even find their own country on a map. So I'm not surprised Fox News has no idea about Egypt!

Brent Martin

Posted 1 day ago

via Echofon

Fox News you suck. Go back to elementary school, do not pass GO and take a geography class.  YOU FAILED.

The Two Abortion Wars: A Highly Intrusive Federal Bill

January 29, 2011

House Republicans are preparing to push through restrictions on federal financing of abortions far more extreme than previously proposed at the federal level. Lawmakers who otherwise rail against big government have made it one of their highest priorities to take the decision about a legal medical procedure out of the hands of individuals and turn it over to the government.

Their primary bill —the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” — is so broad that it could block insurance coverage for abortions for countless American women.

The anti-abortion forces almost derailed health care reform last year over whether people could buy policies that cover abortion on new insurance exchanges. The compromise embedded in the reform law sets up a hugely complicated plan to segregate an individual’s premium payments from the government subsidies. It is so burdensome that it seems likely to discourage insurers from offering any abortion coverage at all on the exchanges.

But anti-abortion lawmakers are not satisfied. The new bill, introduced by Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, would bar outright the use of federal subsidies to buy any insurance that covers abortion well beyond the new exchanges.

The tax credits that are encouraging small businesses to provide insurance for their workers could not be used to buy policies that cover abortions. People with their own policies who have enough expenses to claim an income tax deduction could not deduct either the premiums for policies that cover abortion or the cost of an abortion. People who use tax-preferred savings accounts to pay medical costs could not use the money to pay for an abortion without paying taxes on it.

The only tax subsidy left untouched is the exclusion that allows workers whose premiums are subsidized by their employers to avoid paying taxes on the value of the subsidy. Many, if not most, employer-sponsored insurance plans cover abortions. There would have been a huge political battle if workers were suddenly told they had to pay taxes on the benefit or change their policies.

The Smith bill also would take certain restrictions on federal financing for abortions that now must be renewed every year and make them permanent. It would allow federal financing of abortions in cases of “forcible” rape but not statutory or coerced rape, and in cases where a woman is in danger of death from her pregnancy but not of other serious health damage. It would free states from having to provide abortions in such emergency cases.

A separate Republican bill would deny federal funds for family planning services to any organization that provides abortions. It is aimed primarily at Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of health centers, which also provide many other valuable services. No federal money is used for the abortions. This is a reckless effort to cripple an irreplaceable organization out of pure politics.

January 29, 2011

The Two Abortion Wars: State Battles Over Roe v. Wade

Away from Washington, another ominous anti-abortion battle is accelerating in the states. Anti-abortion forces have been trying to take advantage of the 2007 ruling in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on a particular method of abortion.

In 2010, more than 600 measures were introduced in state legislatures to limit access to abortion and some 34 secured passage, according to tallies by Naral Pro-Choice America and the Center for Reproductive Rights. November’s elections made the outlook even bleaker.

Twenty-nine governors are considered solidly anti-abortion, up from 21 before the election. In 15 states, both the legislature and the governor are anti-abortion, compared with 10 last year. This math greatly increases the prospect of extreme efforts to undermine abortion access with Big Brother measures that require physicians to read scripts about fetal development and provide ultrasound images, and that impose mandatory waiting periods or create other unnecessary regulations.

Such restrictions, combined with a persistent atmosphere of intimidation and violence, have taken a grievous toll on the fundamental right protected by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make her own child-bearing decisions. Eighty-seven percent of counties have no abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

For the moment, most state legislatures are preoccupied with budget crises, so the next abortion battles are still taking shape. However, there are at least two areas where anti-abortion forces will be active in 2011.

The first is the fight over health insurance. The second is the expanding effort to ban later abortions.

Reigning Supreme Court precedent restricts the government’s ability to bar abortions prior to the point considered to be the earliest a fetus could survive outside the womb, around 22 to 26 weeks after conception.

Nebraska enacted a law last year directly challenging the viability standard. The statute, which went into effect in October, bans abortions 20 weeks after conception. It includes a very narrow exception for a woman’s life and physical health, and lacks any exception for the discovery of severe fetal anomalies. Copycat laws are now pending in other states.

About 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, but that does not excuse some states’ efforts to require women to continue pregnancies after a tragic fetal diagnosis or pregnancies that result from rape or incest. The objective is to provide the Supreme Court’s conservative majority with a new vehicle for further tampering with Roe v. Wade’s insight that the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy is best left to women and their doctors pre-viability.

Americans who support women’s reproductive rights and oppose this kind of outrageous government intrusion need to respond with rising force and clarity to this real and immediate danger.