Painful Truths

Egypt's dishourable cowards

Back in February this year, just one day before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, when many Egyptians were labouring under the illusion that the army was their friend and protector, I said on this blog:

Please, let us all shed our illusions. The Egyptian army is the enemy of the Egyptian people. Some might say this can't be so because the army consists of conscripts, i.e. is made up of the people. That is true, but make no mistake: these conscripts will not hesitate to massacre their own people.

Let us have faith in ourselves. To hell with the army, the police and all the other tools of repression. If the army consisted of real men, then let these men go and fight the real enemy, the enemy whose permission they have to get in order to tread on their own soil in Sinai. Let them go and fight and not surrender in their tens of thousands, as we've seen in 1967 and 1973.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and if there's a silver lining to the mayhem that is now unfolding in Egypt it is that the Egyptian people must by now be shedding all the illusions they have had about their armed forces.

The photograph and video below speak for themselves. The thugs of the Egyptian army – the cowards who dishohoured Egypt not just in 1967 and 1973, but also in 1948 and 1956 – can be seen beating a defenceless, female protester for daring to exercise her inalienable right to protest against the oppression, deception, corruption and privilege of the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).

Predicatably, the SCAF's defenders argue that the incident, which was witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people, never happened and that the image of the woman being beaten had been manipulated. Presumably, they would say the same about the video below, which shows the same woman and a companion being chased then beaten by the brave soldiers.

 

Egypt's armed forces are interested only in protecting their considerable privileges and in enriching themselves. Despite the billions of dollars in US handouts on which they survive and for which they would sell their own mothers, the Egyptian armed forces are not a fighting force in any real, professional sense of the word. Incompetent and incapable of securing a street, let alone fighting another army, they are just one or two levels up on the defunct Gaddafi's thugs. 

Back in 1978 the elite of Egypt's army, Unit 777, was deployed in Malta to free an Egyptian aircraft that had been hijacked. Deluded into thinking that they could imitate the Israeli raid on Entebbe two years earlier, they succeeded only in killing 57 of the 88 hostages, who were reportedly mistaken for the hijackers. 

Thirty-four years have passed since then but, by all accounts, nothing has changed. Egypt's army today is made up of dehumanized, poorly trained, badly educated, semi-literate peasants who are led by corrupt dinasaurs and their cronies, a hierarchy of mediocrities who know little about military strategy and tactics and care less and whose paramount purpose is to preserve their power and privilges.

The revolution that began on 25 January 2011 has only just begun and will not be complete until the dishonourable, incompetent and corrupt traitors in the Egyptian army are purged and brought to account for betraying the people and the country they are supposed to defend.

Is Islam the solution?

How long will it take until the Islamists that are now reaping the rewards of the Arab uprisings which they initially shunned – the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – are exposed for what they are: backward, mentally retarded charlatans, hypocrites and misogynists?

Writing in the Arabist blog, (“Egypt’s Islamists and tourism”) the writer and analyst Issandr El Amrani says:

We are now at a point when the comfortable role of opposition no longer holds for Islamists; it's time to be serious about one's positions and their consequences.

A few years ago, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in [the Egyptian] parliament opposed a law that would tighten the ban on female genital mutilation (a practice that has absolutely no basis in Islam; it's largely a Nile Valley thing) and also opposed a law banning child beatings. If they are just traditionalists, let them say that. But if they want to invoke religion, they better make their case with full theological and scriptural backing.

Unfortunately, female genital mutilations and child beatings are not the Islamists’ only warts.

According to El Amrani, it would seem that the Islamists also believe that it is possible for tourism in Egypt to flourish without alcohol, with segregated beaches and with the manipulation of Pharaonic statues, such as those depicting fertility gods, to conceal nudity.

He quotes a veiled Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Azza al-Jarf, who told a cheering crowd of supporters at a campaign event dubbed "Let's encourage tourism" on 11 December: “Tourists don't need to drink alcohol when they come to Egypt; they have plenty at home… They come to see the ancient civilization, not to drink alcohol." The crowd chanted: "Tourism will be at its best under Freedom and Justice," the Brotherhood's party and the most influential political group to emerge after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

In addition, prominent Salafi clerics, such as Yasser Bourhami, are advocating restrictions on tourism, the source of livelihood for millions of Egyptians. In an interview with the private Egyptian channel Dream TV, Bourhami described one of his grand ideas for boosting the tourism industry: "A five-star hotel with no alcohol, a beach for women –  sisters –  separated from men in a bay where the two sides can enjoy a holiday for a week without sins."

Another Islamist genius, Tarek Shalaan, who is a prominent member of the Salafi Al-Nur Party, “stumbled through a recent TV interview when asked about his views on the display of nude Pharaonic statues like those depicting fertility gods”, accordng to El Amrani. "The antiquities that we have will be put under a different light to focus on historical events," Shalaan said.

And there’s more.

However, now that they’re “in power”, at least in Tunisia and Egypt, it’s time to question some of the Islamists’ main planks.

One example is the slogan of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, ‑ “Islam is the solution”.  How, exactly will Islam solve Egypt’s economic problems – its grinding poverty and over population? What’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s answer to this, beyond abolishing usury, i.e. introducing “Islamic banking”, which will do absolutely nothing to address the country’s pressing needs?

The answer, alas, is nothing. The Islamists have no economic or foreign or any other policy beyond getting to power and putting women, minorities and others who are not exactly like them in their place. And if you ask yourself how a major party and its variants throughout the Arab world can survive without a policy, the answer is very simple. The answer is common knowledge among Islamists but they are somewhat reluctant to articulate it in public among non-members, for fear of being ridiculed. The Islamists’ answer to all of society’s problems, from unemployment, overpopulation and poor public services to ritual humiliations at the hands of Israel and its ilk, is simply this: if you please God he will solve all your problems. That’s it! You need do nothing further than indulge in activities which, in the Islamists’ eyes, will please God. And he will do the rest. Now you can see why they are shy of articulating this absurd view to the world at large and are comfortable in sharing it only among themselves.

But the big black cloud hovering over all Islamists remains the well-grounded suspicion that they remain anti-democrats and would, when the time is ripe, abolish democracy and institute a theocracy. In my opinion, the suspicion that, in essence, all Islamist parties believe in “One man, one vote, one time” is as true today as it ever was.

According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misri Al-Yawm, only a few days ago a member of Al-Nur Party’s Supreme Committee, Shaaban Darwish, told a party rally in Giza that democracy is heresy because it contradicts the principle of allegiance that was used after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, whereby people choose their caliph once and then remain loyal to him.

One must therefore beware of the Islamists’ pro-democracy "propaganda". As Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya TV, says ("The Islamists: between propaganda and the truth"):

Since the ouster of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, many people … claim that the image of the Islamists has been distorted by the Arabs and the West to prevent them from political participation. Following the revolutions, the Islamist party leaders rushed to improve their image in the eyes of the West, issuing statements stressing that they would not prohibit bikinis from their countries' beaches, or outlaw alcohol, and that they would accept a woman or Christian as leader.

Of course, these speeches are nothing more than public relations, and something that can only be believed by someone ignorant of the region or the logic of religious parties. If the claim of freedom of religion is true, it expresses the opinion of only a few [religious party] leaders, as the majority of leaders and members of such groups consider "purifying" society to be their first duty, and it would not be long before they turned against those political leaders urging tolerance.

Arab society is going through difficult developments that may lead to more dictatorships under the name of democracy, such as what happened in Iran. Therefore, we cannot settle for reading their intentions and believing their propaganda. If these societies … truly want a democratic approach and want to grant an opportunity for all political forces  ‑ including the Islamist and Arab nationalist forces ‑ to participate, they must build a state that is based on a constitution that protects rights, and an army that understands that its duty is not to rule, but to protect democratic institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament, and prevent the democratic system from being overthrown….

In other words, the solution to our countries’ problems is to build democratic, law-governed states that treat all of their citizens as equals, irrespective of gender, colour, ethnicity, faith or no faith.

The solution is not Islam.

Islam and modernity

The Afghan scholar Nushin Arbabzadah has written an excellent article on the adaptability of Islam to modern times ("Can traditional Islam adapt to the needs of western Muslims?").

In it she relates how the sermon given at her father's funeral in the German city of Hamburg was both incomprehensible and irrelevant.

I waited for the mercy and compassion that Muslims referred to every time they said "bismillah"...

Soon I gave up on listening altogether. The imam might as well have spoken Korean, a language as unfamiliar to me as the Arabic in which the sermon was conducted. I wondered why was I not allowed to hear the words of God in my own language?... For the first time in my life, I really needed religion to give me solace, but here I was, listening to an unfamiliar language where the word "devil" kept popping up, alarming rather than comforting me.

When the language finally switched to Persian, I hoped to get something out of the Hadith [the Prophet Muhammad's sayings]. But to my alarm, even though the Hadith and the imam's interpretation of them were in my language, I failed to understand how they related to the life and death of my father. We were in Hamburg, in the north of Europe, but the imam told a story that took us to the Arab lands of the eighth century, where a group of believers were hiding inside a cave. It was a tale of violence, an attempted mass murder, from which the believers were saved after God miraculously created a spider's net, covering the cave's front and misleading the prospective killers.

Nushin describes only her own, sad experience in Hamburg. But the problem isn't just confined to Muslim clerics failing to make Islam relevant to the needs of the diasporic communities of the West, Arabic speaking or not.

The problem is far wider than that: all the mainstream expressions of Islam, regardless of language, are largely irrelevant to Muslims wherever they are, be it in the Arab world, Asia or the diaspora. I am an Arabic speaker but whenever I hear Muslims – clerics or otherwise – talking about religion I end up feeling exactly the way Nushin felt at her father's funeral. In fact, I begin to wonder whether I am in the seventh or the 21st century.

As individuals, we are free to be as backward or as progressive as we like, provided we do no harm to others. But as societies, we in the Muslim world have a big problem on our hands. In the Arab component of that world, large sections of our societies appear to be gripped by backwardness, yearning not to catch up with the 21st century after years of stagnation under incompetent and corrupt dictatorships but to go back to the seventh century, as is clear from the election results in Tunisia and Egypt, and from the utterances of public figures in Libya.

There is no easy or quick answer to this problem. My feeling is that our societies must first taste the full experience of Islamist backwardness – the "Full Monty" of retards as represented by the Salafis, the Wahhabis and the Muslim Brotherhood – before turning against it and having their critical faculties collectively jump-started. Hopefully, people will then begin to look to more modern and forward-looking interpretations of Islam, ones that respect people as human beings and their right to say what they want to say, believe in what they want to believe and wear what they want to wear.

This will take time, perhaps as long as we have endured the dictatorships of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali.

 

Gaddafi’s pimps still peddling his lies

Libya’s tyrant Muammar Gaddafi is dead and buried but his pimps around the world don’t seem to have got the message yet. Perhaps, like some of Elvis Prestly’s fans, they believe that he’s immortal and is lurking among us, maybe in a disused sewer somewhere.

Be that as it may, it’s worth looking at some of the lies being peddled by these pimps, if only for a laugh – and to have some pity on these individuals. It’s bad enough being a pimp, but a pimp with limited intellect, chronic cognitive dissonance and perhaps also some literacy problems is a creature truly worthy of our pity.

Here’s a selection of the Gaddafi lies still working their way around the internet, with my replies beneath each lie. In contrast to Gaddafi's pimps, I have lived and worked in Libya for over 40 years, so I know what I am talking about .

Lie #1. There is no electricity bill in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.

This is a complete fabrication ‑ Libyans have always had to pay for utilities, including electricity.

Lie #2. There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at 0 per cent interest by law.

This is another fiction – Libyans have always paid interest on all loans. This includes students sent to study abroad – their “grants” are deducted from their salaries after they return home. In addition, under Gaddafi many Libyan have had to borrow money from banks, relatives and friends in order to seek medical treatment abroad, typically in Tunisia, Jordan or Egypt. And this in an oil-rich country with a small population of just six million (including at least two million foreign workers).

Lie #3. Home considered a human right in Libya – Gaddafi vowed that his parents would not get a house until everyone in Libya had a home. Gaddafi’s father has died while he , his wife and his mother are still living in a tent.

This is complete nonsense. It’s true that after Gaddafi’s coup in 1969 most of the corrugated iron shacks that dotted suburban areas in Libya disappeared, but that’s hardly a great achievement in a country whose population in 1969 was just 1.5 million and whose oil revenue grew at least tenfold during Gaddafi’s reign. In fact, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that this would have happened anyway, Gaddafi or no Gaddafi, given the phenomenal growth of income from oil. And that's not to mention the palaces Gaddafi built for himself in every city – all paid for with the Libyan people's money.

Lie #4. All newlyweds in Libya receive 60,000 Libyan dinar (50,000 US dollars) from the government to buy their first apartment and help start up a family.

This is a complete fabrication. It never happened either before or during Gaddafi’s reign. In fact, a huge number of people in Libya are unable to marry because they cannot afford to rent, buy or build a home.

Lie #5. Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Before Gaddafi only 25 per cent of Libyans were literate. Today the figure is 83 per cent .

Education and medical treatment have always been free, under the monarchy and during Gaddafi’s reign. However, under Gaddafi, and especially from the late 1970s onwards, if you were unlucky enough to go to a state hospital you would have had to (a) bring your own bedding if you wanted to sleep in clean bedding; (b) get your family or friends to bring in food for you; and (c) put up with appalling standards of hygiene, including reused syringes. If you didn’t want any of this, then would have had to find the money to go to a private hospital.

Lie #6. Should Libyans want to take up farming career, they would receive farming land, a farming house, equipments, seeds and livestock to kick ‑ start their farms – all for free.

This is a blatant lie. It never happened at any time in Libya.

Lie #7. If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need in Libya, the government funds them to go abroad for it – not only free but they get US 2, 300 US dollars per month accommodation and car allowance.

Utter nonsense. See my answer to Lie # 2 above - under Gaddafi many Libyan have had to borrow money from banks, relatives and friends in order to seek medical treatment abroad, typically in Tunisia, Jordan or Egypt. This is in a oil-rich country with a small population of just six million (including at least two million foreign workers).

Lie #8. In Libya, if a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50 per cent of the price.

Complete nonsense. In fact, you’d be lucky to find a car to buy. Gaddafi seized all car dealerships in the late 1970s and, from then onwards, only the state very occasionally imported motor cars and sold them to the public at exorbitant prices. And that’s not all. To get to buy a car at all, you also had to pay a large bribe to one of the officials in charge of selling the state-imported vehicles. And, if you wanted to import a car privately – whatever its make and whether brand new or used – you had to pay 100-per-cent import duties (plus a bribe to get the port authorities to release the car even after you paid the import duties).

Lie #9. The price of petrol in Libya is 0. 14 US dollars per litre.

As with all oil producing countries, the price of petrol was lower than in Europe or Japan. But it certainly was not 0.14 US dollars per litre. It was equivalent to the price of petrol in the USA.

Lie #10. Libya has no external debt and its reserves amount to 150 billion US dollars – now frozen globally.

That’s true, but why should a country of vast oil revenues, six million people and almost no public expenditure have a foreign debt? In Gaddafi’s 42-year tyranny hardly any new infrastructure was built and existing infrastructure, such as roads, hospitals and schools, hardly received any investment at all. It’s also worth noting that, despite several contracts with Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese railway companies costing approximately 40 billion dollars, Libya has no railway at all. As for the reserves of 150 billion US dollars, that too is hardly surprising given the vast oil wealth and almost zero public investments. Almost all of these reserves were managed by Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, who spent the money in corrupt private dealings. The defunct dictator’s other son, Mutasim, also dipped into the country’s reserves, spending by his own admission  two million dollars per month on gifts and parties for his girlfriends.

Lie #11. If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary of the profession as if he or she is employed until employment is found.

This is a complete lie. It is estimated that at least one-third of Libyan graduates are unemployed – none received anything from the state. And Libya has no social security, so these people, like all other unemployed citizens, had to rely on family and friends for support.

Lie #12. A portion of Libyan oil sale is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.

Rubbish! It’s simply not true.

Lie #13. A mother who gave birth to a child receive 5,000 US dollars.

Another figment of the imagination of Gaddafi’s pimps. It never happened. Ever!

Lie #14. Forty loaves of bread in Libya costs 0.15 dollars.

Bread has always been cheap – even in impoverished countries like Egypt. But the price of one (repeat, one, not 40) loaf of bread in Libya in December 2010 (i.e. before the people’s revolution) was about 0.20 US dollars.

Lie #15. Twenty five per cent of Libyans have a university degree.

More or less true – and 30 per cent of them are unemployed!

Lie #16. Gaddafi carried out the world’s largest irrigation project, known as the Great Man-Made River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.

That’s true. This is a prestige project that cost three times as much as originally estimated. It would have been much cheaper to develop desalinated water plants. And what happened when the “Great Man-Made River” was completed? They connected it to the country’s ageing water pipes which blew up all at the same time because of the huge increase in pressure, leaving millions in Benghazi, Tripoli and elsewhere without freshwater for months. And why weren’t the pipes renewed before connecting them to the “Great Man-Made River”? Well, money had been allocated to do this but the job was never done ‑ not one pipe was renewed! And why was that? Because Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and his brother Mutasim pocketed the money. All of it. Ten billion us dollars, in fact!

Lie #17. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Libya ranked first in Africa (53 globally) on the Human Development Index ‑ ahead of Saudi Arabia at 55, Iran at 70, South Africa at 73, Jordan at 82, Egypt at 101, Indonesia at 108, India at 119, Afghanistan at 155.

Go and tell that to the families of the hundreds buried alive in underground prisons in Libya, or to the loved ones of those locked up and left to die in shipping containers in ambient temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius. Or to the relatives of the 1,200 political murdered in three hours in Abu Salim prison in 1996. As for ranking 53 globally on the UN's Human Development Index, big deal! Only 53, in a country of immense wealth and only  six million people? Why not ranking first globally? This is an indictment of Gaddafi, his thieving family and his murderous regime. And ranking first in Africa – is that a great achievement, considering that the overwhelming majority of African countries are either super poor or ultra-corrupt?

Lie #18. According to the US Energy Information Administration, “Libya has the largest proven oil reserves in Africa”.

It is a measure of the intellectual calibre of Gaddafi’s pimps that they cite Libya’s oil reserves as an achievement of the defunct tyrant. Well, let me surprise them: the size of a country’s oil reserves is determined by natural phenomena spanning billions of years, not by human intervention.

Lie #19. On 21 February 2011, five days after the Arab Spring broke out in Libya, Gaddafi launched a new programme to privatize all Libyan oil to every citizen of Libya, initially providing 21,000 US dollars to every Libyan from a total of 32 billion dollars in the Year 2011, so that the health, education, transport and some other ministries could be abolished and individual Libyans could use the profits of their own investments, including from oil ownership, to obtain the relevant services. This, Gaddafi said, is the best way to eliminate corruption, including the theft of Libyan oil by foreign oil companies, and to decentralize governmental power.

I’ve heard this story from Gaddafi’s own mouth before ‑ in fact, once every three years or so, the last time being in early March this year, shortly after the people’s revolution began. It’s a cheap attempt to tempt people, but never materialized at any time following promises along the same lines from 1979 onwards. Besides, after 42 years of Gaddafi rule Libya is still 97 per cent reliant on oil revenue. So much for development! So, even if Gaddafi were serious, what will Libyans do with all that money. The answer is simple: with zero domestic output, it would mean a several-hundred-per-cent increase in imports. Libya already imports everything. As for the theft of Libyan oil by foreign oil companies, well, who gave these companies control of Libyan oil in the first place, and who pampered them and gave them and their staff preferential treatment over Libyan citizens? Every Libyan knows the answer to that question but let me spell it out for Gaddafi’s intellectually-challenged pimps: the answer is Gaddafi and his corrupt sons.

Lie #20. The Great Man-Made River Project, begun in 1984 by Gaddafi, has been called the Eighth Wonder of the World. It supplies fresh water to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. The US threatened to nuke this “chemical weapons factory”. Foreign companies covet the fresh water.

See my answer to Lie #16 above: This is a prestige project that cost three times as much as originally estimated. It would have been much cheaper to develop desalinated water plants. And what happened when the “Great Man-Made River” was completed? They connected it to the country’s ageing water pipes which blew up all at the same time because of the huge increase in pressure, leaving millions in Benghazi, Tripoli and elsewhere without freshwater for months. And why weren’t the pipes renewed before connecting them to the “Great Man-Made River”? Well, money had been allocated to do this but the job was never done ‑ not one pipe was renewed! And why was that? Because Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and his brother Mutasim pocketed the money. All of it. Ten billion us dollars, in fact! As for foreign companies coveting the “Great Man-Made River’s” freshwater, what exactly would foreign companies do with this water?

Lie #21. Muammar Gaddafi seized power in 1969 in a bloodless coup by overthrowing King Idris of Libya ‑ Idris achieved power with British backing in 1949.

If we're supposed to conclude from this that Gaddafi is a peace-loving man who only does things bloodlessly, then the defunct tyrant's pimps are stupid beyond our wildest imagination. Gaddafi's dismal, murderous human rights record in Libya is a matter of public record and is beyond doubt. Likewise, his murderous actions abroad are almost unparalleled. Just think of his sponsorship of drug-crazed limb amputators in Sierra Leone and Code d'Ivoire, his arming and funding of Charles Taylor's gangsters in Liberia and his decades-long bloody meddling in Chad and Sudan, to mention but a few. Also, staging a bloodless coup in Libya in 1969 can’t have been a very hard job. Gaddafi’s colleagues arrested the crown prince and three army officers and seized the radio and TV station – one building. That was it! And there’s a sting in the tail here too. One of Gaddafi’s coup colleagues – Muhammad al-Mogaryaf, who was murdered by Gaddafi in 1972 ‑ related that at the crucial hour when some of his colleagues went to arrest the army chief, Gaddafi panicked and hid for a full four hours. Mogaryaf paid for this revelation with his life. By the way, Libya’s population at that time of the coup was 1.5 million, in a country six times the size of the UK. It must have been really hard to stage a bloodless coup in such a tiny country with a super weak regime!

BBC smears Egyptians with "anti-Semitism" slur

I have just read one of the worst articles I’ve seen in many years. Entitled “How I became subject of anti-Semitic abuse in Cairo”, you might think it is written by some ignorant blogger in the back of beyond. But no, the writer is a supposedly educated, well travelled journalist working for Britain's state broadcaster, the BBC. It is the online version of a piece broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 and World Service radio programme “From Our Own Correspondent".

According to his Twitter profile, the author, Thomas Dinham, is a 22-year-old “freelance journalist and Middle East enthusiast". However, someone at the BBC appears to have taken a liking to him – he has broadcast at least three pieces on "From Our Own Correspondent", in addition to the piece referred to here.

In the article, Dinham sets out to "prove" that there is "anti-Semitism" in Egypt. To conceal his mission, he frames it in the context of a genuine problem in Middle Eastern societies, including Egypt: the popularity of conspiracy theories.

Thus, he starts by observing:

”Suspicion is a feature of everyday life in Egypt, and a fondness for conspiracy theories is as much a part of the landscape here as the constant traffic jams and their accompanying symphony of blaring car horns.”

He is of course right. Conspiracy theories, and the casual disregard of facts and hard evidence, are curses of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

But we are not alone. Many people in Russia, Eastern Europe and vast swathes of the Anglo-Saxon world, with which I am very familiar, also are guilty of widespread indulgence in conspiracy theories and in passing off as fact rumour, gossip and hearsay.

The difference between us – in this case, Egypt – and the rest of the world is that in the Arab world politics figure prominently in most conversations, whereas in Britain, for example, people are more fond of talking about soap operas, celebrities and their sex lives. And politics naturally lends itself to conspiracy theories, especially in societies with a relatively low level of literacy, where reliable information is sparse and where people feel they have little influence over decisions that affect their lives.

Having set up an ostensibly genuine context for his thesis – the problem of conspiracy theories – Dinham goes on to paint the worst possible picture of Egyptians, which he portrays as "anti-Semites". In so doing, he indulges in the kind of innuendo that he accuses Egyptians of. Here is a passage from his article:

”A group of old men slurping tea mixed with incredible quantities of sugar was studying me.

“Eventually one of the men struck up a conversation, revolving primarily around what exactly I was doing in Egypt at a time when most foreigners had left.

“My answers met with furrowed brows and clearly dissatisfied shakes of the head, when suddenly, raising his hand in front of his mouth in a conspiratorial gesture one man shot, "I bet he's from Israel" into the ear of his friend so quickly as to be barely discernable.

“I was shocked. In nearly six months of living in Syria, where orchestrated hysteria about Israel is integral to the very identity of the state, I had never heard the accusation surreptitiously levelled against me.

“Neither am I from Israel, nor am I Jewish, but as someone of unmistakably European appearance, I have found myself constantly associated with Israel in Egyptian eyes.”

First, let us deal with the question Dinham says he was asked: "what exactly I was doing in Egypt at a time when most foreigners had left"?

This is a perfectly reasonable question, I would have thought, especially in light of the fact that Egypt is brimming with foreign spies, mostly Israelis and Americans. And we all know that foreign intelligence agencies have a habit of masquerading their spies as journalists.

Second, Dinham says: "My answers met with furrowed brows and clearly dissatisfied shakes of the head, when suddenly, raising his hand in front of his mouth in a conspiratorial gesture, one man shot, 'I bet he's from Israel' into the ear of his friend so quickly as to be barely discernable."

Dinham's response, as he describes it, prompts me to ask myself whether his confused reasoning is due to the 22-year-old's lack of knowledge about Egypt and Egyptians' sense of humour, or to a possible prejudice that impels him to search for scraps of information that might substantiate his stereotype of Egyptians.

Dinham soon answers my question. He says:

”Israel is just one of a panoply of worries that exercise the conspiracy theorists that frequent Egypt's cafes...

“Nevertheless, a strong and sometimes violent dislike of Israel is a fact of Egyptian life, something I was unfortunate enough to discover after a cross-border raid by Israel killed several Egyptian security personnel.

“The Israelis had been chasing a group of gunmen who had attacked an Israeli bus close to the border between the two countries.

“While walking in the street someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over.

“Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan.

“Relieved that a seemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants. ‘Sorry,’ he said contritely, offering his hand, ‘we thought you were a Jew.’

“Shaking his head in disbelief on hearing the news, an Egyptian friend sympathised: ‘That's stupid, you are obviously not a Jew.’

“The chilling implication I was left with was that, had I been Jewish, the assault would have apparently been justified.”

Dinham's answer, and my chilling conclusion, is that he is both ignorant and prejudiced. He has taken the reference to Jews out of all context, for example, the fact that in the Arab world feelings against Israel run high because of its continuing occupation of Arab lands and its ongoing crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories; that in Egypt anti-Israel sentiment is particularly high right now following Israel's murder of five Egyptian policemen on Egyptian soil on 18 August and its refusal to apologise for this (as it refuses to apologise for its murder of nine Turkish humanitarian workers on the aid ship Mavi Marmara).

Dinham also omits to mention the fact that, because Israel claims to be the state of all Jews, irrespective of their nationality, Israelis and Zionists are often referred to in the Arab world simply as Jews. This is not a manifestation of “anti-Semitism”, as Dinham would have us believe, but a corollary of Israel's claim to be the representative of all Jews. (Britons and Americans sometimes refer to Hitler's Nazi Germans simply as Germans. Does that mean they are anti-German racists?)

It is sad that the BBC is once again offering us drivel. The reasons are many and varied: Zionists in key editorial positions in the corporation; pandering to the UK's Israel lobby, which can count on Director-General Mark Thompson as one of its foot soldiers; the desire to ingratiate itself with advertisers in the US market which it craves; and sheer ignorance and lack of a genuine desire to understand the Arab world and explain it to the British public.

The victims of all this, apart from us Arabs who have to put up with this kind of slur, are the British public. It is the British licence-fee payer, not American Zionist advertisers or the Israel lobby, who pays for the BBC's shabby, Judaeo-centric journalism.

This is a raw deal indeed for the ordinary British people – the cleaners, bus drivers, bricklayers, nurses, teachers and the numerous others whose living standards are fast sinking as I write – who are paying for the fat pigs in senior BBC management and the hacks who are endlessly force-feeding us their ignorance and prejudice.

And it's a far cry from the BBC's mission – "To enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain".

9-11 anniversary highlights poverty of BBC – and other British broadcasters

Today and yesterday, it has been wall-to-wall TV coverage of the tenth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. For  Britain's state broadcaster, the BBC, and its normally lighter-footed and better focused rivals, Independent Television News (ITN) and Sky News, it would seem that the world has stopped and there is nothing to report or talk about except the 9-11 anniversary.

And what about 9-11? Do these super money wasters have anything new to say? New insight or new angles, perhaps?

None whatseoever. All very predictable stuff hashed and rehashed, debated and redebated over, and over, and over again. It is a complete and utter poverty of the imagination and intelligence.

And why is this, you might ask?

One reason is the traditional British sycophancy towards the Americans. Any primarily American story has to be mangified many times over and treated as if it were a supremely important global story.

Another reason is commercial. The BBC, for example, is trying to make inroads into the American market with its commercial BBC World News channel and BBC.com website. It wants American audiences and American advertisers, whatever the cost to its credibility and to the quality of its programmes. It is aping American channels and will do whatever it takes to dumb down to a level where it will register with American audiences as one of their own and with American advertisers as a channel that is low enough to reach the deepest, darkest corners of the average American six-pack Joe's bowels.

This is what happens when you allow bean counters to take over a public broadcaster. In all of this, the BBC has forgotten that it would not exist had it not been for public funding – the TV licence fee. The poor people who are compelled to fund it and who are force-fed its 9-11 extravaganza nonsense deserve better than this. I hope that yestarday's and today's self-indulgences produce a public backlash that will teach BBC managers and editors a lesson they will never forget.

Finally, a word about 9-11 itself. Of all the hundreds of broadcast hours and the thousands of coloumn inches that have been devoted to the tenth anniversary, I have seen just three articles that are worth reading. Two of the articles are on Scott Lucas's Enduring America World View website – the titles speak for themselves:

"Reflecting on 9-11: why it was not a turning point for the world" and

"Reflecting on 9-11: what the War on Terror has cost the US – and us".

And the third is on Al-Jazeera's English-language website:

Let's forget 9-11

Gaddafi: "My Prerogative"

 

Africa's killer hero

"The Africans do not have problems of political asylum. People who live in the bush, and often in the desert, don't have political problems. They don't have oppositions or majorities or elections...

"These are things that only people who live in cities know. [Africans] don't even have an identity. And I don't mean a political identify; they don't even have a ­personal identity. They come out of the bush and they say: 'In the north, there's money, there's wealth' – and so they go to Libya, and from there to Europe."

via www.guardian.co.uk

You would be forgiven to think these are the words of American Ku Klux Klan leader Raymond Foster or British National Party chief Nick Griffin.

They are not.

These are in fact the words of none other than Libyan crime boss Muammar Gaddafi. So much for the creature that has been hailed by Africans and Africophiles – the idiots who romanticize about Africa and think Africans are quaint or cool – as hero of African causes and African independence.

The fact – known to all Libyans and to everyone who has lived in Libya – is that, when it comes to Africans and black people in general, Gaddafi is as racist as the Ku Klux Klan in the US or the English Defence League/British National Party.

He giveth with one hand and kills with the other. Gaddafi bribes African dictators while fomenting civil war and atrocities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Chad. He opened up Libya to visa-free travel for Africans but, when the number of Africans in the country got too large, he simply set about murdering them so as to frighten them into leaving the country. This is what he did in September 2001 when he incited his mobs –  the so-called "Revolutionary Committees" – to set fire to African quarters in western Libya, maiming and burning hundreds to death.

Yet, Africans and the Africophile idiots love him. As I write, a heavily armed convoy of Gaddafi thugs and mercenaries is reported to have travelled across the Libyan desert into Niger carrying stolen gold and cash. It is said that the convoy includes one of Gaddafi's security chiefs, Mansur Dhaw, and that Gaddafi himself might follow suit (if he is not actually in this particular convoy already, disguised as a Tuareg tribesman), where he might seek political asylum in Niger or Burkina Faso.

They say that birds of a feather flock together. I am sure Libya's infamous mass murderer will feel completely at home among the dictators, killers, rapists, thieves, fraudsters and crooks of the African Union, be they in Niger, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso or South Africa. Their day of reckoning cannot be far off.

As for post-Gaddafi Libya, it has no need for sub-Saharan Africa. Its relationships with black African states have always been distinctly one way: the Libyan people's money flowing into the pockets of African dictators and criminals, and on projects to bribe Africans, while the Libyan people are deprived of decent infrastructure, health, education and housing.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that Libya should save public money by leaving the African Union and cutting off diplomatic relations with all sub-Saharan African states.

But for now, let us say goodbye, black Africa. And good riddance. Hopefully forever.

 

 

Libya's old male whore Gaddafi insults women

"A defiant Muammar Gaddafi vowed to fight to the end against Libya's new government and its Nato backers, warning that his forces would turn the country 'into a hell' rather than surrender like 'women'."

via www.guardian.co.uk

Yet another unbearable barrage of garbage from that old male prostitute of North Africa, Muammar Gaddafi, chief of Libya's leading crime family.

Not only did the supposed champion of women's rights insult women by pledging not to "surrender like women", but once again he showed his contempt for Libya and its people by threatening to set the country ablaze rather than accept being out of power.

"If Libya goes up in flames, who will be able to govern it? Let it burn," he said, in a message carried by a Syrian-based Iraqi mercenary TV channel, "Al-Muqawama" or "The Resistance".

Video: Gaddafi's pimps boast about murdering unarmed civilians

Latest evidence of Gaddafi crimes: civilians murdered by his thugs in Qal'ah. The commentary in Arabic in the background refers to the murdered civilians as "rats".

I wonder if this instils Gaddafi's pimps, the fake "leftists" and "anti-imperialists, with a sense of pride?

The tedium of Gaddafi’s praise singers

It's getting rather tedious. Almost every day I stumble upon nonsense from people who try to frame the conflict in Libya as a war between the resources-greedy Western powers and that knight of liberation and freedom, Libyan mafia boss Mu'ammar Gaddafi and his thieving offspring.

Here's an example I received on 5 June from dayofrageindc@gmail.com. As an Arab who has lived and worked in Libya for many years, it seems to me that dayofrageindc@gmail.com probably has never been to Libya and does not have the faintest clue about Libya, Gaddafi or Africa. Here is what he or she says: 

This war is about the West using pawns, stooges and proxies to control African banking and resources. The Libyan rebels are assisting colonialists while betraying their countrymen and leading to the slaughter of their people. The rebels have betrayed all of Africa. Africa needs to unite and mobilize 100,000 soldiers from across Africa and expel NATO. NATO is treating Africans like savages and disregarding their leaders.

Dayofrageindc@gmail.com is either supremely ignorant or has a remarkably short memory. Let us not forget how the Libyan uprising began. It did not start as a war over "control of African banking", whatever that means, given that Africa is largely bankrupt and many African states live on Western handouts. Nor was it ever an attempt to grab African resources – Libya's oil under Gaddafi was well and truly under Western control anyway, so why would the West want to control something they already controlled? 

As I have reminded the myriad of Gaddafi praise singers on previous occasions, the Libyan uprising began in mid-February as a series of peaceful protests by ordinary people demanding their civil and political rights. They were met with lethal violence by the regime, which used heavy weapons, helicopters as well as hired hands, and from there on the civil rights protests escalated to armed conflict, with the protestors arming themselves with weapons seized from arms dumps and secret police compounds.

The West – in effect, France, Britain and the United States – intervened very reluctantly, after Gaddafi promised a bloodbath in Benghazi "within 48 hours", but also for domestic political reasons – Nicolas Sarkozy to prop up his flagging popularity and David Cameron to appear “moral”. In fact, the US did not want to intervene at all and was embarrassed into doing so only by Gaddafi’s impending massacre and by criticism that Washington was slow in condemning Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s and Hosni Mubarak’s suppression of peaceful protests in Tunisia and Egypt.

The fact that dayofrageindc@gmail.com believes Africa can "unite and mobilize 100,000 soldiers" to fight NATO indicates that even Mars is too close to Earth for him/her to be a Martian with any idea about Africa.

Also, given the central role played by African – especially Chadian, Nigerien and Malian – mercenaries in suppressing the Libyan uprising, and the atrocities they committed against innocent civilians, the fact that dayofrageindc@gmail.com has the audacity to say that the Libyan "rebels have betrayed all of Africa", is an indicator of the depth to which he/she has sunk, for only a morally depraved, ignorant moron can use such words to describe people who are fighting for basic freedoms and rights which he/she takes for granted. 

Dayofrageindc@gmail.com says that "NATO is treating Africans like savages and disregarding their leaders". 

Of course, no one country or people holds a monopoly over savagery – witness World Wars I and II, the violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” in Cambodia, to mention but a few examples.

But when it comes to Africa, I will suffice to say this: take a look at the contemporary history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Rwanda and Sierra Leone and tell me how you would describe the mass rape and wanton murder and mutilations inflicted on innocent civilians in those countries?

And NATO disregarding African "leaders"? "Leaders"? Who elected Gaddafi as Libyan "leader"? Certainly not the Libyans.

I am no fan of NATO, Britain, France or the US. They are hypocrites of the first order – you only have to look at their policies towards Israel/Palestine, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and their ideologically-motivated destruction of Iraq, to see this. But their intervention in Libya, regardless of the ulterior motives they undoubtedly have, saved hundreds of thousands of innocent Libyan civilians from certain death.

So, dayofrageindc@gmail.com and your ilk, go and do your homework and think twice before you choose to share your ignorance with the world at large.