The Islamic State beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians over the weekend, propping the severed heads on the victims’ backs, a barbaric slaughter that led Reverend Franklin Graham to ask, “Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?”
“Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?” he asked.
The brutal killing of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had been abducted in Libya by members of the Islamic State, was videotaped and the entire death film was posted online on Sunday, Feb. 15. It is entitled, “A Message Signed With Blood, To The Nation of the Cross.”
In a Facebook post on Feb. 16, Rev. Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said, “The militant Islamic terrorist group ISIS has released a video called A MESSAGE SIGNED WITH BLOOD TO THE NATION OF THE CROSS showing the beheadings of the 21 Egyptian Christians who had been kidnapped in Libya.”
“Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?” said Rev. Graham. “Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?”
“As we mourn with the families of those 21 martyrs, we’d better take this warning seriously as these acts of terror will only spread throughout Europe and the United States,” warned Rev. Graham.
“If this concerns you like it does me, share this,” he said. “The storm is coming.”
Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter tonight to defend 20th Century Fox’s new movie “Exodus” that casts Christian Bale as Moses, and a variety of white actors as Egyptians.
There’s been scuffle on Twitter ever since Murdoch made his observations. And a lot of this stems from a quote director Ridley Scott gave Variety about why he didn’t use Egyptian or Arab actors for the film.
He said: “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such,” Scott says. “I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”
The other main characters are played by Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, and Aaron Paul. It’s a little odd that, according to the imdb, black actors only seem to be playing “lower class civilians and a thief. But this is Hollywood. And this from the same company that released “12 Years a Slave.”
Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to meet with his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah Sisi, in the Russian resort city of Sochi to discuss a wide range of political and economic issues, including the ongoing Gaza conflict, Egypt’s food deliveries to Russia and Russian military exports to Egypt, according to the Kremlin.
“The discussion will address urgent matters, linked to the development of Russian-Egyptian relations in various spheres,” a Kremlin official said.
The leaders are expected to study in great depth a wide range of bilateral economic issues, such as the creation of a free trade zone between Egypt and the Russia-led Customs Union, which also includes Belarus and Kazakhstan.
“The last year’s trade turnover was roughly at $3 billion. In the first half of this year, [this figure] almost doubled [some $2.5 billion],” the Kremlin said.
Following its embargo on agricultural products from the United States and the European Union, Russia has been looking for alternatives, and Egypt said it was willing to boost its fruits and vegetables exports. In return, Russia could profit from Egypt’s high demand for wheat.
Moscow and Cairo are also discussing deliveries of Russia’s high-tech military products, including 24 Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jets, as well as its Kornet anti-tank missile systems, attack helicopters Kamov Ka-25, Mil Mi-28 and Mi-25.
Russia and Egypt, which is brokering an end to the ongoing Gaza armed conflict, have been keeping in touch on the situation in this highly volatile region, with the Russian president praising Cairo’s efforts toward a long-term armistice between the Israeli and the Palestinians.
Last week, President Putin in a phone conversation with Abdel Sisi lauded Egypt for mediating negotiations between the warring parties. Both leaders agreed to “encourage a nationwide dialogue, aimed at settling contentious issues through political means,” according to the Kremlin.
Israel declared a Gaza ceasefire over on Friday and killed more than 50 Palestinians in renewed shelling, saying militants had breached the truce shortly after it began and apparently captured an Israeli soldier.
The 72-hour break announced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was the most ambitious attempt so far to end more than three weeks of fighting, and followed mounting international alarm over a rising Palestinian civilian death toll.
The ceasefire, which began at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT), had prompted Palestinian families to trek back to battle-devastated neighbourhoods where rows of homes have been reduced to rubble. It was to be followed by Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Cairo on a longer-term solution.
The Israeli military said that 90 minutes into the truce, militants attacked soldiers searching for tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip.
Asked if the ceasefire was over, Lerner replied: “Yes. We are continuing our activities on the ground.” He said Israeli forces were mounting an “extensive effort” to locate the soldier.
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 50 people were killed and 220 wounded by Israeli shelling after the incident near the southern town of Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a special meeting of his security cabinet for later on Friday. A statement from his office said the Israeli leader spoke by telephone with Kerry and told him “the Palestinians had blatantly breached the humanitarian ceasefire and attacked our soldiers”.
Three Al Jazeera journalists have been sentenced to seven years in jail after an Egyptian judge found them guilty on charges of aiding a “terrorist organisation” by publishing lies.
The three include Australian Peter Greste, Al Jazeera’s Kenya-based correspondent, and Canadian-Egyptian national Mohamed Fahmy, bureau chief of Al Jazeera English.
The verdict — delivered to a packed courtroom in Cairo — has left Greste’s Brisbane-based family devastated.
A third defendant, Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed, received an additional three-year jail sentence on a separate charge involving gun possession.
Another 11 defendants were sentenced in absentia to 10 years.
The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East’s dictatorships would be succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The near-annihilation of the world’s most ancient communities of Christians.
The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West’s Kindle Single “The Silence of Our Friends.” The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well.
Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave.
The world’s most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed.
In Egypt, a rumor that a Muslim girl was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children were held in police custody for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted in Christian families leaving their homes behind.
In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista Pizzaballa reported that “of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh… no more than 10 people remain.”
Two Syrian bishops have been kidnapped by rebel groups. Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch says that out of a population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their homes in fear.
In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic. According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed, who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, was murdered in his home. The number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the invasion. The decline of Iraq’s Christian population since the first Gulf War is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion.
The U.S. and the U.K. bear the responsibility in this catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq’s postwar government and did little to protect minority faiths.
The clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes are obvious. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis. The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair toilets in them) without explicit permission from the head of state, almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time some of these militias were executing a pogrom against Christians.
A Christian shopkeeper in Ma’loula summed it up in a quote to the BBC: “Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us.”
Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?
If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.
Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.
Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.
This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.
Yet this revelation in Gates’ “Duty,” a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.
If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.
A bereft Gates tells of “evening sessions” during which he’d write condolence letters “to the families of service members killed in action.” There “probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,” he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became “on the strain on our troops and on their families.” After all, “they’d been at war for 10 years.” “My highest priority,” he averred in an interview with NPR, was “trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,” and expressing “concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.”
It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.
Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or “save” another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. The former Israeli prime minister died on Jan. 11, after languishing in a vegetative state for 8 years.
Seared in my mind as a child growing up in Israel is a 1973 image of the late Ariel Sharon. He is on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt, head bandaged because of an injury sustained in combat. What is he doing? Winning. Sharon was beating back an enemy that came close to vanquishing Israel.
Ariel Sharon led his men into battle and won the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli government and the intelligence failed miserably. He himself had said that “his greatest military success came during that war, during which he surrounded Egypt’s Third Army and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men over the Suez Canal, a turning point.”
Had Sharon himself not performed military miracles, who knows if Israelis, myself included, would have survived? How many Americans can point to a leader who had actually saved their lives, rather than send other men to die in foreign lands, and then propagandize his countrymen about having fought for their freedoms?
As a Special-Forces commander, Sharon was on the front—and in front of his men—performing daring assaults that saved Israel in both the 1967 and 1973 wars.
Pugnacious and tenacious, “Arik” Sharon was nothing if not controversial. Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was, nevertheless, a soldier in the style of “Stonewall” Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter, to whom he and the Likudniks were often compared.
Agree or disagree with the methods and politics of this titanic personality—it is unarguable that Sharon’s overriding concern was with the survival and security of the Jewish state: he saw himself as bearing a “historic responsibility” for “the fate of the Jewish people.” By contrast, Bush’s Wilsonian, global missionary movement to rid the world of “evildoers” related not even tangentially to the future and safety of the American people.
Unlike George Bush the internationalist, “Arik” Sharon was a fierce nationalist, who put his country and its people first.
As with so many of our military men—cast adrift by the policies of Rome-on-the-Potomac—Mr. Gates would be less of a mess had he, too, been able to lead his men into wars of necessity, instead of charging headlong into unjust “wars of choice.”
Scene of the explosion at Mansoura, north of Cairo
At least 14 people are believed to have died in a large explosion that destroyed a police headquarters in a Nile Delta city north of Cairo early Tuesday morning, according to the state news agency and a security official. Some 200 people were injured in the blast.
The Egyptian government accused the Muslim Brotherhood of orchestrating the attack. Cabinet spokesman Sherief Shawki said Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi had officially declared the group a terrorist organisation.
The Muslim Brotherhood, however, condemned the attack in an emailed statement from the group’s London press office released hours after the explosion.
“The Muslim Brotherhood condemns in the strongest possible terms the attack on the police headquarters in Mansoura (region),” the statement said.
“The Muslim Brotherhood considers this act as a direct attack on the unity of the Egyptian people and demands an enquiry forthwith so that the perpetrators of this crime may be brought to justice.”
Among the injured from the blast at Daqahliya security headquarters in the Nile Delta province of Mansour, was the police chief of the province General Sami al-Meih.
Most of those killed were policemen inside the security headquarters. Many bodies are still believed to be buried under the debris and the death toll is expected to rise, the official said.
An initial investigation indicated that the explosion was the result of a car bomb.
The attack came a day after an Al-Qaida-inspired group called on police and army to desert or face death at the hands of its fighters.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or the Champions of Jerusalem, said it considers Egyptian troops to be infidels because they answer to the secular-leaning, military-backed government.
The group and others based in the Sinai have been blamed for a surge of attacks against security forces since the July coup that toppled the country’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi. In response, Egypt’s armed forces launched a military offensive against militants in the Northern Sinai province in August.
Speaking at a public forum on Monday, military spokesman Ahmed Mohammed Ali said so far the operations have resulted in the killing of 184 militants and the arrest of 803 others. He said about 25 percent of those killed and arrested are foreign fighters, but didn’t provide further details.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis is believed to have ties with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, and officials have said other foreign militants have found refuge in Sinai during the ongoing turmoil. – AP, Reuters, dpa
Another former president of Egypt is going on trial. Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist leader who became the country’s first freely elected president only to be ousted by the military after a year in office, faces charges he incited his followers to kill protesters.
The trial is a new landmark in Egypt’s 2 ½ years of turmoil since autocrat Hosni Mubarak was toppled. Morsi’s supporters have been protesting since he was removed on July 3. Hundreds have been killed in clashes, and authorities have arrested more than 2,000 members from his Muslim Brotherhood. Officials, the media and a broad swath of the public contend the Brotherhood have proven themselves a threat to the country, while the group says the military is crushing democracy.
Here is a look at the case against Morsi and 14 Brotherhood members on trial with him – and the politics around the case.
Q: What are the charges based on?
A: The charges are rooted in violence that erupted during one of the first major protests against Morsi during his year in office. On Dec. 4, some 100,000 people protested outside the presidential palace against Morsi’s decree granting himself sweeping immunity from judicial oversight. The decree allowed his Islamist allies to push a disputed draft of the constitution toward adoption without court challenge.
The protesters demanded he call off a referendum on the draft scheduled days later. Some scuffled with police outside the palace gates. Morsi left the palace from a backdoor, and his convoy was heckled. He later said one of his drivers was injured. A few thousand protesters set up a camp outside the palace while the Muslim Brotherhood called for a “general mobilization” of members.
The next day, Islamists attacked the camp, tearing up tents and beating protesters. Videos at the time showed them marching in military-style lines and chanting, “God is great” and “Morsi’s men are everywhere.”
More anti-Morsi protesters streamed to the scene, and street battles lasted into the early hours of the next day, each side throwing stones and firebombs.
Amid the melee, Brotherhood members abducted protesters and held them in a makeshift room at the palace gates, beating them to confess they were paid thugs, according to later statements by those who were held. The next day, they handed the detainees to the police. A prosecutor later freed them, saying there was no evidence against them but that his Morsi-appointed boss had pressured him to implicate them.
At least 10 people were killed in the battle. One was a journalist who wrote articles critical of Morsi. The Brotherhood claimed all the dead were its members, but the families later said the group pressured them to say their slain relatives belonged to the Brotherhood.
A: Isn’t this just a political show trial?
Q: That’s complicated. Human rights lawyers say on the face of it, this is possibly the strongest case against Morsi. Laywers tried to raise a case against Morsi over the Dec. 5 violence soon after it happened, giving some credibility to arguments it is not purely based on post-coup vengeance. (Under the Morsi-appointed chief prosecutor and justice minister at the time, the attempt went nowhere.)
However, this trial comes as part of the wide crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood aimed at crushing it as a political force as the new military-backed government moves ahead with its own transition plan.
The Brotherhood says the charges are baseless and the planned trial a sham, aimed at giving legal cover to the coup.
There are concerns over how fair the trial will be. Morsi has been held in secret military detention undergoing questioning since his ouster, virtually incommunicado except for two calls with his family and visits by the EU foreign policy chief and an African Union delegation. He has not spoken to his legal team, which says it hasn’t been given documentation on the prosecution’s case.
Another issue reflecting the politics: Trials are selective. No one is prosecuting the military or police over deaths of protesters. Human rights lawyers say officials in office are almost never held to account.
Q: What is the evidence against Morsi?
A: The prosecution’s case has not been made public. Morsi at the time accused the protesters of starting the violence.
In parts of the investigation leaked to the Egyptian press, the head of the police force at the time said he refused to use force to break up the unarmed protesters outside the palace, so Morsi called out his supporters to do so. According to the press reports, the head of the Republican Guards – which protect the palace – said Morsi gave him a one-hour ultimatum to forcefully break up the sit-in. The Guards chief said he asked for more time to disperse it peacefully, and one of Morsi’s aides told him “our men” will take care of it.
At the height of the fighting, leading Brotherhood member Essam el-Erian went on the group’s TV station and called for Morsi supporters to go to the scene “in the tens of thousands to besiege those thugs because now is the moment to arrest them.” El-Erian is now a co-defendant in Morsi’s trial, though he is currently on the run and in hiding, so would be tried in absentia unless caught.
At the time, the organized nature of the attack on the camp fueled accusations by opponents that the Brotherhood runs “militias” to crack down on opponents, a claim the group denies.
Q: Any other trials coming up?
A: The Brotherhood’s top leader, Mohammed Badie, and several other members are already on trial on incitement charges over a separate incident of violence. Prosecutors are preparing cases against some 2,000 Brotherhood members currently in prison, including on allegations of including inciting violence in clashes outside the Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo and holding and torturing policemen during a pro-Morsi sit-in.
Morsi could also face more trials. He is being investigated on charges of insulting judges when, during a presidential speech, he accused specific judges of helping rig elections under Mubarak. Another case concerns allegations he colluded with Hamas to carry out attacks on prisons that broke free Morsi and other Brotherhood leaders during the 2011 anti-Mubarak uprising.
Q: Speaking of Mubarak, he’s still on trial?
A: Yes. In June 2012, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for failing to stop the killings of the around 900 protesters who died in 2011 uprising But an appeals court overturned the conviction, saying the prosecution failed to provide concrete evidence. Mubarak’s retrial began last spring. – AP
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said on Wednesday that he opposes cutting off US military aid to Egypt but vowed Washington would keep pressing for “reconciliation” in the country.
The United States earlier this month condemned Egyptian security forces for firing on protesters backing ousted president Mohamed Morsi, in a crackdown that left nearly 1,000 people dead.
“The interim government has to get back on the path to reconciliation, stop the violence, put Egypt back on the path of economic, democratic reform,” Hagel said in an interview with the BBC aired Wednesday.
“Now do you do that best by cutting off all aid? Maybe eventually that happens, but I don’t think you can take that approach initially, you have to respond and we’ve made it clear what we’d like to see happen,” said Hagel, in Brunei for a meeting of regional defence ministers.
Hagel did not rule out eventually shutting off the flow of $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Cairo, but he stressed the importance of maintaining the decades-long alliance with Egypt, calling it a source of stability that had reinforced US interests.
“We’ve had strong partnerships with Egypt for many years starting with the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that the US brokered in 1979 that essentially prevented the region from breaking out into a regional war,” he said.
The United States “wouldn’t necessarily agree with the forms of government, the dictatorships, but… we would not want to see the disintegration of a relationship with a large important country like Egypt,” he said.
Echoing similar remarks he made earlier this month, Hagel said America’s influence with Egypt had limits.
“So we’ve tried to help where we can, within the boundaries where we can affect influence where we can,” Hagel said. “You can’t go in and impose. It’s up to the Egyptian people what kind of future they want and what kind of government they want.” – Sapa/AFP
A coalition of South African advocacy and social groups plan to demonstrate against the military coup in Egypt at the Egyptian Embassy in Pretoria on Friday.
The group calling itself the Coalition for Egyptian Democracy is made up of the Jamiatul Ulama South Africa, ANC Youth League, South African Municipal Workers Union , Muslim Youth Movement (MYM), Coalition For a Free Palestine (South Africa), MSA Union , Awqaf SA, and Media Review Network – South Africa.
The coalitions, Minhaj Jeenah says that they “joins democrats around the world in calling for a return to democracy in Egypt.”
They also demanding the de facto rulers of Egypt, the military, to end the crackdown on its people and a transparent international judicial investigate to prosecute those responsible for the killing of civilians since 30th June.
Jeenah says they condemn the 3rd July military coup which saw President Mohamed Morsi ousted and detained.
An Egyptian court has ordered the release of former President Hosni Mubarak. Security sources say he will leave prison later in the day as there are no longer any legal grounds for his detention.
The 85-year old Mubarak was being retried on charges of ordering the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that led to his downfall. Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison last year for failing to prevent the killing of demonstrators.
Last week, hundreds of Cape Townians handed over a memorandum to a member of the Committee for International Relations, condemning what they called “illegitimate military rulers who are trying to silence the voices of peaceful protesters in Egypt”.
Jeenah says they are also calling on the military to open the Rafah border post with Gaza and to cease its destruction of the tunnels that connect Egypt to Gaza. The tunnels are a vital lifeline for the people of Gaza who are under an Israeli-imposed siege since 2007.
The coalition also commended South African government on their position taken towards the coup. However Jeenah says, they calling on government to follow the actions of Venezuela, Ecuador and Turkey and withdraw the ambassador from Cairo.
Egypt’s toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak was transferred from prison to house arrest at a military hospital on Thursday, in a move overshadowed by a blistering crackdown against his Islamist successors.
The former strongman, forced to quit in early 2011, was flown by medical helicopter to a military hospital, where he will remain under house arrest as he stands trial on corruption and murder charges.
His ouster in 2011 was a pivotal moment in regional democratic upheavals that in Egypt led to an Islamist government, which lasted a year before a popularly backed military coup last month.
In other circumstances, the 85-year-old’s removal from prison might have caused shockwaves.
But with Egypt mired in a deadly conflict between the military-installed government and Islamists, Mubarak’s transfer took place amid little fanfare or protest.
He was ordered released after his lawyer argued Mubarak’s stay in prison had exceeded the maximum pre-verdict detention, and Mubarak made financial amends for one of his charges.
He still faces trial for corruption and his role in the deaths of protesters during the uprising that toppled him, with his next hearing on Sunday.
Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi, empowered with the authority to order arrests under the current state of emergency, ordered Mubarak to be placed under house arrest after release from jail.
Mubarak chose to be held at the military hospital, the official MENA news agency reported.
The decision to grant Mubarak pre-trial release added a volatile new element to the political turmoil that has gripped Egypt since the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi on July 3 following massive protests against him.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in the past week in violence following the forcible break-up of two pro-Morsi camps in the capital.
Authorities have arrested dozens of members of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, including its supreme guide Mohamed Badie — the first time the group’s chief has been arrested since 1981.
Morsi himself is being held at a secret location and faces charges related to his 2011 escape from prison and inciting the death and torture of protesters.
The juxtaposition between the fates of the two ousted presidents, Mubarak and Morsi, is notable, analyst Hisham Kassem said.
Mubarak “committed numerous crimes… against the country, but managed to hide the evidence, particularly as all the state’s institutions were working for him at the time he was overthrown”.
“The opposite is true for Morsi, who was thrown in prison while all the state’s apparatus were against him.”
Arrests of Brotherhood leaders continued, with authorities detaining Ahmed Aref, a spokesman for the group, in Cairo.
Despite the pressure, a Brotherhood-led coalition has defiantly called for mass rallies on Friday, in a test of its support following the crackdown.
Egypt has experienced unprecedented political bloodletting since August 14, when security forces stormed two pro-Morsi protest camps in the capital.
The crackdown and resulting violence across the country killed nearly 600 people in a single day, the bloodiest in Egypt’s recent history.
Islamists have been accused of torching and attacking dozens of Christian churches, schools, businesses and homes — mostly in the rural south –accusing Egypt’s sizable Coptic minority of backing Morsi’s ouster.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch condemned the government for failing to protect churches, but also the Brotherhood for failing to halt incitement against Christians.
Violence has also targeted police and soldiers, including two who were killed in a drive-by shooting near the Suez Canal town of Ismailia on Thursday.
The unrest has prompted international criticism, and EU foreign ministers agreed at an emergency meeting Wednesday to suspend the sale of arms and security equipment to Cairo in response to the mounting violence.
They issued a statement calling recent security operations “disproportionate”, while also condemning “acts of terrorism” in the Sinai and the church attacks.
But they expressed concern over the economic situation and said “assistance in the socio-economic sector and to civil society will continue”.
The United States has also criticised the violence, as well as Badie’s arrest, and announced the cancellation of joint military exercises.
But it has stopped short of halting its $1.3 billion annual defence aid package to Egypt, and denied reports it was withholding aid.
Washington on Thursday also sidestepped questions about Mubarak’s release, saying it was a matter for Cairo to decide, but called for Morsi to be freed.
“With respect to the Mubarak trial and decisions made, this is an internal Egyptian legal matter,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
“Our position on Mr. Morsi remains the same. We believe there should be a process for his release,” Psaki said.
Reporters had for days asked the State Department to comment on the seemingly paradoxical situation of the two leaders.
Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, which backs the army-installed interim government, has said it would step in with other Arab nations to fill any funding gap if Washington halts aid.
Meanwhile, a Hamas official said Egypt was set to reopen the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip daily from Saturday after closing it in the wake of last week’s bloodshed. – AFP
Hundreds of people, who have marched on Parliament in Cape Town to protest against the ousting of Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsi, have dispersed after handing over a memorandum to a member of the Committee for International Relations.
The protesters marched to parliament in Cape Town today condemning what they called “illegitimate military rulers who are trying to silence the voices of peaceful protesters in Egypt”.
Some Capetonians who were present at a demonstration organised by the Muslim Judicial Council support the council’s view that Morsi’s ousting undermines democracy.
Secretary General of the MJC, Abdul-Khaliq Ebrahim Allie has described the events taking place in Egypt as “unacceptable.”
“We are speaking as fellow South Africans who have enjoyed democracy, South Africans that have seen apartheid. What we see and witness in Egypt today is unacceptable. And as fellow South Africans, we are saying to the Egyptians that we stand with the masses who have elected the first democratically elected government. This we regard as a military coup.”
Some said the MJC did not speak on behalf of Egyptians.
“I’m an Egyptian citizen living in South Africa. I really love and appreciate the freedom in this country. They have changed the Constitution in Egypt. They want us to go backwards again. They don’t want us to be a prosperous country. Besides the fact that I’m an Egyptian, this violates everything to do with Human Rights, and we are here to show our support for the Muslim brothers and sisters who are being killed in Egypt for the mere fact that they stood up against oppression and injustice.”
Meanwhile, an Egyptian court has ordered the release of former President Hosni Mubarak. Security sources say he will leave prison later in the day as there are no longer any legal grounds for his detention.
85-year old Mubarak was being retried on charges of ordering the killing of protesters during the 2011 uprising that led to his downfall. Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison last year for failing to prevent the killing of demonstrators.
The military says Tamer Abdel-Raouf sped through a military checkpoint, ignoring soldiers’ warning shots. A colleague who was with him in the car says he obeyed the soldiers’ orders to turn back, but they opened fire anyway as he was making a U-turn.
The result was the same: The reporter for the flagship Egyptian daily Al-Ahram on Monday became the fifth journalist to die as the media are swept up in the bloodshed roiling Egypt.
Television and radio stations air patriotic songs while a slew of talk show hosts glorify the military that seized power and denounce the Islamist government it overthrew.
This satirical programme on TV has become almost real in Egypt
It’s a sharp turnaround from the challenges these same journalists faced under President Mohammed Morsi’s rule, when reporters were sued by Islamist lawyers for “insulting the president.” After his ouster, his Muslim Brothehrood group openly blacklisted 50 of those media personalities.
Now journalists are facing deadlier perils.
A week ago Mick Deane of the British TV broadcaster Sky News and two Egyptian journalists were fatally shot while covering the violent breakup of protest camps in Cairo. Other foreign journalists are also feeling the pressure, complaining that security forces fail to respect the exemption that allows them on the streets after nighttime curfew.
The tense media landscape is increasingly mirroring the venomous atmosphere, where people are fractured along political lines.
“The whole media scene has been extremely polarized and it’s a reflection of the polarization in society,” said Rasha Abdulla, a media professor at the American University in Cairo.
TV presenters have sung the national anthem on TV and openly cried tears of joy when Morsi was ousted seven weeks ago.
Meanwhile, Morsi’s Brotherhood group has waged its own media campaign online and through its spokesmen on social media websites after channels sympathetic to the group were shuttered last month.
In one, a spokesman posted a picture of dead Syrian children online, claiming they were Egyptian kids killed by police. In clashes that the Health Ministry said killed around 80 people, the Brotherhood’s emails to reporters initially claimed 200 were killed. At another point it claimed the overall death toll was more than triple what the Health Ministry was reporting.
The discrepancies come from both sides, as the death of reporter Abdel-Raouf demonstrates.
A statement by the army said that he sped through a checkpoint after curfew and soldiers fired warning shots.
However, Hamed al-Barbari of Al-Gomhuria newspaper told the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists that the two, riding in the car together, were turned back by soldiers at the checkpoint. He said the soldiers then fired at the car as they were making a U-turn, shooting Abdel-Raouf in the head.
Abdel-Raouf had been critical of Morsi’s ouster on Facebook and other social media, though the CPJ said there was no evidence that he was targeted for his views.
Western journalists have come under attack from angry citizens. CPJ reported that during violent protests Saturday, Annabell Van Den Berghe, a freelance journalist with the Belgian public broadcaster VRT, and crew were confronted by people who accused them of being American spies and said Western media were biased. They beat a crew member but did not harm the journalists.
The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network, particularly its channel dedicated to live coverage of events in Egypt, has been the only major Arabic-language outlet for the Muslim Brotherhood’s views. Its Cairo office was raided by security forces last week and two of its journalists detained.
A number of its presenters quit around the time of Morsi’s ouster, saying the station had misled viewers. The network counters that it is covering all events in Egypt with “balance and integrity”
Three Turkish journalists, Metin Turan and Heba Zakaria were arrested over the weekend and Tahir Osman Hamde was reported arrested on Tuesday. It’s not clear whether any have been released.
Senior Egyptian officials have taken to critiquing the foreign media.
The State Information Service released a statement saying some media outlets are “falling short of describing events of June 30 as an expression of popular will.”
Meeting foreign journalists recently, interim Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy expressed his frustration.
“You have a problem of your profession frankly,” he said, saying the limited space to report complex issues makes the journalists “very superficial in what you are doing.” “And frankly,” he added, “many of you have covered the news incorrectly and unfairly.”
Adel Iskandar, author of “Egypt in Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution,” said that under the rule of autocratic President Hosni Mubarak, “The military was untouchable and invisible” and that “the media, both state and private, were obedient because they were censored.
“Now they are willfully on the bandwagon.”
Under Mubarak, bloggers were targeted as well. Mostly liberal, leftist and secular protesters active on Twitter and Facebook were beaten and arrested during subsequent rallies against the military rulers who temporarily took over after he was toppled. Similarly, online administrators of Brotherhood websites and online activists sympathetic to the group are now being arrested, shot at and even killed by security forces at anti-government protests.
Noha Radwan, a scholar of Arabic literature at University of California at Davis, follows events in her native Egypt closely, and says the media is actually driving polarization in the country.
“For the past three weeks media sources on the ground, whether they are the governmental or the independent channels. have been working the public into nothing short of a mass hysteria,” she wrote, blaming both the state media and Islamists.
“Every media source in Egypt is lying, spreading hearsay, and dismissing reports that do not serve their agendas. The result is a frenzied and divided population that is proving uncharacteristically callous to the bloodshed among one group or the other.”
Iskandar said that while Egypt may not be in a state of actual war, the battle lines have been drawn in the media
Egypt, he said, “is in a state of media and rhetorical war.” – AP
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