Shaked considers the West’s demands for more openness and democracy in Egypt to be a fatal mistake. “It is an illusion to believe that the dictator Mubarak could be replaced by a democracy,” he says. “Egypt is still not capable of democracy,” he adds, pointing out that the illiteracy rate is over 20 percent, to give just one example. The Muslim Brotherhood is the only real alternative, he opines, which would have devastating consequences for the West. “They will not change their anti-Western attitude when they come to power. That has not happened (with Islamist movements) anywhere: neither in Sudan, Iran nor Afghanistan.”
Ultimately the choice is between a pro- or an anti-Western dictatorship, says Shaked. “It is in our interest that someone from Mubarak’s inner circle takes over his legacy, at any cost.” In the process, it is not possible to rule out massive bloodshed in the short term, he says. “It would not be the first time that riots in Egypt were brutally crushed.” (Read more from spiegel.de)
Great photo collections here and here. Also, this video of protesters crossing a bridge and cops giving way before them demonstrates the scope of these protests.
The White House may stand behind the protesters in Tunisia, but demonstrators in Egypt haven’t gotten the presidential blessing. Appearing on PBS NewHour last night, gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden remarked that he doesn’t consider Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak a dictator—despite his 29-year rule—and isn’t sure what exactly protesters want.
I wonder how much of the US’s luke warm view of the protests has to do with the Israel Lobby. I can imagine them wanting a tyrant whom the US more or less controls over a popular movement.
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Obviously, government repression doesn’t like internet freedom of information. By the way:
Internet ‘kill switch’ bill will return A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a “national cyberemergency,” and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year. . . . Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure. (Read more from news.cnet.com)
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Riot control agents used against the Egyptian protests seem to be Made in the USA. Are you proud, chest-thumbing neo-cons? Wait, don’t answer that.
See Also: The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to equip the Egyptian security forces with high-tech military hardware.
But unless things get really, really bad there, it’s unlikely that any big-ticket American military hardware will be used directly against the Egyptian demonstrators. A selection of Defense Department contracts dating to the mid-1990s reveals weapons sales to Egypt that include a Black Hawk helicopters (Sikorsky), a dizzying variety of missiles (Raytheon), Abrams tanks (General Dynamics), Humvees (AM General Corp.) and all manner of ammunition. . . .
Now, if through some incredible circumstance Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decides to flee the country, Ã la Ben Ali, there’s a good chance his first-class flight would come courtesy of the American taxpayer.
Pentagon contracts show that the US government has spent at least $111,160,328 to purchase and maintain Mubarak’s fleet of nine Gulfstream business jets. (For those keeping score, Gulfstream is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.) (Read more from warisbusiness.com)
While some Americans assume this is a “Arab affair”, the fact is that Egypt’s president Mubarak is a yes-man to the U.S., and the fall of the Tunisian and now Egyptian leaders are really the ouster of U.S. puppet regimes in the Middle East.
. . .
Mainstream Islamist parties in the Mideast have nothing to do with al-Qaida (which barely exists any more) or anti-Western programs. Their primary concern is getting rid of the western-backed oligarchies that keep the Muslim world backwards and in thrall. Their platform is sharing resource wealth, social welfare, education, uprooting thieving oligarchies and fighting endemic corruption.
The big question now is will Tunisia’s dramatic events be a harbinger of other explosions across the volatile Arab world? All eyes are on Egypt, the home of a third of all Arabs. Egypt’s 83-year-old military ruler, Husni Mubarak, is a giant version of Tunisia’s Gen. Ben Ali.
Mubarak was engineered into power by the US after the killing of longtime CIA “asset” Anwar Sadat. Gen. Mubarak has ruled Egypt like a modern-day pharaoh ever since, crushing both violent extremist and legitimate political opposition. Mubarak’s rigged elections, winked at by Washington, are every bit as egregious as Tunisia’s.
So could the flames of Tunisia’s revolution spread to Egypt?
He asks to publish a list of the top 100 tax evaders and avoiders. (Tax avoidance is legal. Not working is the simplest form of tax avoidance.) He envisions the angry masses showing up at their offices as tax collectors.
Great pictures of the London protests can be found here.
These are the socialists. They believe they are entitled to receive something and a price of their choosing. No doubt they also consider the ongoing economic crises (which is about to get *MUCH* worse), as part of the same conspiracy that raises their tuition.
It is important for those of us who believe in liberty to win the intellectual debate, to point out to the world that it is exactly the same sense of entitlement felt by government, its vast bureaucracies, and its constituencies, that leads to the catastrophic economic crisis we are about to face.
As regular readers of this blog know, I am wary of police and the government monopoly on violence. However this is a protest in which security (public or private) had a very appropriate role.
One of the pictures shows blatant, senseless destruction of private property by protesters:
Both his rally and this one are an attempt to switch the game from a philosophical debate between liberty and socialism to identity politics.
I do, however, prefer Glenn Beck’s pseudo-Tea Party rally because it is at least partially libertarian. This one betrays its goals with the Bolshevik-like slogan “One Nation Working Together.” What they really mean is, “Obey Us Or Else.”
Every socialist endeavor must eventually choose be failure and tyranny. It seems there are increasingly many examples of them adopting the rhetoric of tyranny.
WASHINGTON – Tapping into anger as the tea party movement has done, a coalition of progressive and civil rights groups marched by the thousands Saturday on the Lincoln Memorial and pledged to support Democrats struggling to keep power on Capitol Hill.
“We are together. This march is about the power to the people,” said Ed Schultz, host of “The Ed Show” on MSNBC. “It is about the people standing up to the corporations. Are you ready to fight back?”
In a fiery speech that opened the “One Nation Working Together” rally on the National Mall (Read more from news.yahoo.com)
Get used to seeing this, and please notice that the protesters are part of the coercive government economy. Governments need to shrink. Once a government program goes into effect, it gets a constituency who will protest it’s reduction or removal. This is one of the reasons why governments, unlike businesses, only get bigger, regardless of whether their services are wanted.
Tens of thousands of protesters from around Europe have been marching across Brussels in a protest against spending cuts by some EU governments.
Other protests against austerity measures are being held in Greece, Italy, the Irish Republic and Latvia.
A general strike is also taking place in Spain, hitting transport and other public services.
Trade unions say EU workers may become the biggest victims of a financial crisis set off by bankers and traders. (Read more from )
Favorite parts (though the entire interview is dynamite):
@10:20 – Identification of Atrocity, and absurdity of counter argument “that’s war.”
@ 11:40 – Tom Wood’s paraphrases the surprising pro-war stance of many (but not all) Objectivists: “Collateral damage is not something to be deplored, it’s to be cheered. . . These people live in terrorist countries. . . I mean these people actually use that term, ‘Terrorist Country.’ There’s a nice individualist philosophy for you. . . To defend the good countries, we need to lay utter waste to our enemies. That’s individualism and reason.”
So long as anti-government sentiment remained the over-riding tea party narrative, it remained healthy, and so long as the trivial remained such, it was tolerable, becoming not much more than irrelevant fodder for the left. So what in God’s name, quite literally, was the purpose of the Promise-Keepers-like even Beck held last weekend?
As I’ve mentioned before (here, here), Glenn Beck is a saboteur raised by the establishment to derail the liberty movement.
Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.
Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.
. . . . the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he’s grateful for the work, even though he’s not sure why he’s doing it. “I could care less,” he says. “I am being paid to march around and sound off.”
. . . . In California, one group is offering to pay $10 and up per hour to activists to hold signs in demonstrations against foam cups and plastic bags. (Read more from online.wsj.com)
@ 1:00 this video suggests that the police car lit on fire at Toronto’s G 20 protests were burned by agents to discredit protesters. It discusses provocateurs at this and other protests.
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@ 3:00 this video discusses police agent provocateurs infiltrating peaceful protests.
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WATCH AT 0:45…..all the plainclothes people running in that pack, and being let behind the line, are cops–including the black-clad ‘anarchist’ !!!! BTW, watch out for the old white-bearded flannel shirt cop and the famous ‘scary lady’ cop:
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Large peaceful protests allegedly ignored by Big Media:
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Woman discusses her detention by police, their threats of rape, strip searches:
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. . . not that I sympathize with the message of most of these protesters.
“the ‘substitution of political for economic power’ now so ofted demanded means necessarily the substitution of power from which there is no escape for a power which is always limited.” ~F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Shaked considers the West’s demands for more openness and democracy in Egypt to be a fatal mistake. “It is an illusion to believe that the dictator Mubarak could be replaced by a democracy,” he says. “Egypt is still not capable of democracy,” he adds, pointing out that the illiteracy rate is over 20 percent, to give just one example. The Muslim Brotherhood is the only real alternative, he opines, which would have devastating consequences for the West. “They will not change their anti-Western attitude when they come to power. That has not happened (with Islamist movements) anywhere: neither in Sudan, Iran nor Afghanistan.”
(Read more from spiegel.de)
