Egypt Must Become a Socialist Nation

Egypt is perhaps one of the most powerful nations in the middle east today. With the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, it is finally possible to change Egypt form being subject to the neo-liberal capitalist agenda.

The Egyptian Socialist Party opposes discrimination based on race, gender, religion, and supports Palestine. If they were to become the dominant party in Egyptian Parliament, then they would be able to provide a strong opposition to Israel's imperialist agenda in the West Bank.

Put the Egyptian Socialist Party in Power

Currently however, after the revolution, radical Islamist parties took over a huge number of seats in the Parliament. Many of the Islamists are "Salafists", and they have called for a denunciation of secularism, as well as a return to Sharia law.

The Muslim Brotherhood is among the Islamist groups currently controlling the majority of Egyptian Parliament. In the past, they have defended the military junta and support a neo-liberal capitalist, imperialist agenda.

An Egypt ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, or any other neo-liberal group would be a disaster, and would put the whole nation right under Washington's finger again; just like it was before.

Egypt's political future is in crisis

One Year On, Egyptian Military Continues to Secure US/Israeli Interests.

"A positive democratic outcome." That means positive for Israel, and the Egyptian Military; last standing institution of the old Mubarak regime.



One year on and the protest is going strong. Something the media can't silence, it's like the voice of the voiceless coming down like a hammer on the stone.
Party line is that the revolution is old hat, black hat, untenable, and loosing favor amongst the masses. If you watch the news you hear the gears grinding they want the factories to start again, the machine of production hasn't been oiled in weeks.
But over one million people have brought their voices to the one-year demonstrations happening in Tahrir square; they realize they've still got work to do.

This time last year, they said the revolution and the Egyptian military were hand in hand; born like the Phoenix, the 'Happiest Little Elf' had come to play. But people aren't fooled any longer, they see the council for what it is.
The Egyptian military controls 25-40% of the Egyptian economy, they're part of the power, switching to the revolution was, if anything, a survival tactic, they knew Mubarak was sinking, drowning in the weight of the innocents murdered by his regime.

As a part of the old Mubarak regime, the Egyptian Military is there to secure the interests of neoliberals in Washington DC who want to see a Zionist Egypt; to turn a blind eye to the people of Gaza eating stone for bread.

The revolution isn't done yet, not by a long shot. Portions of the middle class have lost faith in freedom, and the revolution. The children have been led astray by the Pied Piper, and his flute of magical reform, always tomorrow but never here now. The party has been telling them about Sugar Candy Mountain, and the people have swallowed the bitter candy-cane whole.

But you can see through their lies, once you know where the Military stands. They supported the revolution against Mubarak, only after being dragged in, forced to consent. Now they ralley 'round the family, under the Military banner, there to keep the flag waiving, but once you know, once you realize that they've been dinning with the Zionists of DC you see the connection is clear.

The Pied Piper has been playing political arm of the Military by reigning in the protests, standing in the line of anger between the people and the bourgeois. They came to celebrate, to do a dance and a jig then lead you all off to Sugar Candy Mountain. Don't listen, don't be fooled.
The Revolution isn't finished, it's not yet time to celebrate. The people of Egypt now know they came home too soon, they've taken to the streets, they want reform. It's clear to them know they can't leave it to the bourgeois; to the generals; to the military, to carry out this revolution for them.

The Pied Piper now dominates the recent elections, but the Pied Piper never opposed Mubarak on principal. The Pied Piper plays a tune that sounds just like the old sound. The Pied Piper is a arm of the global Capitalist order. The Egyptian people want reform, freedom, liberty. What does the Pied Piper want? The gears of war, the factories en mass, the god of production demands the sacrifice of the soot-faced children pulled out of school and sent to serve the bourgeois.

The Pied Piper is a servant to the global bourgeois elite. Do not be fooled, they never really opposed Mubarak's privatization programs on the whole. They're not really here to give back to the Egyptian people, but to play the friendlier face of the elite. It's Barack Obama gone international incorporated; the sound of progressive rock, but the melody is a drum-beat march to the factories of private hands.

But again you can't fool all the sheep. The Egyptian people are beginning to see the Pied Piper's game, they know Sugar Candy Mountain is a lie.


If the Pied Piper wants to dress like the best of Egypt, like an honest man come to spread peace to all the land, let 'em, the policies of the Pied Piper which lie underneath their humble attire, are the same neoliberal policies of exploitation.

The people of Egypt must realize, they have joined the age old struggle, to throw off the shackles of the old ruling class and enter a new era, and that their desires are the same as the desires of the workers in Gaza, Syria, Libia...etc. The desire for peace does not know boarders.


Egyptians, you have joined the ranks of the works of the world. You must unite to create a new world, by the people, for the people. Egypt does not belong to the private hands of the money changers, or the god of industry who feasts on the souls of dreamless men. You are not alone in your struggle, so make alliances and reach out. Make a new Egypt, for Egypt. Pass out fliers of the Communist Manifesto and start working for yourselves.

Workers of the world unite!

Egypt closes boarder with Gaza without warning or reason

Was it too good to be true? Or will Egyptians unite and protest the move?

Free Palestine

(Translated from Arabic via Google)

BREAKING: Egypt shuts down Rafah crossing !

Urgent: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing in a surprise without informing the Palestinian side and, without giving any reasons. and citizens with supporters of Hamas stormed the Egyptian gate of the Rafah crossing in protest against the policy pursued by the administration of prevention in Egypt.

Island: Reuters: Dozens of angry Palestinians storm Rafah crossing gate in Gaza after its closure by Egyptian authorities. Cheers for the citizens and people says wants to end the siege, and the police trying to disperse the demonstrators and onlookers now


UPDATE: The boarder, Rafah Crossing, has been re-opened.
(Translated from Arabic via Google)
Aljazeera : Egypt reopens Rafah crossing

Al Jazeera broadcast an announcement soon now that the Egyptian authorities decided to reopen after being closed for several hours

Israel None Too Happy About Egypt

Israel loses its Egyptian ally

LRB

The challenge to Israel of the revolutionary changes now underway may well be existential, depending on how it responds to these events. With Mubarak gone, Israel may once again be a pariah nation in the region.

Netanyahu’s government has already proved that even if Zionism is not racism, Zionists can be racists.

By denying Palestinians a state of their own and bringing about an apartheid state, it may yet succeed in persuading the world that Zionism as practised by Israel is indeed no different from the settler colonialism that existed in South Africa.

Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt is what ruled out a successful military challenge by the other countries in the region. Egypt has by far the most effective military force in the Arab Middle East, and no Arab military challenge to Israel would have been dared without Egypt’s participation.

A change of government in Egypt that brings to an end Mubarak’s policy of supporting America’s coddling of Israel will seriously undermine Israel’s strategic situation.

Moreover, Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel is unlikely to survive if Egypt’s treaty is abrogated – Jordan wouldn’t want to risk being the only Arab country to maintain normal relations with Israel.

No matter what further changes there may be in the region, developments in Tunisia and Egypt have already drastically curtailed the ability of surviving Arab regimes to move towards a rapprochement with Israel.

It is unlikely that the Arab Peace Initiative, disdained by Israel for nearly a decade, will remain on the table. No surviving Arab regime will dare challenge the popular rage against Israel for the humiliations it inflicts on the Palestinians.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the prime cause of the current upheavals, the failure of Arab regimes to halt Palestinian dispossession is not far from the top of the list of popular grievances.

Egyptions Victorious! Mubarak Resigns!

Democracy wins by a landslide!

By Simon Assaf

The tyrant has fallen. Mubarak has gone. Israel’s man, imperialism man, the US’s man, the World Bank’s man, has been deposed. Mubarak has been swept away by one of the greatest mass movements in history.

The “moderate strongman” so loved by imperialism presided over a regime of cruelty, nepotism and corruption that went beyond silencing democracy activists. It touched all Egyptians, and reached across the Arab world.

Now the consequences for imperialism, Israel, the dictatorships and oil kingdoms are in the balance.

Mubarak rose to power on the back of a huge surge of reaction that spanned the Arab world following a peace deal with Israel—signed by his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, in 1979.

He played a key role in the “disengagement”—a US strategy to break the alliance of Arab countries resisting Israel and imperialism.

The Camp David Accords that Egypt signed with Israel in 1978 freed the Israeli army to launch its deadly invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Mubarak was silent when this invasion ended with the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila.

Complicit

Mubarak’s regime was complicit with Israel’s long occupation of south Lebanon. He rallied Arab regimes to isolate Hizbollah and the Lebanese resistance during the 2006 war, and helped fund US clients in Lebanon.

Mubarak lent all his weight to crush the Palestinian Intifada from 1987, ordering Egyptian journalists to describe the Palestinian resistance as “terrorists”. Only with his help could Israel keep its grip on the Palestinians in Gaza.

He was a man the US could do business with. He sent troops to fight alongside the US in the 1990 Gulf War and opened the Suez Canal to warships on their way to Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He turned Egypt into a giant prison, and lent his torture chambers for “special rendition” in the “war on terror”.

Mubarak opened the country to the worst ravages of neo-liberalism. He imposed the privatisation of industries and encouraged the return of landlords who were deposed in the 1950s.

His dream of transforming the country into the “Tiger on the Nile” condemned large sections of the population to poverty. The wages for Egyptian workers, some just £3.26 a month, have remained unchanged since 1984—while inflation has rocketed.

Unions were banned, activists jailed and tortured. The factories were handed over to his cronies or global companies. Mubarak and his corrupt friends—known as the “one thousand families”—amassed huge amounts of wealth. He ran the country as his fiefdom, fixing elections and jailing opponents.

With Mubarak gone, Israel has become isolated, and every regime in the Arab world is now vulnerable. The mood of fatalism that had gripped the Arab world for decades has now evaporated.

This revolution has destroyed 30 years of US and Israeli strategy in the Middle East. At the beginning of the demonstrations Israel’s Haaretz newspaper described Israel as being in “strategic distress”.

For imperialism and its allies in the Middle East, this has now become strategic despair.

HAPPY MUBARAK RESIGNATION DAY!

Today, should be a Holiday

This a day to rejoice, not only for the people of Egypt

But of Gaza and the whole middle east

By Bill Van Auken

With his speech on Thursday night, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak threw down the gauntlet to the mass protests and growing strike wave that have rocked his regime for nearly three weeks.

After widespread media reports that Mubarak would announce his resignation—and rumors that he had already fled the country—the Egyptian president appeared on national television to declare that he would “remain adamant to shoulder my responsibility, protecting the constitution and safeguarding the interests of Egyptians” until elections are held and his term expires next September.

His remarks, which included vague promises to pursue “national dialogue” and to repeal police state measures in the country’s constitution once “stability allows”, included an announcement that he was delegating some of his presidential duties to his hand-picked vice president, the longtime chief of the regime’s secret police, Omar Suleiman.

Suleiman, a key ally of the US Central Intelligence Agency, then delivered an even more ominous speech. He demanded that Egypt’s millions of demonstrators and strikers “go back home” and “go back to work.” He warned them to “join hands” with the regime, rather than risk “chaos.” And he urged them not to listen to those promoting “sedition.”

The reaction of the millions of demonstrators assembled in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, central Alexandria and in towns and cities across the country was one of stunned disbelief followed by uncontrollable rage. Crowds that had been singing and dancing in celebration of Mubarak’s anticipated downfall began waving their shoes in the air in a sign of hatred and contempt for the US-backed dictator. Thousands were reported to be marching from Tahrir Square to the national state television headquarters and the presidential palace, both ringed by barbed wire and heavy troop deployments. In Alexandria, the majority of demonstrators reportedly left the center of the city to march on the local army base.

With even more millions expected to take to the streets on Friday, the likelihood of a bloody confrontation between the Egyptian military and the masses in revolt is growing. If murderous repression is unleashed, the political and moral responsibility for the dead and wounded will lie squarely with the Obama administration in Washington.

The decision of Hosni Mubarak to hold on to the Egyptian presidency was not, as the shallow and duplicitous reporting of the American media would have it, a matter of one man’s obstinacy or “military pride.”

Rather, it was the outcome of intense discussions within both Egypt’s own ruling establishment of corrupt capitalists and military commanders and within the corridors of power in Washington and other imperialist capitals.

Involved is the classic debate that besets every reactionary regime confronted with a revolutionary challenge from below. Some insist that at least nominal concessions must be made to defuse the revolutionary threat. And others counter that to make such concessions will only strengthen the revolution and hasten the downfall of the regime.

There are reports from Cairo that the military command, which Thursday convened its “supreme council”—a body that had met previously only during the wars with Israel in 1967 and 1973—was beset by just such divisions. It was Mubarak’s absence from the meeting that convinced many that his departure was already secured.

In his speech, Mubarak made an absurd attempt to appeal to nationalist sentiments by vowing not to bow to “foreign diktats”, by which he meant orders from Washington. However, the reality is that the Obama administration had in the previous days made it clear that it had accepted the Egyptian president remaining in office, while placing its full support behind the country’s chief torturer, Suleiman, as the organizer of an “orderly democratic transition.” It stressed that it was focusing on “process” rather than “personalities.” In other words, what Mubarak and Suleiman announced on Thursday was precisely what the Obama White House had promoted.

Whatever differences exist between the Obama administration and the dictatorship in Cairo are of an entirely tactical character. Within the US administration—as within the Egyptian regime itself—there are no doubt divisions as to whether salvaging the regime can best be accomplished with or without Mubarak, through a direct assumption of power by the military or by some intermediate means.

Israel, Washington’s principal client state, was even more categorical. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom announced that any democratic opening was impermissible, because it would strengthen “radical elements.”

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama held private discussions with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf potentates, all of whom urged the US to back Mubarak against the Egyptian masses. The fear, both from the semi-feudal monarchs and Washington itself, is that if an uprising succeeds in overthrowing the Egyptian dictator, these other US-backed regimes may fall as well.

Speaking hours before Mubarak’s speech, Obama declared in relation to Egypt, “What is absolutely clear is that we are witnessing history unfold.” He added, “Going forward, we want ... all Egyptians to know that America will continue to do everything that we can to support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy.”

Coptic Christians in Egypt Attacked By Suicide Bomber, Newsmedia on Holiday?

Terrorist attack against Coptic Christians is being downplayed

Steve huntley

We’ve heard outlandish allegations of Islamophobia sweeping America. Not getting nearly as much attention is the bloody persecution of Christians in parts of the Muslim world.

Every report of an Islamist terrorist plot is accompanied by a chorus of warnings against Americans hating or attacking Muslim Americans. Yet, that much-ballyhooed bigotry almost never seems to arise. The latest FBI hate crime statistics, for 2009, found that 8.4 percent of the 1,575 victims of anti-religious crimes were attacked because of anti-Islamic bias. In contrast, 71.9 percent of the victims were Jews.

No doubt acts of intolerance against Muslims can be found, and they should be condemned. But Muslims aren’t fleeing America in fear of their lives like Christians are leaving some Islamic nations.

Open Doors, an organization supporting persecuted Christian churches, asserts 100 million Christians worldwide are targeted for their faith. It found that eight of the top 10 countries that are the most dangerous for Christians to practice their religion are nations with Islamic majorities, including Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. Topping the list was communist North Korea.

New on this year’s Open Doors list is Iraq, to the shame of that nation’s new leadership and of its biggest backer, the United States. More than half of Iraq’s Christian population, numbering 800,000 to 1.4 million before the 2003 U.S. invasion, have fled the country, according to the New York Times.

As the U.S. military footprint has receded, violence against Iraqi Christians has surged. The worst recent attack was an Oct. 31 siege of the Our Lady of Salvation Cathedral in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and two priests. More carnage followed in a wave of bombings and killings aimed at Christians. In one ghastly case, a Christian woman who survived the Baghdad church attack was murdered in her bed.

In another mass attack against Christians, a suicide bomber detonated at a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt, last weekend, killing 21. Compounding an act of Christianity hate with a dose of anti-Semitism, Egypt blamed Israel’s Mossad spy agency for the attack. Israel is one country in the Middle East that has seen its Christian population grow, with Palestinian Christians fleeing persecution in the West Bank ruled by the Palestinian Authority.

Anti-Christian atrocities are far from uncommon. The State Department this week said it is “deeply concerned” by increasing attacks on Christians in the Middle East and Africa, citing Iraq, Egypt and Nigeria. Christmas Eve church attacks and explosions in Nigeria killed 38 people. In Afghanistan, a prosecutor threatened the death penalty against two Afghans who converted to Christianity. Islamic organizations are blamed for multiple attacks on churches in Indonesia. A Somali teenager was murdered last month for converting to Christianity. The Taliban kidnapped and killed three Christian relief workers in Pakistan last summer.

Just being tolerant of Christianity can make you a marked man. A prominent Pakistani governor was assassinated Tuesday by his bodyguard. His crime: Working to repeal blasphemy laws used to persecute minorities and standing up for a Christian woman sentenced to death under those laws. An influential group of more than 500 Muslim clerics and scholars paid tribute to the killer. This organization represents Pakistan’s majority Barelvi sect, which according to the AP, “follows a brand of Islam considered moderate.”

Can anyone imagine the Catholic College of Cardinals justifying murder of non-Christians? Islamist terrorism is more than a bunch of thugs killing people. It’s enabled by radical theology from influential clerics, authoritarian governments using hate of “the other” to manipulate restive populations, and too much silence, or worse, acquiescence in the Muslim world.