06/05/14 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay.
Enough of that.
Our next guest is our friend Adam Morrow.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net, and he lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How have you been?
I've been okay, Scott.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show, and I wonder how the restored democracy in Egypt is going.
Yeah, it's a new era of democracy over here, so everybody's very pleased, obviously.
Just joking.
Well, as your listeners probably know, we just had the election of a new president, new Egyptian president, who was elected for the second presidential election since the 2011 uprising that ousted the Mubarak regime in January 25th, if people can remember that far back.
And we have Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was a former army chief who just recently retired from his post as defense minister to run in Egypt's presidential elections, and he won by a landslide, about 97 percent, against his sole competitor, who was a veteran leftist politician named Hamdeen Sabahi, who you had actually asked me about one or two shows back, I remember.
He was, this guy was basically willing to play the foil to the winning candidate, and basically, I mean, he's come under intense criticism for having done nothing more than simply legitimize an otherwise pro-forma election.
So the mood is highly polarized here.
You've got a lot of people who are celebrating his victory, and then you have a lot of other people who are crushed by the fact that the future that had been promised Egypt following the revolution three years ago seems to have gone up in smoke, and we're back to the same sort of Mubarak regime-type status quo that had prevailed for 30 years before that.
So it's interesting.
I mean, we still have pro-Morsi, you know, pro-Mohamed Morsi, that's the president that was ousted one year ago by the new president-elect.
His supporters are still calling for protests, are still hitting the streets for limited – you're seeing limited protests by pro-Morsi people, and again, Mohamed Morsi, for those who have forgotten, was a Muslim Brotherhood member.
He represented the Muslim Brotherhood, which was deemed by the government in December a terrorist organization with very little evidence, and that group is now being thoroughly suppressed by the authorities.
Of the last figures I heard were 22,000 detainees.
Wow, 22,000, huh?
I did not realize, I wondered about that, but did not realize that it was that many.
Well, again, the numbers game here, and this is a theme that sort of, you know, we run into repeatedly, this whole numbers thing, whether it's the number of prisoners, you know, whether it's the number of detainees, you know, behind bars, whether it's the number of people turning out to a square to support this party or that party, there's this constant, it's always difficult to find out, you know, to get to the bottom, to get true figures, to get real reliable figures on stuff here, because, you know, because everything is so incredibly politicized, the government is denying it.
The government actually has come out repeatedly and said there aren't any political prisoners in Egypt's many detention facilities right now, because they all face criminal charges, so they're not political prisoners, they're criminals, basically, who were arrested for breaking the law that bans protests, or for quote-unquote inciting violence, or for quote-unquote belonging to a band group or a terrorist group.
So that crackdown is still in full swing.
All of the, any kind of media that might have provided, you know, a view other than the party line have all been shut down.
The only channel that's sort of taking, you know, an anti-coup, anti-Sisi line is Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar.
And as you know, I mean, what's interesting, actually, about this whole thing is...
Those guys are still being held, right?
The Al Jazeera journalists have been arrested, and how many of them have been released, any?
I don't know if, I'm sure several were arrested and released subsequently after short periods, but you have a core group of five or six who have been in jail at least since December, some of them even more.
The best-known one is Abdallah Shami, and he was covering the Rabbala, the way a square fit in when it was broken up on August 14th of last year.
And he's been held since then.
And he's actually been on hunger strikes since January, and there's actually, pictures have emerged of him.
He looks emaciated.
He looks like he's on death's doorstep.
And there's actually all this controversy right now, because the government came out with these pictures that claim to show him eating.
It looked like a sort of an attempt to sort of show the world that he wasn't actually on a hunger strike.
So you've got his family coming out saying, no, he's still on a hunger strike, and he's about to die, and we want him released, and we want him to get medical treatment.
And then you've got the government saying, no, no, no, he's not on a hunger strike.
He's eating.
He's fine.
He's in good health.
Nobody's on a hunger strike.
And there's actually been a mass hunger strike.
From what I understand, there's like, of those 22,000, several thousand have now gone on hunger strike.
It's very difficult to confirm any of this stuff, because they're all behind bars, and the government is denying it.
And then we just heard today that actually criminal, there have been reports that some of the criminal inmates in Egyptian prisons, and I don't know what their population is, but apparently some of the criminal inmates have now joined this pro-Morsi hunger strike, which would be an interesting development if it could be confirmed.
So it's crazy.
You've got Sisi about to be inaugurated.
Let me just give a quick recap of the election, which came as such a surprise to everybody.
You're with me, Scott, huh?
Yeah.
I was going to ask you, because Jason Ditz wrote up this great thing, and he's linking here to a Pakistani article, actually, about how there was this overwhelmingly or underwhelmingly hugely low turnout, which really robbed him of all the chess beating he wanted to do about how unanimous it was.
He got a very high percentage of very few people bothered to show up and ratify this coup.
Exactly.
It was actually a huge surprise.
It took everybody by surprise, both sides of the equation were totally taken off guard, because basically you have the situation where ever since the coup 11 months ago, it was on July 3rd, that Morsi was forcibly removed from office and imprisoned, and all of his supporters were, and the entire government was basically locked up.
That was 11 months ago.
And since then, the pro-Army media has been working night and day to push this, to promote Sisi as the savior of the nation.
And they've been pushing this whole line, and he's been portrayed as this incredibly popular national savior who's basically unopposed.
Everybody agrees with what he did.
There's a very small minority, a very small annoying minority that's gradually fading and gradually being stomped out.
But all of Egypt, they're constantly referring to the Shab al-Mursi, or the Egyptian people, as being behind this guy 100% to the hilt.
And I think what happened is they kind of ended up believing their own propaganda, and just sort of assumed, just started believing in themselves that this guy enjoyed universal support.
No, that would have been a great answer for my previous guest, who was asking me what I think the effect of all this new media is, and I think that you nailed it right there, in spite of an almost total ownership of the TV media in Egypt, and despite the fact that there's still, I guess, a relatively small proportion of people who have online communication or maybe satellite TV to check out other sources, you still have a consensus, it sounds like, among the great silent majority of Egyptians, that they do not approve of what's going on here.
Right, exactly.
They're not left with only that one narrative to believe in.
They've found others.
That's true.
Yep.
Alright, now I'm sorry that I have to interrupt you here again, again and again and again, but we gotta take this break.
It's the great Adam Morrow, he's a reporter out of Egypt, he writes for IPSnews.net, and we'll be right back about the military coup and relations with America and Israel and the rest in a second.
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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show now.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show, I'm talking with Adam Morrow, he's a reporter for IPSnews.net, interpress service, lives in Cairo, Egypt, and we're talking about the new, again, fake democracy, military dictatorship of the country there, what seems to be the completion of the counter-revolution from the Arab Spring of 2011, and now the whole thing is such a complicated mess.
Adam, if you give me just a second to try to oversimplify some things for people who need a little bit of catching up here.
America backed the sock puppet dictator there, really they backed Sadat even before Mubarak, but then they backed Mubarak for 30-something years, and in 2011 there was a revolution in Tunisia, and the people of Egypt as one said, man, you can do that?
And they went outside and they overthrew the dictator, and it was about as simple as that.
It was everyone in Egypt who wasn't an officer wanted to overthrow damned Mubarak, and that was all the liberals, all the Muslim Brotherhood, and everybody, all the nothings, all the just regular people.
This was the consensus, they had to do it, and it's true that the State Department had helped back some of these more liberal groups, and that kind of thing, and the NGOs, they played their part, although I sure don't think what they wanted was what ended up happening with the breakout of the mass protests of 2011, and it was pretty transparent, and I don't think a fake narrative, it was pretty transparent that Hillary Clinton and the US government were doing everything they could to keep Mubarak in power until the last minute, and then when they finally had to admit defeat there, they wanted to have Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret torture police, replace him, and the people of Egypt just said absolutely not.
They held elections, and the two major organized groups were the liberals on the left, generally speaking, and the Muslim Brotherhood on the right, and the Muslim Brotherhood won the parliamentary elections, and then they won the presidency, and then instead of the liberals working with them to make a more or less left-right two-party civilian government with the military as its add-on, the left blew it, and they refused to stand for democracy and law and regular elections at all, and when the military called them out in the street, they basically shot themselves in the face and did exactly what the military said and provided the pretext for, it was ridiculous the way they pulled this off last summer, almost a year ago now, 11 months ago now, where they said, oh, look, some liberal protesters in Tahrir Square, it's just like last time, you know what that means, we have to overthrow the government now, and that was overthrow the democratically elected leader and replace him.
So, assuming that I didn't screw up anything real bad, oh, and then they sentenced a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood leaders to death, and et cetera, et cetera, and it was a horrible military coup, and they killed more than a thousand people in the streets, okay, there.
So now here we are, almost a year after that, if you need to correct my screw-up of anything in the narrative there, please do, but otherwise, I would beg you to address for us, Adam, the role of the United States government in bringing the military back to power and the overthrowing of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I have read and heard from very informed people who think that actually the U.S. took a let's go ahead and wait and see what happens kind of attitude, and that the Egyptian military said screw you, we're going to do whatever we want, and went ahead and did whatever they want.
On the other hand, it would seem more obvious that the empire just canceled the Arab Spring and hired the generals to crush the democracy and move forward from there, so I'll now turn it over to you, sir, thank you.
Well, just one thing before we reach that, Andrew, the point that you mentioned about it being sort of a unanimous, 2011, about the January 2011 uprising, being sort of so unanimous and it was everybody in Egypt that had enough of Mubarak and they threw him out, that is a bit of an oversimplification, that's a bit of sort of buying into the myth of the 2011 revolution.
It wasn't quite as unanimous as that, and what we have learned, you know, what the observer has learned in the three years since that revolution is that the Mubarak regime had actually, you know, got its claws very, very deeply into the country, and that includes large, very, very wide swaths of the population.
It wasn't quite as unanimous as all that, and I think there were probably a good 30%, and that's like a conservative estimate, that were actually quite, you know, that were against the revolution from the beginning, who had a decent deal under Mubarak.
You know what I'm saying?
Who were either involved in some kind of system of patronage, or it was the entire real economy of the country, right?
People who were invested in the status quo, people who were invested in the status quo and didn't want to see it get rocked.
And let's not also forget that in 2012, it wasn't really so much a brotherhood versus liberal thing.
I mean, the liberals have always been in the minority.
That's something people tend to forget also, because the liberals get so much media exposure.
People tend to forget that Egypt is still a very conservative country, it's a majority Muslim country, and these liberals that you always hear about, you know, this new generation of Facebook-savvy youth, and this whole thing, those kind of people, you're really talking about less than 10%, and I think that's actually a very liberal estimate.
Sure.
Well, I mean, the thing of it, too, is that it's such a very overused term, and it can mean so many different things, I guess.
When I think of it, and this may still be oversimplifying and including too many people who really don't belong in the group, but I think of it more as people who would emphasize secularism in government, so that we don't have to have a big civil war between Muslims and Copts over who controls the government, because it's not a religious government, that kind of thing.
Right.
So that's not, that's a very minimal definition of liberalism, but I guess I'll take it, right?
Sure.
Sure.
But let's not also forget the 20...
Is that still just 10% of people who want a secular state, rather than an Islamist state?
Again, it's incredibly difficult to see your numbers, because that secular elite that you're describing controls the media, especially after the coup, when you had 12 or 15 Islamic channels all shut down, all Islamic media has now been completely shut down.
So the only people controlling the airwaves right now are the business class, which is unanimously liberal.
So again, they seem like a much larger demographic, just because they have such a loud voice, just because, a monopoly really, a monopoly on communication.
So people tend to exaggerate their numbers, when in fact, I mean, again, it comes down to your definition of liberal as well.
And if you just mean secular, then yeah, like 10% maybe, something like that, I mean, at the risk of, you know, at the risk of, you know, give or take 5%.
Well, and I sure don't mean atheist, you know, I just mean would emphasize, you know, not Islamist government, even if some might be really, really, really into Sunni Islam, but still not want it to be the basis of state power, right?
Well, let's not forget also, the Coptic Christians are said to account for roughly maybe 8 to 12%.
And again, that number also is incredibly politicized.
It's not certain, you know, so it's also highly unreliable.
But you know, the traditional estimate has been like 8%, 10%, like some people will say as high as 15%, but I don't think it's that many.
So that, you know, there's an 8% right there that would be, that would presumably be opposed to, you know, Islamic rule per se.
But I also wanted to mention the 2012 presidential election, which in your recap, it sounded a little bit like it was down to the Muslim Brotherhood on the right and the liberals on the left.
If you remember, it was Ahmed Shafiq.
It was the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi facing off against Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq.
Right.
So the two primary forces that you have in the country...
Yeah, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the liberals were the major competitors necessarily, but that they could have been if they had decided, okay, we got goal one, which is something like legitimate regular elections here, and the beginnings of a real civilian government, not one where Mubarak is just pretending to be a civilian, right?
But they didn't, they refused to participate in the damn victory, and they just sat on their asses out in the square.
And so then it came to the only two parties, the only two interests left in the country, the military and its, you know, cronies and buddies that you described, and the Muslim Brotherhood as their opposite.
Right?
Right, right.
The liberal leftist forces never got beyond the sort of street mobilization phase, kind of like what you said.
They never got into the whole electoral process, they never sort of, you know, and it was kind of lazy.
It's easy, you know, it's easy to just hit the streets every, you know, to just constantly hit the streets and shout slogans and that sort of thing, and to constantly organize marches and all that sort of thing.
It's much more difficult to campaign, you know, to like field electoral campaigns, and to like get your, you know, articulate your ideology to people, go out around the country and try to, you know, and try to, you know, try to win people over to your ideology and that sort of thing in hopes that your party will eventually get their vote.
You know, that's much more difficult.
You know, that inquires sitting down and thinking and planning and organizing.
And again, for these liberal leftists and the so-called revolutionary groups, it was just much easier to just constantly hit the streets.
And that's what the June 30th demonstration against Morsi was about, you know, like, I agree with what you said before, like, rather than taking them on, and they were already like losing popularity because of mistakes Morsi was making.
The smart play would have been to make them pay at the ballot box.
Right.
Exactly.
I mean, my thing is, I got no reason to love the Muslim Brotherhood whatsoever.
My only thing is, it seems like the liberals, what they should have done was give their legitimacy to the system that elected the Muslim Brotherhood.
That this is a new, this is a cut above the old fake democracy that kept reelecting Mubarak.
This actually has a little bit of people power to it.
Let's continue with this system, and then we'll win some and we'll lose some.
And I'm a libertarian.
And that means I'm an individualist.
And that means in some circumstances, I'm deadly opposed to democracy, you know, 100% opposed to democracy.
It's not my highest value.
My highest value is liberty.
But compared to a military dictatorship and a completely military run economy, if the people of Egypt are ever to have a modicum of liberty at all, step one is a regular process of civilian elections and, you know, something, you know, work hard on trying to make the law apply to the state.
I mean, that's what it's a it's a crappy ideal compared to real freedom.
But that's the the ideals of the West, right?
Is that, you know, when the government, a government doesn't have any more right to murder anybody than anybody else does that kind of thing.
Declaration of Independence.
Scott, it's it's important to understand, though, also how deeply entrenched and how deeply infiltrated by the intelligence services and the whole political scene in Egypt is, you know, all of these parties, all of these political groups.
I mean, it's well known by people that belong to these groups, but there are going to be infiltrators.
There are going to be attempts by by the mohabbat or the, you know, the security services to get to get into to get the people inside these groups.
And I think in many cases, the leaders of these groups, you know, you had a lot of idealistic followers, but I think you had leaders of these groups that were actually at the end of the day taking their orders from the deep state.
That's that's my take on it.
And that's why, you know, that's why it was so easy to mobilize these forces against Morsi when it was in the long term was a stupid, you know, was a stupid idea.
I think a lot of these people were manipulated.
I think a lot of these groups that called themselves revolutionary, etc., were actually being run by by the intelligence agencies.
What about the American role?
Because, you know, one narrative would be that the Egyptian military is simply a division of the U.S. Army.
That's all it is.
Don't be ridiculous.
On the other hand, hey, people are individuals.
And maybe if the Saudis bribe them to have a different point of view, they'd have a different point of view or who knows what.
Right.
So what's the level of cooperation anymore?
Obviously, I know we're still selling them and giving them all the weapons in the world.
No question about that.
So we don't need to waste time on that.
But what about, you know, the working relationship between the American military and the military dictatorship pretend democracy in Egypt right now and and particularly in regards even if you got to speculate, go ahead and call it that and tell us about what you think America's role was in the coup last summer.
And then as long as I'm keeping you over time here, too, I'd like to talk about Israel and Rafa if you have another couple of minutes after that.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
Absolutely.
And I think it definitely it's a very interesting subject is what role exactly, if any, did America have to the U.S. have in the in the coup?
The Washington played dumb.
You know, they pretended like they were they were taken totally by surprise by it.
What's for sure is that it was quarterbacked in the region.
I think the whole thing was sort of cooked up and executed and financed in the region.
And we've talked about this before a lot, especially from the Gulf.
You have this access of Saudi and Kuwait and the United United Arab Emirates in particular has been extremely vocal about it, about its dislike of the Muslim Brotherhood recently, you know, in the last couple of years.
And I think those states were deeply freaked out.
They were like traumatized by by the fall of Mubarak and the subsequent rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And they totally flipped them out.
And they were they they decided that they were prepared to spend tens of billions of dollars to reverse this thing, you know, to basically do whatever they had to do to reverse this thing.
And, you know, Saudi is definitely had a lot to do, like funding a lot of the counterrevolutionary activity.
A lot of it.
You had Ahmed Shafi who admitted to the press that he helped coordinate the June 30 protests from from a command head from from, you know, an operations room in Abu Dhabi.
So the actual operational side, I think, was definitely all sort of in-house, like in region was done in the region.
And I think the U.S. knew about it and just let it happen.
I think that's how it worked.
The U.S. sort of, you know, I don't think they were tight.
Of course, they knew that was what was being cooked up.
I think they let it happen.
And then, you know, you can just see by their reaction and the reaction of the European Union as well, which is also something that's just been absolutely incredible in allowing this to happen, in sort of not objecting to, you know, to a military coup against a democratically elected government.
They've been very I don't think the U.S. has even called it a coup until now.
I don't think they've ever actually referred to it as a coup until now.
And then you have the European Union giving a very half-hearted, giving very half-hearted approval to to the election that just happened.
I don't know if you noticed that.
But you actually had an EU commission was here.
And I was saying to myself, like, are you I mean, surely the United Nations, surely the European Union isn't going to isn't going to give a stamp of approval to this ridiculous election that just happened where this guy got 97 percent and, you know, campaigners for the for the for the for the only, you know, for the only other candidate were literally being arrested during the days of the of the election was going on.
I mean, it was it was absolutely ridiculous.
And the EU, sure enough, they came out and they said they hemmed and hawed a lot.
But they but they ultimately said it was, you know, it was it was a fair election.
We know Jason Dixon, antiwar.com again, had a great piece two days ago about how the Americans, of course, just raced to put their rubber stamp on the election in Egypt.
At the same time, they're condemning Assad, who's got a smaller margin of victory going on.
Right, exactly.
And you also see what the Ukraine situation I mean, you see a lot of hypocrisy.
A lot of people have pointed out that the sort of the double standards that are applied.
But I heard from a quite well-informed source that EU diplomats were saying months before the election that they planned they were they knew that they were they were going to they were going to approve this thing no matter what, which is pretty shocking, because given that they're supposed to stand for, you know, the Europe's supposed to stand for, you know, democracy and human rights, et cetera.
Not more like the interests of their government and their governments and their government's vested interests.
That's just how that goes.
All right.
Now, so what about Israel?
Because, of course, Hamas is a break off of the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so they began to warm up relations a little bit and open up that Rafah border crossing, which is the third wall, basically, of Israel's siege of the Gaza Strip there.
The millions.
This is under more than you're talking about.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
The Muslim Brotherhood before they were overthrown.
So I guess, you know, this is your opportunity to tell us the bad news that can't possibly be good.
Well, just to refresh everybody's memory, I mean, so many things have happened in the last couple of years.
It's easy to forget.
But but Morsi actually took and again, it was hard to it was it was difficult to even tell this because the media was so against him.
They didn't.
They were very well.
The media was very reluctant to report anything positive that he did.
So you almost had to, like, read between the lines to figure this stuff out.
But what he did was he took these initial tentative steps.
He started easing restrictions.
He started keeping the border open for longer hours.
All of these tentative steps towards basically opening Rafah, opening the Gaza Strip to permanent, you know, opening, opening the border permanently, because, as you know, now it's completely closed off to the outside world.
The Gaza Strip is until now.
I mean, the population is it's the largest, the world's largest prison, basically.
No one can go in or out.
And Egypt is complicit in that by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed.
Morsi was taking steps to undo that.
Within two weeks or three weeks of these tentative steps that he was taking, you had a spectacular terrorist attack on very close to the border in which 16 Egyptian border guards were killed by unknown elements who have never whose identities have never been determined.
And when that happened, there was huge pressure that the border was immediately closed again.
And there were all these pressures to immediately close it for fear of, you know, there was a lot of talk about that this was the work of jihadists coming from, you know, coming from jihadist terrorists coming from Gaza.
Whenever anything bad happens in Egypt, especially in Sinai, there's always this tendency to blame Gaza.
Oh, they must be Palestinians coming from Gaza.
And this happened right near the border.
So they must be from Gaza when, in fact, you know, just any modicum of thought or critical analysis, anybody would be would realize that this would be the worst possible thing the Gazans could do just as they're about to open the border, you know, on a permanent basis to then go and kill 16 Egyptian border guards.
I mean, why?
I mean, again, I mean, who benefits from that?
I mean, what would they possibly have to gain from that except the inevitable, which is, you know, the border, the border was slammed shut again and has been has been remained closed ever since, more or less, with occasional exceptions.
Now, after the after the coup, it got even worse, because not only did they keep the Rafah border closed, but they started destroying all of the tunnels that the Gazans have been using to import their raw to import their, you know, vital commodities from the Sinai Peninsula.
So all of those, most of those have been destroyed at this point.
Again, it's hard to get exact figures.
I've heard some of them are still intact, but the vast majority of the tunnel network is now destroyed, putting got putting the entire Gaza Strip, of which there are two million inhabitants, I think, in, you know, in an even worse, in an even worse situation than they were before, you know.
Total captivity.
Yeah, it's it's nothing else like it on the rest of the planet where you have a big geographical area in which people aren't allowed to leave, you know, and most of them are what we call minors, as in the minority, because I don't know, for whatever reason, maybe just because the Israelis killed so many fighting age males or I don't know exactly how that works.
They've got a majority population under 18 now, which means that really Hamas is just the most powerful prison gang inside this juvenile prison that the Israelis have created.
No government at all.
Another thing to remember about Morsi, which a lot of people forget also, is in November of 2012, you had this exchange, you had you had sort of this conflict between Hamas and Israel, if you remember, that looked like it was about to evolve into a caste led type operation, by which I mean, if you remember, 2008, 2009, the caste led 21 day caste led operation in which 1500 Palestinians were killed, it looked like it was going to turn into something like that at the time.
And Morsi, you know, sent his prime minister to the Gaza Strip, you know, in order to show solidarity and ended up brokering a ceasefire that sort of stopped the violence.
I actually interviewed an Israeli activist who was working with the Muslim Brotherhood to work with the Gazans with Hamas on that.
Okay, so that's a great example, that's a great example of, you know, a big foreign policy achievement that, you know, that Morsi scored during his time, you know, and people now look back and they're like, oh, he was such a disaster, he didn't do anything good, he was such a failure, everything he did was messed up.
But if you look back, I mean, there, you know, he did have some, there were some things and that was one of them that was that was one quite spectacular, you know, foreign policy achievement that he that he managed to pull off and it probably ended up saving hundreds of hundreds of lives as well, you know, and Can you tell me about the difference in the police state?
I know that the executive branch of the government basically wouldn't do a thing under Morsi's authority as far as, you know, providing basic policing in the streets and, you know, water and power services and these kinds of things in order to undermine him.
But I wonder about the secret police and the torture and the extrajudicial detention and all these kinds of things, the various states of emergency law, and for that matter, the fear on the street of being caught dissenting, that kind of thing.
Can you rate these things from one to 10 through the different eras for us here?
And real quick, we're already over time, way over time.
Yeah, sure.
It's way worse than it's ever been.
I've lived in Egypt almost 18 years exactly now.
And it's I mean, I've never seen this kind of fear.
I mean, you've probably seen that they're now talking about monitoring the monitoring social media.
I mean, that's the latest thing is that they're basically said they're threatening to monitor social media, pass laws where they can monitor social media.
People are afraid, you know, people who, you know, intelligent people who know this is wrong have kept quiet for fear of, you know, there's been this mob mentality where anybody who dissents.
And it's not just like a political thing.
I know people who at their jobs, at their jobs, who said, you know, I don't feel like voting.
I don't want to go vote for this guy.
I'm not convinced.
And who have been savagely attacked, I mean, verbally, of course, savagely attacked by their coworkers and accused of being, you know, American agents and Brotherhood sleeper cells and all different sorts of crazy hysteria.
It's kind of a form of hysteria that's been promoted by the media.
I think that's funny, too, that the conspiracy theory is that America is behind the Muslim Brotherhood and it's the heroic Egyptian military that all seven billion people in the world know for a fact has been in America's back pocket this whole time, who's protecting the people from America and their Muslim Brotherhood terrorist agents.
Ha.
Oh, yeah.
They've they've totally co-opted the anti-America line.
The regime here has totally co-opted that.
And absolutely, the Muslim Brotherhood was an American plot.
And they exactly and they they stuck it to America and the European Union, basically, by telling them to go to hell.
We're going to we're going to hold our own democratic elections and see 97 percent of the people in totally fair elections have picked this military guy and he's going to like save the country.
So and a lot of people choose to live in denial.
You know, a lot of people sort of like I can tell they know in their hearts that this is just going to Egypt is going to go back into the you know, back into the same stagnation that it was for 30 years before the people just want to believe people just want to believe that it's going to get better.
And they've just sort of many people just sort of just, you know, grit their teeth and just tell themselves the thing that this guy is actually going to turn Egypt into a first world country.
Well, thank God, the result, the last results of the elections that just took place last week, which saw an unbelievably low turnout there, they're claiming it was 47 percent of the electorate.
Independent figures are putting it closer to 10 or 15 percent.
So.
Yeah.
Well, so now that has that that has basically exploded the myth that has exploded the myth of of being sort of national savior.
So it's interesting.
The dynamic has changed just within the last couple of days.
So we're still going to have to see how that pans out.
Well, with what's happened to the Al Jazeera guys, are you worried about your position as a journalist with independent things to say and write about in Cairo right now?
I've kept a low profile.
I mean, I will tell you, I sort of kept a low profile, as you know, I haven't I haven't been filing many stories, you know.
But yeah, definitely.
Absolutely.
It's you can easily be you know, they can just like not renew your visa.
You know, they can just ask you to leave if they they can, you know, if they see that you're if you're producing anything critical on Egypt.
Absolutely.
And I hate to see you kicked out of there, but I sure prefer that to seeing you end up in a cell like these Al Jazeera guys.
Well, that's another.
You know, I kind of avoid the protests.
I'm not one of these sort of combat journalists that need to be right in the thick of the action or anything.
But but there's also just sort of sort of general sentiment on the street.
Like for for for example, I you know, I've got I've got friends who every Friday do do morning walks around old old districts of Cairo.
And they've been doing this for a couple of years with without ever without ever having any problem or any harassment or anything like that.
And just the last time they did it, they were actually confronted by some some dude who who who managed to call a a like an intelligence guy and some kind of intelligence officer or something who came and asked them all where they were from and what they were doing in Egypt and asked them to see their we have to see their papers and things like that.
And stuff like that for Egypt is very alien.
You know, Egypt has been very foreigner friendly, has been very tourist friendly, as you know, tourism has long been one of the main foreign currency earners here.
So it's always been a place in which, you know, you would you would see foreigners in abundance, you know, even long term people who choose to live here, you know, expatriates who choose to live here in the long term.
That's all changing.
That's all changing.
You don't see foreigners here.
It's becoming a much more sort of inward looking xenophobic country, unfortunately.
And that is and that is reflected on the street, you know, where there is, you know, you can go there is a vibe these days that didn't used to exist before.
That's not as friendly towards towards outsiders as they used to be.
And, you know, I'll tell you one last thing very quickly, Scott.
Also, it's funny, because whenever I would get it, you know, whenever I would get into taxis with with Egyptians, and I would say that I was American, they would inevitably have the same question would always come up, it would be like, why?
You know, we have no problem with American people.
But why is the Egyptian?
Why is the American government always backing Israel?
That was always the question I would get, you know, to which I sort of had a pro forma reply that I would always come back with.
But what's funny now is, these days, now you get a very similar question from the same taxi drivers.
But instead of asking, why does America support Israel?
They now ask, why does America support the Muslim Brotherhood?
It's interesting that, you know, these people are so unpopular, and yet they won the parliamentary and presidential elections.
So was it just dissatisfaction with the military dictatorship up to that point?
Or who is it that supports these guys?
I mean, we've talked about them before.
It's my characterization that they seem sort of like Pat Robertson, Republicans, right?
Like pretty right wing religious Republicans.
But basically, that's all they are, because they're all old and rich enough that they're not radical, right?
They got jobs in the states and things.
They might be in a minority, but they've been organized politically for so long that they really know how to make that minority pay.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I mean, they may have a minority in that they're 20 or 30 percent, and by this, I mean pro-Islamist.
But because they were the only, because the Muslim Brotherhood represented the only real opposition in Egypt under Mubarak for all those decades.
They're the only ones with sort of the political savvy and the, you know, the inspiration and maybe even the vision to, like, get out the vote, to be able to mobilize people.
And that's one of the reasons why turnout was so low in last week's election, was because the Muslim Brotherhood called for a total boycott.
You know, so I'm not saying, I'm not saying they were solely responsible for the low turnout, but I mean, the absence of the Islamist vote made a huge difference, made a very, very noticeable difference to the point where people, you actually had pro-Army media personalities cursing and insulting the Egyptian people, because the polls were empty.
You actually had these guys on air cursing at the Egyptian public.
And one guy went so far as to say, look, if you're not going to vote, why don't we just get, take Morsi out of the prison and put him back in the presidential palace?
You know?
I mean, it was, they lost it.
They lost it.
And the polls were really, really empty.
I mean, the media itself was showing pictures of empty polls.
They couldn't, you know, they were totally taken by surprise.
It was quite remarkable.
It was an incredible thing to watch.
It was, for me, it was incredibly gratifying.
And now, how does that compare to Mubarak's various elections?
Because he would run periodically and wear a suit and tie and not a green uniform, right?
Call himself president instead of el presidente.
Yeah, I mean, none of the Egyptians that I know personally would ever vote in any of those.
I mean, everybody knew that those were entirely, well, you know, that's not entirely true because the Muslim Brotherhood would actually frequently manage to pull off, you know, would actually put, manage to get people in parliament.
In fact, in 2005, they managed to get 88.
They managed to win 88 seats of around 450 seats in parliament, which was quite something.
But that's a good question.
It would be interesting to sort of, like, look back at coverage of the Mubarak elections in comparison to the more recent ones.
Needless to say, they were nothing like what we saw in 2012, where you really did, I mean, you could look back and see the images back then when you really did have lines of people stretching for blocks to vote.
And it was, the difference in 2012 was people really didn't know the outcome.
That was what was so exciting about 2012.
Nobody knew what was going to happen.
It was open.
It was up for grabs, you know?
It was for the first time people didn't know what the results were going to be, as opposed to last week's election, where everybody knew from the very beginning that this was just basically a referendum on Sisi, rather than a, you know, rather than a competitive race between more than one candidate.
All right, well, so much for the Arab Spring for now, although, you know, a pretty big precedent has been set about the power of the people to throw these things off, so it'll come again.
For now, this thing isn't over.
Patrick Coburn said, you know, in January of 2011, Patrick Coburn said, listen, this Arab Spring is going to take decades, all right?
Let's not anybody get excited.
And I think it's always the right thing to listen to what he says.
Sure.
And the regional implications, like, we didn't really touch on that today at all, but there are definitely regional implications.
There are regional implications for the Gulf.
There are regional implications for North Africa, especially Libya, which shares a long porous border with Egypt, and it has its own sort of version of June 30th going on right now with the appearance of this Khalifa Haftar, this general, this renegade general character.
And it even will have repercussions in Europe, I think, because from what I understand is you actually have individual European states coming out and very angry at the fact that the European Union approved the election.
You actually have individual European countries coming out and saying, like, why did we approve that?
That is going to impact our credibility of, you know, of guarantors, of democratic guarantors in the future.
So, I mean, the repercussions of this thing are going to be...
And there have been repercussions even in the United States, where you seem to have internist and, you know, divisions going on within the White House and Congress over events in Egypt.
So we haven't seen the end of this.
You know, it's still playing out.
The Gulf states, the three Gulf states that I mentioned earlier, are all still ganging up on Qatar, desperately trying to stop the Jazeera transmissions, which...
So, you know, here's the thing that I'm a very American-centric chauvinist type, I guess, man.
My primary interest in all of this is, you know, the people who are willing to kill themselves to kill Americans.
And it seems like this whole entire adventure is the greatest propaganda coup for Ayman al-Zawahiri and the al-Qaeda movement, such as it is in the world, that they could possibly hope for.
Here's a guy, this has been Laden's partner in al-Qaeda, now it's supposed a leader anyway from Pakistan.
He's been saying all along that the Muslim Brotherhood are sellouts because they participate in this democratic process nonsense, which is completely, you know, forbidden and corrupt and Western and whatever.
And here the Muslim Brotherhood actually won.
And just as he predicted, or would have predicted, I'm sure did predict, the Westerners will never, and the militarists, they'll never let Islamists come to power in a democracy and win and stay in power.
They'll just cancel it.
And just like they did back in Algeria in 1993, and just like they try to do in Gaza, and just like they do any time Islamists win anywhere, and they think they can possibly try to take it back.
Right.
Especially in a country as pivotal as Egypt, especially in a country as...
In Egypt, which is the center of everything, right.
So all he has to do is just say, see, I told you.
And so for people who agree with him at all about having some kind of Sunni Islamist state as the cure for all this imperialism and, you know, satellite in the empire-ism, and all the rest of the madness, he just gives the al-Qaeda guys more credibility as the means to that end.
We're here, if Americans wanted to nurture anything like some kind of moderate Islamist democratic type rule, it might have made sense to get behind the Muslim Brotherhood, like in the accusations, or at least the system, again, that brought them to power, at least for a while, but nope.
And so, again, it's almost like, and I joke, and I know it's not really that funny or anything, but I'm a reverse 9-11 truther.
I think that the Republican and the Democratic parties are the secret agents of Osama bin Laden.
Rather than him working for them, they work for him, and everything they do, from invading and occupying Afghanistan, to invading and occupying Iraq, to invading and bombing and overthrowing Qaddafi and backing the Mujahideen in Syria, and everything is exactly what Osama bin Laden would have them do.
They've only disappointed him for not bombing the Ayatollahs out of power in Tehran yet.
So what about that?
Well, with the shit I've seen, Scott, I wouldn't rule it out, man.
I mean, I think that, well, I don't know.
I would assume that he's already said this.
I should go and check out some of the war blogs and see if Zawahiri has addressed the coup from last summer.
He must have, right?
I don't really follow the Qaddafi statements much, but just because I'm so focused on sort of events in Egypt.
But I know he just came out with a statement basically urging, I believe urging Egyptians to attack the military or to rise up against the military or something like that.
But this is another thing from the American point of view, why it's such a bad idea to sort of let the new Egyptian, Egypt's new regime get away with this.
Because like you said, I mean, you basically had an example of a very moderate Islamist group coming to power democratically and then being crushed and being sort of unfairly accused of terrorism, or at least being accused of terrorism with the lack of evidence.
And basically forced into this sort of, you know, being forced into basically turning the whole situation, turning it from sort of an electoral one into an existential one.
You know, I mean, if this is the lesson that Islamists are going to learn, that even if, like you said, it's basically, it basically vindicates this hardline approach that democracy and the ballot box are basically for the naive, you know, entirely vindicates that position.
So I mean, it seems like just an incredibly stupid thing to do, because, you know, any one Islamist at this point, at this point is going to look to the Egyptian example and say to themselves, you know, this is, so what's the point?
You know, what's the point of, of contesting elections if we're just going to be overthrown by the army and not just overthrown, but imprisoned and tortured and murdered?
Right.
And of course, it's ridiculous to me to even think that it, it's ridiculous to me to even think that it matters whether Zawahiri says so or not.
Any idiot anywhere between Morocco and Pakistan could tell you the same thing.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Yeah.
No, it's unbelievably dangerous and careless and stupid from all, you know, by all, all concerned parties, whether it's the Egyptian liberals or the, or Washington or the, the Gulf, you know, these Gulf states whose only seem to care about preserving their own hides, you know, preserve, preserving their own, you know, their own, their rule, the rule in their respective countries.
Because I think to them, the brotherhood, you know, represented a, what was dangerous to them about the brotherhood is the fact that, I mean, it was a force for political reform, but it was, it was also, it was also a credible, it also had a, you know, has a credible, it has a credible Islamist credentials, you know, has Islamist credentials.
And that, I think, freaked them out, totally, totally freaked them out.
And they just reached the point when they saw Morsi take a, you know, win the presidency with more Muslim brotherhood come to power in Cairo, they basically said they, I'm sure they were, a meeting took place at one point and they were like, one year, they said to themselves, one year, this guy cannot, people cannot get used to this.
Right.
This guy has to be gone in one year.
Isn't it funny too how they, they will outright arm, I mean, pretty much outright arm Islamist warriors in Syria to defeat and overthrow and crush Assad and all his allies and seize power.
But they will not tolerate Islamists winning elections anywhere.
Right?
The thing is, Scott, something to bear in mind, something important to bear in mind on that point, though, a lot of these groups that have Islamist sounding names and that are supported by Saudi and stuff like that, I don't, I don't, I think it's a mistake to assume that they're all actually Islamist, meaning that they're, you know, pious Muslims who want to institute Islamic law.
I think a lot of these outfits are straight up mercenaries who are just given, who just are given Islamic, Islamist sounding names and that sort of thing to give them this sort of veneer of cover.
And another, another way that the media can sort of, you know, tarnish the image of Islam, you know, another way they can link the idea of Islam with terrorism, which has become, you know, this ubiquitous now.
Well, you know, Flint Leverett was on the show yesterday.
I think it's important to realize that a lot of those groups probably aren't actually Islamists, but that they're mercenaries.
Well, yeah, but, you know, I don't know, sent there exactly by who and recruited from where.
I mean, it's not your average mercenary that goes around crucifying people and goes around cutting people's heads off and doing suicide bombings.
And believe me, it's, it's, that's, that's not, if that's not Islamic, that is not Islamic behavior.
No, no, no.
Blowing up a market.
It's the behavior of somebody who's been completely inculcated in something and, and the inculcators can call it whatever they want, but they sure don't call it Christianity or Hinduism.
They call it, you know, purifying the land.
You know, a lot of this has to do with, as Patrick Coburn has written about, the Saudi sheiks who do nothing but demonize Shiites as these inhuman people who must be eradicated from the earth all damn day long.
And how this is a lot of what's going on here.
This is one of the things keeping America safe at this point is the ISIS and Al-Nusra coups in Syria right now are so obsessed with murdering innocent Shia that they haven't gotten back to us yet.
So I'm not saying that all Islamists are suicide bombers, but I'm saying these guys being deployed here now, they're, most of them are volunteers and most of them are volunteers from their local mosque, everywhere from just like during the Iraq war, from Libya, from Jordan, from Saudi, from Syria, right?
It's not like they were all recruited in some mass army campaign with tax money from, you know, Jihadistan, which doesn't exist somewhere.
Right.
And let's not forget that this whole Sunni-Shia divide is a very new, is a very recent development.
You know, people, you know, you talk to people and they'll be like, oh, thousands of years of animosity.
And that's simply not true.
They've coexisted peacefully for thousands of years.
This whole Sunni-Shia divide stuff only started after the invasion, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's a Saudi-Iranian divide first, and then everybody likes to dress up their politics with, you know, religiosity for legitimacy.
And so it takes on all those other colors too, unfortunately, right?
And it's the same thing with the Americans, they all take a knee and pray before they go out killing people on patrol.
Did I lose you?
Oh, I lost him.
Maybe I interrupted him one too many times.
Anyway, that was the great Adam Morrow, everybody.
He's at IPSnews.net, IPSnews.net, interpress service.
And we're way over time for the end of the show anyway.
Thanks for listening.
Hey y'all, Scott here.
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