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Welcome back to the show.
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All right.
Our first guest on the show today is Adam Morrow from InterPress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
IPSNews.net.
And he writes from Cairo, Egypt.
Welcome to the show, Adam.
How are you doing?
I'm doing okay, Scott.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us again.
Sure, my pleasure.
So how's things in Cairo now?
Things seem to have calmed down.
We had about five days, five or six days of sort of sporadic clashes going on in the Tahrir Square vicinity, which is located just meters away from the U.S. Embassy.
So there was a sort of nexus of sort of confrontation going on in that part of the city, very localized.
But as of yesterday, that had all sort of petered out.
So things are relatively quiet right now.
Well, that's good.
Now, I guess, I don't know, how bad did the riots get there?
Was anybody killed in Egypt?
Well, I heard reports that the two people were killed.
There were a couple hundred injuries, most of them light, you know, tear gas inhalation and that sort of thing.
But, yeah, certainly no more than, you know, there weren't dozens killed or anything like that.
There were only one or two people who might have been killed.
Well, now, apparently the American, you know, professional right-wing types are flipping out on how long it took Morsi to tell people to chill out and that, you know, this is what happens when you let them Muslims run their own countries.
Right.
Well, I would say to that that, as we've talked about before, Morsi and by extension the Muslim Brotherhood is so embattled right now in meaning that, you know, that it's actually in power, it's being criticized from every single corner.
And they know, like some of their counterparts elsewhere in the region, they know they can't really make one false move.
They know that if they make a mistake, if they issue a statement that's inaccurate or politically incorrect somehow, they know that everybody is going to jump on top of it and, you know, they'll come under intense criticism for something if they get something wrong or if they make the wrong move.
So they're being extremely careful.
I'm sure they're, like, making sure they have all their facts correct.
You know, they're probably discussing it among themselves before they issue statements.
I mean, in their defense, Yanni, they might have taken a long time to do it.
But at the same time, it's such an incredibly sensitive situation because it actually involves, you know, Egypt-U.S. relations and other things like that that I think they've just made sure to, like, you know, cross all of their T's and dot all their I's and everything.
Plus the idea that it's very difficult to sort of get to the bottom.
We still, until now, people don't know exactly what the motivations of the Libya attack were, whether it was something planned in advance, whether it was something that came amid these demonstrations.
So they need to make sure they have all the information.
It's traditionally difficult to get information from hotspots like this right now, especially now.
They just want to make sure they have everything, all their facts right before they issue a statement.
So I would say that in their defense, but that's probably the reason why it took them so long.
Well, yeah, and as far as that goes, too, I want to have my facts right.
I read at least a couple of places.
I think that there was a group to the right, a group of Salafists to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood who held a protest to mark the anniversary of September 11th at the embassy.
And that...
What, you mean to pay tribute to Osama bin Laden, you mean?
To pay tribute to the attack, to celebrate the attack?
I don't know.
Or maybe it was just, you know, an anti-American thing and they picked that day for the attention.
I never, like, you know, read their banner in Arabic or anything.
I don't know exactly what it was, but I read that that was the basis of the big, you know, the protests that turned into the big, you know, reaction to this YouTube, this movie, The Innocence of Muslims, whatever, supposedly, that it was that there was already a big protest there in the first place.
And that was sort of, I don't know, really what that means.
That sounds...
I have not heard that.
That sounds a little bit dodgy.
I don't think anybody was there, anybody was planning any particular protest.
Before the emergence of this film, I don't think there had any event had been planned outside the U.S. Embassy to mark September 11th or to...
People have been caught at these, you know, these Salafist groups don't have the hierarchy that the Muslim Brotherhood does.
You know, they're groups of... they're smaller-knit groups of people who follow particular preachers.
They don't have a one sort of large, you know, one all-encompassing monolithic, you know, umbrella organization like the Muslim Brotherhood does.
And therefore, they're prone to sort of go off and do their own thing, you know.
They're sort of free radicals.
People don't really know what they're going to do the next day, whereas the Brotherhood, everything it does is very, very well thought out.
Everything is planned in advance.
They make sure they have everything, you know, all their facts straight before they issue a statement, you know, because they don't want to, you know, they don't want to make any mistake.
They don't want to give their enemies any ammunition.
Whereas the Salafist groups are much less predictable like that.
They have much less discipline.
They tend to be... it seems like they tend to be easier.
It's easier to get them worked up, you know.
It's easier to elicit a confrontation from them.
And this is one of the things that the security...that some of the security agencies here do.
I think over the last year, we've seen them do things, you know, heavy-handed police actions with the intention to draw protesters out because they want to create chaos.
They want to create these demonstrations and conflicts with, you know, in order to trip up the new presidency or before that, in order to derail the democratic process.
And these Salafists often will often fall into the trap, you know.
They'll, you know, they're more prone to sort of just hit the streets without thinking, you know, and maybe...
I do know that some people were chanting things about Osama bin Laden in the last round of protests.
A couple of these Salafist elements were...
And that, unfortunately, they're falling right into the trap.
And then the U.S. media can seize on that and, you know, and point to these guys and say, look, this is Islamist Egypt.
Now they're celebrating Osama bin Laden.
And that's a mistake.
And that's something that the Brotherhood wants to avoid.
And the Brotherhood has been very, very...has explicitly called for calm, has explicitly condemned any kind of violent acts or any kind of violence against diplomats or any kind of violence against foreign embassies and are very much into the idea of peaceful protest.
That's how we're going to voice our objection or our opposition to this film.
We're going to stage silent protests.
We're going to bring a lot of people in the street and just express ourselves that way.
What, in fact, happened is I heard they had planned for a very, very large protest on Friday.
But then news emerged in the wake of this, of what happened in Libya, the death of the ambassador there and three of his colleagues.
I think the Brotherhood ended up canceling the Friday protest just because they really wanted to distance themselves from the violence that had happened in a neighboring country.
So they're very, very keen to definitely not be tarred with the brush of a violent group.
They don't want to be described as if they don't want to be perceived as a violent group.
They might have done things in the 1950s and 60s, but ever since then they've spent decades cultivating their reputation as an entirely political, completely nonviolent group, and they don't want to do anything that might risk that reputation that they've built.
Well, they have a very important relationship with America that they've got to keep.
That's the position Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are in, is that if they end up coming between the military and the Americans, they're going to get removed from power by the military.
That's as long as their leash goes.
Keep the Americans happy.
Exactly.
They're very keen to keep the relationship with the U.S. stable, as you just said, which sort of leads to questions, though, as to why the timing of the appearance of this film and who was behind it and what their motives might have been, or was this just a coincidence?
Was this just a bunch of irresponsible filmmakers who didn't realize what they were doing?
The verdict is sort of still out as to who was behind the film, the man who's shrouded in mystery, this alleged filmmaker.
In the very beginning, I'll tell you what we heard here.
What we heard here in the very beginning was that it had been produced and promoted by expatriate Coptic Christians in the U.S. who have a reputation for being radical, whereas the Coptic Christians in Egypt have coexisted with their Muslim compatriots for generations and for centuries and really have very little problems, with some notable exceptions.
But for the most part, they coexist peacefully with their Muslim neighbors, whereas you've got groups of Coptic Christians living in the U.S. who I suspect are probably dealing with Zionist groups as well, and they are much, much more radical.
They're the ones who are always making accusations of religious persecution in Egypt, which in my view are entirely exaggerated.
They're the ones that will occasionally call for an independent Christian state in Egypt and sort of radical things like this.
One of them, even one of these hardcore Coptic Christian activists, I think in 2005 or 2004 or something like that, actually called on Ariel Sharon to send an army to Egypt to rescue Egypt's Christians from the Muslim majority.
So you've got these radical elements in the United States, these radical Coptic elements, who were initially blamed.
The first reports we heard were that some of these people were behind this film, and then it later emerged that it was actually some kind of, it was actually an Israeli-American filmmaker.
And now since then, the media seems to have backtracked a little bit on that, and now they're sort of pushing that it was in fact a Coptic person.
But like I said, it's so difficult to get to the bottom of these things with this co-opted media, when you never know, you know, it's very difficult to get to the bottom of these things, especially something as sensitive as this.
Well, you know, one benefit though, nowadays though, is we do have the Internet, and there are so many journalists on this story, and pieces of it breaking out all over the place.
The best I can tell, the last reason that I thought that they might have still needed help that we still don't know of, was the amount of money spent.
Then I read an interview with one of the participants, a minor player in it, a guy named Jimmy Israel, and the way he made it sound, and I think credibly, was that the whole thing cost about 50 grand, not 5 million.
And so there's not really a mystery to be solved, where they get the 5 million from, because there was no 5 million.
But I don't really know.
I mean, it could be just some right-wing kooks down in Orange County, some Copts, like you say, expats.
There could be more to it.
I guess we'll see.
But you know, I really am, I already know the answer, I think, and whatever, but at the same time, it is really a fascinating thing to see, and a mysterious thing to see, what, 23 countries at least, massive riots over this YouTube, where to me, you know, if a 5-year-old runs up and punches you in the knee and calls you stupid, what are you going to do, cry about it, hit him back or something?
No, you don't care, because it's just a little kid, right?
And so what, your feelings are hurt?
So I don't understand how whoever these people are, these losers, put together this video, and this somehow cuts all the way to the most, you know, deepest emotions of every Muslim from Morocco to the Philippines?
I mean, what in the hell is going on here?
Right, right.
Well, it is a tool that they have, you know, in the event that they ever want to cause chaos throughout the region, it's a very simple method of doing so, you know?
It's a very easy way to just...
Yeah, believe me, there's a million and one insults, right?
You can come up with a million insults for anybody if that's all it takes.
I just don't understand why that's all it takes.
Help me understand.
Well, another thing I might consider also is, we might consider also is that, I mean, I don't...
This is a cynical reading of things, but if it's not a coincidence, if this wasn't just a coincidence, I wonder just because of the timing, just because of the fact that the whole thing seemed to happen on the 11th anniversary of the September 11th false flag attack on New York and Washington, that this is part of some neoconservative plan, this is some kind of next phase that we're entering, because we know that they've been pushing this clash of...this artificial clash of civilizations idea for at least two decades, you know, with the...
What is it?
The Samuel Huntington?
Is that his name?
The clash of civilizations treatise that came out in the early...
Samuel Huntington, yeah.
I considered that this could have been Karl Rove, too.
You know, these were the guys who ultimately...
It was just the Republicans were behind the Niger-Uranium forgeries, right?
So this very well...
I mean, the timing is September 11th, the timing also is right before an election here.
I think it might be bigger than just a Republican-Democrat dynamic here.
You know, I don't think it might just be playing an elect...
Don't underestimate Karl Rove, dude.
Possibly, possibly.
I do think at the end of the day, though, these two parties are definitely...
I don't really...
I'll tell you, from the Middle East, it's difficult to discern a difference between these two parties anymore.
Oh, well, hey, you and I agree on a whole lot of things, too, but that doesn't mean we're the same person with the, you know, exact same plan for the exact same job if we were competing for it.
You know what I mean?
And even if we did have the exact same plan, we still each would want to win and be the one.
Right, that's true.
That's true.
But, I mean, from a Middle East perspective...
Believe me, I'm not trying to sell the virtues of the two-party system or anything, because there hardly is one at all.
Well, I mean, people here, I mean, people who just had their first free election for their president or for their head of state ever in the history of...since the dawn of time here in Egypt, the first time they freely elected their leader, they chose from among 13 different candidates in the first round, and then later, of course, they selected between the two finalists in a runoff.
And people here marvel at the fact that a country of 300 million plus, like the United States, has only two choices, only two people whose policies on many issues are in lockstep, certainly on most issues related to the Middle East, such as, you know, blind support for Israel and this perpetual war agenda in the region.
You know, if you wanted to vote for an anti-war candidate, who would you vote for, or a non-Zionist candidate in the United States?
There's no one to vote for.
Right.
Yeah, I know a guy who went to Russia and his cab driver said to him, hey, help me understand about America.
Are they crazy or what?
You want to take over the whole world?
I mean, the whole world.
Come on.
You can't.
And that seems to me like that cab driver, that Russian cab driver speaking for seven or, you know, six and a half billion people in the world.
Like, what in the hell?
Are you people nuts?
Or just stupid?
Right, and we're so obviously overextended, you know, in terms of our economy and all of that sort of thing.
I mean, we're really, really on our knees.
Hey, Ron Paul just ran for president saying we can't afford the world empire.
We have to just call it off.
And even if you don't like any of my other arguments, we just can't afford it.
And you know what the people said?
We want Romney.
I mean, it's true that they stole it too, but, you know, they still had, what, millions of people showed up or at least hundreds of thousands of people showed up to vote for Santorum, Gingrich, Mitt Romney.
Anybody but Paul.
Oh, right, right, right.
What's your reading of things over there?
I mean, in terms of, I mean, which way do you think the election's going to go, just judging from what you're seeing?
Well, I don't know all the numbers, and I'm not an expert in, you know, Pennsylvania as a swing state, so it counts for this much, and Ohio, this and that.
I don't know about that.
I do know that, generally speaking, Obama's quite a few points ahead, and I know that just in my own gut, and I said this years ago, he'll be reelected.
He's not Jimmy Carter, he's Bill Clinton.
Now, things can change, and this is a perfect example of a black swan kind of thing where, you know what, this may be the quite bladed, I would say, in short, to the anti-American half of the Arab Spring, where what had been basically inward-looking revolutionary spirit begins to look toward their far enemy, us, the people who are really responsible for their empire, and he could have a hell of a time between now and November 4th or whatever day it is, and so I don't know for sure, but I would say all things being equal, even today, it's Obama, simply because no one loves Mitt Romney.
No one.
I mean, there are people who will settle for him, and there are people who think, yeah, I can make a lot of money with that guy in power, or that kind of thing, but nobody likes the guy.
No one.
Not even his own family, probably.
I don't know if they're even allowed in his country club, you know?
He's unrelatable even, you know, really by any regular guy, I think, whereas Barack Obama, people love him, and they love him so much that they don't care if he cuts little kids' throats right in front of them, they still love him anyway.
He could do anything.
He could take their entire paycheck out of their paycheck every Friday, and they would still love him.
He could torture people to death, Somali kids, for example, like his JSOC does, but he could do it himself during American Idol or whatever, and he would win American Idol.
So I think he's got it in the bag, unless something absolutely crazy happens.
Could you attribute this blind love to, just out of curiosity, what do you attribute this blind love of Obama to?
I think Americans are pathetic, you know?
I don't know what else to attribute it to other than...
Just his sort of charisma?
I mean, he is a charismatic guy.
He's a likable guy when you hear the guy talk.
I mean, he's certainly more likable than these Republicans.
If you ask me why do UT girls like him, they like him because he's tall, dark, and handsome.
What else do they need to know?
Nothing.
You know what I mean?
That's why a lot of people support him, I think.
That's why the female half of his supporters support him, is because they think he's attractive.
They don't know nothing.
I mean, if they knew anything, they would know that he murders little kids, and then they would have to not like him anymore.
Hardly an endorsement of U.S. Democratic politics.
Yeah, and I'm just talking about UT kids because they're the kind of people I know.
You know, I had stickers.
I made stickers starting in early 2007 that had Obama's face on it, and it said, you're going to be very disappointed.
And I was driving around, and I would look, and my very favorite was watching the young college girls, the white girls, reading my bumper sticker.
I could see them at the red light in my rearview mirror.
They read the bumper sticker, and then they get this terrible frown on their face.
Oh, but they love Obama so much.
And, you know, like what can you do?
The TV, it works on them.
TV says you love this guy, and they go, I love this guy.
And then that's it.
Hey, you know, I'll tell you, Scott, I remember in the run-up to the election shortly before the last election, when he was 21, I remember reading an AP story or some wire story about some kind of study that had just been done by a research group, by some kind of a marketing agency, which basically did a survey to see what celebrities Americans trusted the most.
Okay?
Like what famous people Americans would listen to or would maybe buy things on the advice of such a person, you know, on the recommendation of these people.
And I remember three of the top five were, it was Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and another black act, oh, Morgan Freeman, were like the top three, I think, of this, you know, of the results that this study found, which I think was very, and it immediately reminded me of Obama, where you've got this Obama, this, you know, this black, but yet very articulate and, you know, very charismatic sort of guy.
And it's almost like the exact same thing.
I mean, they were looking for, you know, who can we, you know, what symbol or, you know, what characteristics are needed, what new figure can we bring to really trick the American people into thinking that they're going to get change, you know?
And the answer was, you know, the inverse opposite of George Bush, who was kind of an older sort of white guy, inarticulate white guy, and then what's better than a young sort of, you know, dark, articulate guy like Obama?
And just like the, just like they found, just like this marketing company found who, you know, which of these guys would, you know, would Americans trust?
You know, it's, you know, buying these.
Same, you know, mindless bigotry turned inside out.
You know what I mean?
What could be more simple than manipulating people by showing them a different skin color?
You know what I mean?
But if it works, it works.
Mindlessness is definitely the common denominator here, definitely.
And I'll say one more thing about this, which is that there was an article, and I forget if it was Time or Newsweek now, but it was one of the two that came out probably before he was sworn in, but after the election or something, that said that they had brought in all of these experts and, you know, PhDs in social psychology and marketing and whatever in to run the campaign, and that their most powerful, you know, MKUltra brainwashing mind control technique was to simply repeat, we're expecting a record turnout.
We're expecting a record turnout.
And people want to be part of that record turnout.
It's like when stupid Princess Diana died.
All these people who never even cared about her in their whole life all of a sudden were out in public crying on TV because they were expected to.
And so they did what was expected of them.
And so that's it.
We're expecting a record turnout.
Well, I guess if it's expected of me that I actually am going to show up for this thing, then I guess I better actually show up for this thing.
And there you go.
That's how easy people are to manipulate.
That's why I don't even believe in adulthood anymore.
I just think there's small children and tall children.
That's it.
Well, that actually reminds me.
There's a documentary your listeners should be familiar with, and you too if you haven't seen it already.
I don't know if you're familiar with it.
It's by the British documentarian Adam Curtis.
And he did a three- or four-part thing called The Century of the Self.
And it's basically how the nephew of Sigmund Freud basically took Freud's ideas and basically took them over to the United States and basically applied them to marketing and advertising with the intention of, you know, these are novel ways, novel methods of basically influencing public opinion, and how later on in the century, towards the end of the century in the Clinton era, that these same techniques began to be applied to the political stage and used to influence people's political opinions and make them vote one way or another.
It's a very, very, very strong, very, very insightful documentary called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis.
People should download that and check it out because it's really, really great.
Yeah, it is very interesting.
I've seen that too.
In fact, I just saw something on PBS the other day where a guy has written a new book about the science of elections and how with the computer power now and the problem sets and the practice that they've had, they have got it down to such a science, not just who in the neighborhood leans Republican or Democrat, but what key word do you have to use on each of them to get them to actually show up and that kind of thing.
And it's just, it's like gerrymandering to the 10th power.
It's just, it takes any of the actual will of voters and, you know, the chance of a politician having to stand before them out of it, and it makes the whole thing a predetermined event, you know.
You know, this, that reminds me, speaking of these key words, that reminds me of something that Mark Dankoff pointed out.
If you're familiar with him, he actually, I've heard him mention your show a couple of times on his program.
If you're, if you're familiar with Mark Dankoff, he's affiliated with the Ugly Truth, the Ugly Truth Broadcasting Network.
But he, he, he pointed out recently that at the Republican convention, the, not a, when Romney was, I guess, was nominated, the word Iran, through the course of the three-day event or whatever, the word Iran was not mentioned one time, which I find extremely scary.
You know, that's extremely sinister.
That almost sounds to me as if that definitely means they're going to, they're going to launch an attack on Iran if Romney wins.
You know, there's a piece by Daniel Larrison at the American Conservative right now, erasing the Iraq war from Republican Party history.
They won't ever talk about Iraq either.
That's a guilty conscious screaming for you in its silence right there.
Oh, it's so ludicrous.
All right, I'm sorry.
We got to go.
I got to get Bob Murphy on to explain this QE3 madness and so forth and so on.
But I really appreciate your time as always, Adam, and I appreciate being able to turn to your expertise at a time like this.
I hope we can talk again soon.
My pleasure.
I'll talk to you soon, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's Adam Morrow, IPSnews.net, interpress service, IPSnews.net.
Adam Morrow reporting live from Cairo, and we'll be right back with Bob Murphy from Mises right after this.
