Alright y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and we are joined once again on the phone from Cairo by the great Adam Morrow.
Hey Scott.
Rehearsed for IPS News, Interpret Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How's things?
Thanks, thanks.
Things are good.
Things are good.
Good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Here looks like your latest piece is Muslim Brotherhood Looks Beyond Tahrir Square.
It's by yourself and Khaled Musa al-Amrani.
Apologize to him for me for not saying his name right.
Sure.
First of all, give us the lowdown on, is it still a running battle in the streets of Cairo today?
There are very limited skirmishes going on outside of the cabinet building in downtown Cairo close to the parliament building.
But it's more or less contained.
It's on a single street.
And things have sort of been happening there on a low boil for the last four days.
But nothing of the size that we saw maybe two or three weeks ago, if you remember.
There was a huge battle royale in downtown Cairo that lasted for five days, I think, and that spanned the entire area in and around Tahrir Square.
It's nothing like that.
This is a much smaller thing, and it's confined to the cabinet building.
And it's a small group of protesters, basically, that are trying to prevent a newly appointed prime minister from entering the cabinet building, basically.
But it's nothing like what we saw a couple of weeks ago.
And it also happens to coincide with the second round of Egypt's first post-Mubarak parliamentary elections, which are shaping up to be another landslide for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.
A lot has been made in the American media about the video of the beating of this woman and footage of the soldiers setting fire to all the tents in Tahrir Square and basically clearing Tahrir Square.
How old is that?
That's just what happened within the last couple of days.
And we've seen similar incidents like that in the last couple of months.
What's sort of interesting is how these events are, despite their rather, you know, I regret to say that 13 people have been killed so far, which is always tragic.
But at the same time, it's interesting how this relatively small sort of contained incident is completely overshadowing the much, much, much more important development of these unfolding elections, which actually represent the first free elections that Egypt has had in 30 years at least, if not many more.
People are likening it, people are saying the last free elections were held sometime in the late last century, the late 19th century.
So this is an incredible, incredible watershed for democracy, which I would expect the U.S. media would be focusing on that much, much more than they would on these small violent clashes that are taking place the last couple of days.
But here, too, in Egypt, a lot of focus is being put on them.
The media is sort of throwing a spotlight on them.
My personal take on it, though, is that these are people where they might have legitimate claims.
They want to bring an end to military rule, and that's an entirely legitimate claim.
But the way they're going about it, I think, is a bit ill-conceived.
And they jeopardize, they're putting the elections in jeopardy, you know.
If things got out of control, they could possibly furnish the ruling military council with an excuse to stop elections.
Now, that's not going to happen because these clashes haven't reached those proportions, and I don't think they will.
But at the same time, one would think that, you know, now, nine, ten months after the revolution, now that elections are actually happening, now that Egyptians are actually going to the ballot boxes and casting their votes in record numbers with record voter turnout, one would think that, you know, the people, the revolutionaries, et cetera, would sort of maybe, you know, maybe chill out a little bit just for the moment until elections are finished, and then they can maybe start talking about more mass rallies and Tucker's Spare and this sort of thing for revolutionary demands and this sort of thing.
Well, is this because these are basically the young and liberal protesters who are obviously getting their clocks cleaned at the polls, and they're just focusing on the one thing that they can actually try to accomplish is focus on any military rule?
I think you put your finger right on it.
I think that's it exactly.
I think these are people that are probably pretty bummed out by the fact that they're taking such a drubbing at the polls when, in fact, I mean, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
I mean, anyone who's sort of studied the area, who knows Egypt, knows that if in the event that free elections were ever held, it would be a landslide for Islamist parties spearheaded by the very influential Muslim Brotherhood, which has had 80 years to prepare for this.
And they have hit the ground running, and they ran a very smart, they mobilized their people and they ran a smart campaign, and they did extremely well in the first round about two weeks ago, and now the results are starting to come in from the second round, and it's looking like they did even better in the second round.
So the impression that I'm getting is that these people who are still fighting and still, you know, sort of running these skirmishes with police and army units near the cabinet building are kind of just sort of, you know, just, I don't want to say sore losers, but they're, you know, but I think they're just picking a different battle to fight since the election when it's already a foregone conclusion, I guess.
Sure, sure.
Well, let's not forget we still do have another round of elections.
I suppose something could, theoretically something could happen, and they could be, you know, if those were delayed for any reason, you know, the entire process might come to a halt and be delayed for six months or something like that.
And that's not to say that the Islamist parties as well support most of these demands of these young revolutionaries being an end to military rule, a speedy election of a president, an end to military trials for civilians.
Well, and this is where America steps in and steps up aid to the military junta because they don't want the Muslim Brotherhood.
They would rather just keep a military dictatorship there.
Am I right?
Right.
I mean, I think that would be the best case scenario for them.
Which also explains why they're not talking about the triumph of democracy that you described before, because it just, of course, reinforced the point that anywhere Muslims are allowed to vote, they're going to vote our puppets out.
That America's on the side of dictatorship, not democracy in the Middle East.
Right.
No, that absolutely cannot, that's inarguable at this point, what you just said.
Although there have been some, I have to say there was a very high-level visit by Senator John Kerry along with the new U.S. ambassador to Egypt here.
I know they visited the Freedom and Justice Party headquarters three or four days ago, and they seem to be playing very nice with the Brotherhood right now for what that's worth.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the Americans also tried to rig an election for Iyad Alawi a few years back.
That didn't work out so well.
They tried to overthrow their own puppet Karzai back in 2009 in Afghanistan replacing him with Abdullah Abdullah, but Karzai stole the election better than them.
It's not really up to Uncle Sam right now, it doesn't look like.
Let's not forget our very own 2000 elections, which until today I still can't believe transpired as they did.
Well, look at Ohio.
I thought 2004 was worse.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, no, I'm with you, I'm with you.
So yes, it's definitely not beyond them to throw an election when it's in their favor for sure.
Well, and now, what's word on the street?
Is the Muslim Brotherhood worried that over the long term they're basically just going to be frozen out and that the place is going to remain a Mubarak-like situation?
No, no, no, I don't think so.
I think people are quite optimistic.
The big hurdle that remains, we still have to see a president elected and then a new constitution will eventually be written.
So there are still several political hurdles that have to be dealt with.
And exactly, you know, the exact...
It was very much a presidential system under Mubarak and whether or not that presidential system will remain intact under a new constitution or whether the parliament will be given more powers under the new constitution, all of this has yet to be seen.
And who exactly will end up writing the constitution is another huge controversy that's raging here.
A lot of people are afraid that, you know, if the constitution is written, a new constitution is written by parliament or if parliament at least appoints the team that will write the new constitution, people fear that this means that Islamists basically are going to be the ones writing a new constitution.
So there's still this months-old controversy as to whether or not a constitution should precede elections or vice versa.
All right y'all, so it's Antiwar Radio.
We're on the phone with Adam Morrow.
He's in Cairo, Egypt right now.
He writes for Interpress Service, IPSnews.net.
The latest piece there is called Muslim Brotherhood Looks Beyond Tahrir.
And that's going to be where we pick this conversation up on the other side of this break.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Adam Morrow from Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
Where his latest piece is Hillary Clinton's shocked to find out there are Muslims in Egypt.
It's called Muslim Brotherhood Looks Beyond Tahrir.
Is the name of the thing.
And so the big news is, of course, that the second round of elections have taken place and the Islamists have...
And that doesn't just mean the Muslim Brotherhood.
That means other parties as well, I believe.
Right, Adam?
But they've done really well.
70% of the something or other?
Something like that.
But we don't have final results yet for the second round yet.
Something like that.
I think it's in the 50s or something like that.
And which of the different Islamist parties, so-called, or however you would define them, go ahead.
Who are they?
What are they about?
Sure, sure.
The two main ones that are taking center stage right now.
You have a lot of smaller ones that maybe picked up one or two seats.
Not a lot, but you have a handful of smaller ones that might have picked up one or two seats each.
But the big ones are the Freedom and Justice Party, which is basically the Muslim Brotherhood's party.
The Muslim Brotherhood went without any sort of official recognition.
It was actually formally outlawed for the 30 years under Mubarak, since the 1950s, actually, so before Mubarak.
So it was not allowed to form a party in all of those decades.
And the months following the revolution, I think two or three months after the revolution, they finally launched an official party, and that's called the Freedom and Justice Party.
And that's been the biggest beneficiary in the elections.
They've won by far the largest number of seats to date.
The second party is a Salafist party, and now this Salafism is sort of an ultra-conservative brand of Islam, but more conservative than the relative moderate Muslim Brotherhood.
And they sort of came out of nowhere.
In the Mubarak era, nobody had even heard of the name, had heard the word Salafist even, until the last couple of years, just in the last maybe three years, people have started to talk about the Salafists.
And they were very apolitical.
They've been extremely apolitical for the last several decades, and basically confined themselves to religious work, to proselytizing, to preaching, and this sort of thing.
And they specifically said, their ideology was an apolitical one, and they avoided the political realm all of these years.
Now, much to everybody's surprise, after the revolution, they suddenly really got their acts together and launched one political party, the largest one being the Noor party, which means the light party.
And that's the one that's come, that's the one that's been, that's the party that's been the runner-up, the main runner-up of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freedom and Justice Party.
And they've picked up a number of seats, at least it initially thought, because they lost a lot of runoff, but they're definitely number two after the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.
How exactly the two of them are going to cooperate, how exactly the two of them are going to coordinate, though, following elections, once they actually do have a parliamentary presence is a big question mark that nobody knows entirely.
There is some bad blood between them.
The Salafists tend to, in my opinion, they tend to be, maybe they, well, first of all, they open themselves up to charges of extremism by calling for changes to dress code and outlawing alcohol and sort of hardcore stuff like that.
And they also tend to, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, who's been, that has been a formidable political force for, you know, 70, 80 years, and who know how to play the political game, know how to do things, to approach things strategically and from a longer-term perspective.
The Salafists tend to just sort of, say, make these radical statements and scare everybody, much to the chagrin of the Muslim Brotherhood, no doubt, which is very much trying to sort of calm their critics right now.
It's in a situation right now where they're trying to reassure both their critics, their domestic critics, as well as their critics internationally, that they are not here to change everything, they're not going to field a presidential candidate, for example, they're not looking to completely dominate parliament and completely change everybody's way of life.
They're very much trying to reassure everybody that things will be, for the most part, business as usual in Egypt and that they basically plan to focus on, and I think this is smart, they basically tend to focus on these very, very serious, chronic political and economic issues, like inflation and unemployment and all of these sort of serious things that really do have a very serious impact on everybody's daily lives.
They want to focus on these issues before they start talking about more controversial social issues, like what people can wear, what sort of things women have to wear, or where alcohol can be consumed, or how the tourism industry is going to be run under their rule, etc.
Well, you know what, no matter how conservative, as opposed to radical, you make them sound and whatever, I'm very worried, Adam, about what you describe, because primarily, especially, I guess I should say, because there's an election going on, and it's about to really get kicked into gear, and other than Ron Paul, the rest of the Republican candidates, no matter which of them end up with the nomination, can be expected to describe, in fact, probably starting later today or something, they will be describing the Muslim Brotherhood as the Islamofascist caliphate on the march.
They don't want to discriminate out of a billion and a half people in the world between nationality or ethnicity or tribe or custom or region, for that matter.
It's already one big Islamofascist caliphate, but man, this thing about the Muslim Brotherhood taking power, or coming to major prominence anyway, in the new Egypt, I'm afraid how this is going to be spun, and what could happen.
For example, Egypt imports a lot of wheat from the United States, and Egypt can't feed its own population without this kind of thing.
So there's going to be fights over the future.
For sure, no doubt.
Some of the things that these Republican candidates are coming out with, for anybody who actually has an understanding of the region, not necessarily has lived here, but anybody who has a general understanding of the region, is absolutely blown away by some of the things they're obviously kowtowing to the Israel lobby.
Newt Gingrich has commented about a week ago that the Palestinians were an invented people.
Now this is a bit of Zionist myth that was debunked by Israeli historians, by Israeli revisionist historians decades ago.
This is something that Golda Meir spoke about in the 1950s or something like that.
This is just simple Zionist propaganda that, like I said, has been completely discredited decades ago.
Yeah, including by Benny Morris, who is no dove by any stretch.
He's the guy who wrote a thing in the New York Times saying America better bomb Iran before Israel nukes it.
Yeah, his whole transformation from dovish revisionist historian to whatever he is now is a story unto itself.
But anyway, get to the heart of this thing.
Is the Muslim Brotherhood something that is going to launch a war against Israel at their first opportunity or whatever scary story Michelle Bachmann is ready to come up with here?
No, absolutely not.
They're very, very smart.
They know how they are perceived abroad.
They know the media forces that are arrayed against them that are looking for any false move.
Similar to Hamas and some of the other...
A loose affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood is an arm of the International Muslim Brotherhood.
But these groups are very well aware of how they're being portrayed and the sort of scaremongering that the Western media is doing trying to depict them as, like you said before, this caliphate on the march that's just gearing up to invade America or whatever they're saying.
So they know sort of what to say and they're extremely conscious of their image.
And like I said earlier, they're really doing everything they can to reassure their critics of their moderation.
They've stressed several times to several different people including John Kerry when he visited here a couple days ago that they intend to respect all international treaties with the understanding that chiefly among them is the Camp David Peace Treaty with Israel.
Although they do add the caveat that these treaties will be respected as long as they serve Egyptian interests which I think is fair and which might suggest possible modification of the agreement at some point down the road.
Well, maybe some of the elder ones have ties with the CIA going way back that they can exploit to calm nerves on this side a little bit, you know?
You used to finance us back in the day.
I'm not sure how far back you'd have to go even, really.
Yeah, I don't know sort of how close the connection is, if the connection still exists.
I really don't either.
I should interview Bob Dreyfuss on that because his book, Devil's Game, talks about the history of that going way back.
Wow, I'll have to take a look at that.
Oh yeah, you've got to read Devil's Game and that goes for all of you.
Alright, that's it.
We're all out of time.
Thanks so much for your time, Adam, as always.
Thanks, Scott.
My pleasure.
