All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest is Adam Morrow from interpress service, IPS news.net.
His latest piece I think is Islamist parties to abide by Camp David for now.
We'll get to that here in a minute.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Adam?
Hey, good, Scott.
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Did I mention, uh, he's on the phone from Cairo, Egypt today.
And, um, so we're not quite, I don't guess, but right around, uh, the, you know, year anniversary of the beginning of the Arab spring over there, um, getting there anyway.
So we've had elections, the Muslim brotherhood won, uh, the military self-appointed council that replaced or filled the vacuum after Mubarak left, uh, is still in power to some degree or another, and so straighten this all out, fill us in the details and tell us where are we a year out almost here from, uh, the massive uprising in Egypt and, uh, what's it all mean in the biggest, most populous, most influential Arab state.
Sure.
Scott, actually Egypt just celebrated its year, the first year anniversary of its, uh, of its Bahr square uprising.
That was on January 25th.
Oh, really?
I'm sorry.
Well, I'm a fool then.
I was thinking it wasn't until like the middle of February or later, but I can't remember exactly what I think it was Wednesday.
I think it was exactly one week ago.
It's, you know, it's, uh, it's easy to get confused because so much has happened in the last year and you've got different dates and different countries and we're coming up on this and a lot of radio lately.
So anniversaries have passed me by.
I'm sure more than that one.
Well, sure.
I think it was, there was the Tunis celebrated its year anniversary, not too long, like a couple of weeks ago, I think as well.
Um, but it didn't kick off in, in Egypt until January 25th.
Uh, that was the first big day.
And then you finally had it sort of climax three days later on the 28th.
Um, and, uh, there were just, uh, there were just a big celebrations or, or, uh, or a year anniversary here in Bahr square, which was actually quite controversial because it brought two different, uh, two different trends out onto the streets that day.
You had a lot of people that were there celebrating, uh, the year, the year anniversary.
And those celebrations were actually sanctioned by the ruling military council who, which, which declared the day a national holiday.
And then at the same time, you also had a lot of, uh, protesters and demonstrators that were there, uh, who had called for a, uh, you know, a, a mass demonstration against military rule.
So you had both of those groups who were in the square a week ago.
Uh, there was some concern that that might lead to violence.
Uh, but, uh, fortunately, uh, fortunately it ended peacefully.
All right.
Now, um, the Muslim brotherhood, and then they say in the Western media, the Salafis, whatever that means exactly.
Uh, they're the big winners of all the parliamentary elections.
Correct?
Right.
Uh, together, all of the Islamist groups, uh, looks like they took down, uh, 76 and a half percent, I think was the final number, which is remarkable.
That's, I mean, that's more than not only more than two thirds, uh, you know, more than a two thirds majority needed to have incredible influence over legislation, but it's also, it's more than three quarters.
So, uh, so they received, they, yeah, they were definitely received a very broad public mandate.
Um, that's, that's, that's indisputable.
And yet the extent of their power is mandated by the ruling military council, not by the will of the people so far.
Am I right?
Well, okay.
Oh, the, the, the deal is that basically they, they control parliament now.
And, um, with the, with the understanding that, uh, presidential elections, but actually they just wrapped up shore, a council elections as well.
Just, just happened to note those elections are for, uh, the upper house of parliament, which just has a consultative role.
So it's really not that it's not terribly important, but those elections just happened, um, and, uh, the military council has also promised, uh, presidential elections to be held, uh, uh, in June after which they have vowed repeatedly that they would, they would relinquish power to that, uh, to, to that elected, that elected president, they currently hold presidential authority.
So basically you have a, uh, a Islamist dominated parliament, but seen its first couple of sessions, but just held its first couple of sessions over the course of the last week.
Uh, and then you have executive authority that is currently, that is currently being held by the ruling military council with the promise to relinquish that authority to elected president in June.
That's how things stand.
That's the, that's the timetable that's been, that's been, uh, that's been laid out by the ruling council.
Uh-huh.
And best you can tell, does the Muslim brotherhood believe that and do the, the Twitter revolutionary liberals who thought this was for them, do they believe it, that at least the president will get the authority from the military soon?
Yeah, that's a good question.
You, you basically put your finger on the sort of, on the, on the problem.
Basically the Muslim brotherhood is just being as accommodating as possible with the ruling council because it knows it's just swept elections and it knows that, uh, with free and fair, uh, presidential elections promised just around the corner, it's just biding its time.
It wants things to go smoothly.
The last thing that it wants is any sort of, uh, chaos or any sort of problem that might somehow derail this electoral process, but it is, it is in the process of, of, of winning.
Um, so, so they're just biding their time and really don't want any problems.
Whereas the, these, these, uh, young revolutionary groups, uh, most of which or all of which are merged in the wake of the revolution, um, are actually, are the ones that are calling for these demonstrations are basically their demand now is they, they want an immediate end of military rule.
They want, uh, they want the military council to, uh, to cede power immediately.
That's what they're calling for.
That's what their, their continued demonstrations are about rather than, uh, waiting until, waiting until elections in June.
And what difference is that going to make for them?
Do they think?
To be honest with you, um, I think, uh, their critics would probably accuse them of, of just, uh, you know, of just basically not accepting the results, not accepting the results of the election.
They're upset about the results of the elections and, um, and they're basically, um, they're basically trying to rile people up against the, you know, against, against the new democratic leadership, uh, in the hopes of maybe somehow derailing the electoral process.
That's, that's how it seems.
A lot of these, these protests and demonstrations I wrote, I actually wrote another story for IPS, but it's more recent than the one you mentioned about camp David.
Um, and that's, that's basically about the, um, how a lot of the whole idea of, of demonstrations and, uh, and these million man sort of marches in Tahir square and all that stuff that, that they really lost in the past year since last January 25th, they really lost a lot of public support where the, I would say that the bulk of the Egyptian populace now far from wanting more instability and, uh, and demonstrations is actually quite, uh, quite keen for stability right now.
Uh, they're right.
They've got, uh, their economic considerations on their mind.
The economy still hasn't improved the, uh, the, uh, the country's, uh, total reserves, the total foreign currency reserves are half of what they were one year ago.
The stock market lost half of its value.
Um, the tourist numbers are down by 30% or something like this.
Uh, so, um, so people right now are more, are sort of more concerned about, about daily economic issues and, and, and getting by.
And they, they don't want to see the streets gnarled by, by, uh, by demonstrators, um, or Tahir square paralyzed because of, because of million man marches, they're, they're sort of fed up with that.
And they just, they want, they want to get back to business as usual and they want to be able to, um, you know, they want, they want, they want to see the economy improve.
They want to see these, these long standing problems that Egypt inherited from, uh, the Hussein Mubarak, uh, regime.
Uh, they want to see those problems solved for these, these longstanding political problems and specifically these longstanding economic problems.
They, I think a lot of people want to see an elected government come in and start basically rebuilding the country after the 30 years of autocracy and mismanagement that it suffered under, under Mubarak.
And now there's been some press about the Muslim brotherhood saying, you know what?
Really?
These people are the Romney voters of Egypt.
They're the doctors and the lawyers and the country club people, not even necessarily the military people who got rich by being a general, but the actual kind of professionals of the society and whatever, by their very definition, they are conservative, not radical and maybe scary.
They have Muslim in their name, but maybe it's not that scary.
What do you think about that?
I think, uh, you're talking about the Muslim brotherhood in general.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, no, I would, I would be very leery of, of, of any sort of description that you get of the Muslim brotherhood, uh, in a lot of the Western media.
All right.
Well, you know what?
Hold it right there and we'll go over this in better detail.
I should ask a shorter question or something, but I'm no good at watching the clock, Adam, forgive me.
All right, everybody.
It's Adam Morrow.
He's on the line from Egypt.
He's a reporter for interpress service.
That's IPS news.net.
And we're talking about his journalism.
What the hell's going on over in Egypt right now?
A year after the Arab spring began.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I couldn't recite a chapter in verse four or anything, but I sure could recommend Robert Dreyfus's book devil's game, where he talks about how the British and then the Americans did a lot to support the Muslim brotherhood, at least back in the days.
Uh, I don't know about these days.
Um, probably, certainly if you ask any politician on the right, they would say that they have the name Muslim in their name and that's a terrible terrorist danger, Oh no, um, at the very least it'll be a Taliban like repression for the people of Egypt in the future, et cetera, like that.
Um, and then there at least have been some writers who I've seen have said, you know what, these people basically are like the Rick Santorum's of Egypt.
Conservatives, but they're not really radicals.
They're conservatives.
And for example, they would probably at least in the near term, keep the camp David treaty with Israel and, and try to, uh, you know, reform the economy in a productive way, these kinds of things.
Like I think you're saying here, uh, Adam, um, but, uh, anyway, I know the least about it really.
So now I turn it over to you to tell us what you think of the Muslim brotherhood, what you think of the Muslim brotherhood.
Yeah, sure.
That's a, that's a really good point you made.
Um, they're, they're definitely not, uh, this, this, uh, you know, this, uh, this tendency to, uh, to assume that all Islamic groups are extremist is a, is a, is a massive misnomer that's going on.
The Muslim brotherhood is very, extremely moderate.
Uh, it was banned in the 1950s.
It was outlawed by the state here under Nasser in the 1950s.
There were accusations that they had attempted to assassinate the Muslim brotherhood, uh, in the 1950s.
There were accusations that they had attempted to assassinate Nasser.
But, uh, but from, from what I can tell, there's no, no evidence was really produced of that.
So I, I think that I, I, that still, that still remains unconfirmed as far as I'm concerned.
But, uh, but ever since then, they've, they've never, they've never conducted any sort of violence.
They've always, uh, officially forsaken, forsaken violence.
They have, uh, they're, they're an entirely nonviolent group for the past several decades.
Um, so in that sense, uh, they're, they're, they have no real ties to terrorism in recent history.
Um, so, uh, so yeah, they're, they're definitely, uh, they're definitely a moderate force.
Uh, and they've, what they've done in the last several months, uh, in the run-up to the elections and during the elections and after the elections until now is they've, uh, continually reiterated, uh, or they've, they've tried to reassure their critics abroad and domestically that they really don't plan to make any radical changes in terms of Egyptian legislation, because they, they know how they're perceived abroad, particularly, especially by the, the, the international media.
So they're really bending over backwards to reassure their critics these days, but they're not, they're not going to do anything radical either in terms of, uh, domestic policy or, or foreign policy.
Um, there's been a lot of, there's a lot of talk in Egypt.
People were, there's a lot of scaremongering in Egypt after the, the first, the first results of the election started coming in with a lot of people saying, oh, they're going to make all the women wear the hijab or, uh, you know, cover their hair and they're going to, uh, they're going to ban tourism.
You know, these sweeping, sweeping statements, they're going to stop tourism because, you know, a lot of tourism in Egypt is, uh, is, uh, beach tourism and resort tourism with, in which, uh, you know, where, where women wear bikinis and this sort of thing.
And that there was talk that they were going to ban, uh, the consumption of alcohol and all of this, all of this sort of stuff.
And in the, in the, uh, since then, uh, there've been, uh, they've made repeated statements saying that they weren't going to do any of these things.
In fact, they plan to raise tourist numbers.
Um, they've, they've, they've laid out this ambitious plan to, uh, to, to, to boost tourism to Egypt.
Um, they've said that, uh, they would not ban alcohol.
They're basically saying that, uh, they're like I said earlier, they're, they're looking to focus on, um, uh, addressing serious political and economic problems that remain from the Mubarak era.
The, the, the, the, the countries in, in, in desperate need of development and, and, uh, and needs a restoration, a restoration, uh, after, after the last 30, 40, 50 years of autocracy.
Uh, and these, and the, their root issues like that, especially the economic ones that they need to address to keep the, to keep the country solvent, if nothing else, issues that in terms of importance really Trump, these minor, what I like to call these red button issues that tend to, uh, tend to, you know, uh, rile people up a lot, but actually aren't that important in the grand scheme of things.
Certainly when it comes to the big, the big economic and political problems, but that Egypt is facing.
And now they've also said that the same thing about the foreign policy, and they've also reiterated several times that they, that they, that they don't plan to, uh, to suddenly cancel the Camp David peace deal with, uh, with Egypt, for example, uh, they don't intend to do anything, anything radical or sweeping like that, that now at the same time, they've also said that, uh, they might eventually put, uh, certain clauses of Camp David up for, uh, up for a public, public referendum.
If they do plan to make changes to Camp David, uh, and, uh, and the, the modification of Camp, certain, certain clauses of Camp David aren't, aren't entirely out of the question.
If there are any changes like that that are proposed, those will be put before some kind of popular referendum.
Now, for example, the Camp David forbids, uh, Egypt from deploying its military forces fully throughout the Sinai Peninsula.
And that, that's a, that's a source of, of, of, of, of great concern for, for Cairo, because you've had these incidents recently.
You've had, uh, gas pipelines being blown up in Sinai Peninsula.
You've had, uh, you've had a, a police station was attacked and destroyed several months ago.
Um, and nobody really knows who's doing it.
You know, there's, there's talk that these are Islamist extremists out in the desert that are doing this, but it's probably much more likely that this has to do with disgruntled Bedouin, uh, Bedouin tribesmen who were, who were treated very, very poorly under, under Mubarak, uh, who might, who might have their own reasons for doing these things.
But the point is that, that Cairo can't police the, the peninsula, um, because it's, because it's armed, because it's panzer-tied in terms of, uh, military deployments in the area.
So this is, this is the sort of thing that might come up for eventual modification, uh, in the future.
But again, they've said that they wouldn't do anything.
They wouldn't make any changes unilaterally and that they would put any changes like that up to a, uh, up to a public referendum.
Well, so in other words, at the very least, they've got good public relations and good international political skills, and they're trying as hard as they can to avoid fulfilling the caricature of the Taliban rule come to Egypt, that especially people on the right in Europe and the United States might like to seize on as an excuse to intervene in an even worse way there, which is basically unimaginable, but who knows?
Um, and again, and again, uh, the Egyptian brand of Islam has traditionally been of a moderate nature.
It's not the, the sort of, uh, you know, much, much stricter interpretations that you see, uh, in the Gulf, for example.
Yeah.
But you know what?
They do talk about the Salafis a lot, and these are the other Islamists that have seized power in the parliament over there.
And that means Osama bin Ladenites, right?
Sure.
I wouldn't go so far as to call them Osama bin Ladenites, but, uh, but, uh, they're, yeah, they definitely do have a stricter interpretation.
Well, I'm not necessarily saying I believe that either.
I, I'm, I'm pretty sure my tone sounded like that.
I, that's certainly the caricature here is that Salafi means I'm an Al-Zawahiri.
Right, right.
They're definitely, uh, they definitely have a stricter interpretation and they're definitely closer to the sort of Wahhabi strand that you see in the Gulf.
That's, that's, uh, that's for sure.
Um, but at the same time, um, the, the Salafi phenomenon is very interesting because they really sort of came out of nowhere.
They were very apolitical.
You seldom heard about them over the course of the last, you know, several decades, they only sort of came to the fore within the last two or three years.
You started hearing people talking about, about the whole Salafi movement before, before that they were confined strictly to a religious role.
They were allowed to preach.
They were allowed to do, do, do, uh, you know, um, they were allowed to do sort of, I guess, evangelistic activities and that sort of thing, um, prophetizing activities and they were confined, they were confined to that, but they, they didn't, they didn't have a political presence at all.
So their, their emergence in the, in the, in the wake of the revolution and their incredible, their, their, their unbelievable success, they came in number two after the Muslim Brotherhood, um, definitely surprised a lot of people.
And, uh, and a lot of people I'd say are far more comfortable, even critics of Islamist movements, I would say are, are more comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood than they are the Salafis only because the Muslim Brotherhood has been a lot around for so long, sort of knows how to play the political game, sort of is more, uh, pragmatic.
Um, it's certainly more organized and, and pre presents a more monolithic front than the Salafist movement does, which the Salafist is sort of broken up between several different, uh, several different shakes who all, all sort of have their own different, uh, their own different way of seeing things, whereas the Muslim Brotherhood is extremely hierarchical.
And now I'm sorry, but, uh, very quickly, um, the, uh, military or I guess their police went and raided these NGOs, which were all just fronts for Hillary Clinton and the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA and who knows what, right.
But who all were they trying to back there?
The young liberals or the Islamists too?
Well, it's weird, Scott, because the young liberals here are all outraged by this, by this move on the NGOs, you know, when in fact, uh, like you said, I mean, if they had their reasons for going after the thing is you've got, you've got the two, the two American NGOs, which are the Republican and the Democrat Institute.
And then there were something like four or five other, uh, other NGOs that weren't, it weren't as obviously, you know, weren't, weren't, weren't American in nature and they went after those as well.
So a lot of people were, were upset that they had gone after these, these, uh, you know, these organizations that were, that, that said that claim to be devoted to, uh, to, to, uh, promotion of human rights and democracy and that sort of thing.
But at the same time, apparently they did have valid reasons for going after, for going after these NGOs.
They, they had one from the point of view of the young parties that they would know better than to associate with some, anything that even looks like a foreign powers intervention and who's ahead in the game over there.
I agree completely.
I agree completely.
And I think it's, yeah, yeah, I agree completely.
And I think it's a big mistake, but, um, but yeah, I think the thing is there, what they're, they're just going after anything that the military council does.
They're after the military count.
They want to, they're after the military, military council and the, and the, and the, and the Muslim brotherhood, who are sort of the two, the two dominant forces in the country right now.
So whatever they do, you know, is going to be, the source is going to be the subject of criticism for them.
But I agree with you completely.
And, and the, the, these raids on these places were sort of played up in the media, like nobody's business as well, that they were often, that they were often described as attacks on these places.
And, uh, as if, as if that they, as if they were done without any sort of judicial sanction, which was not the case, they went through all the right judicial channels.
They had warrants for these arrests.
And from what I understand, uh, certainly those two organizations that we mentioned earlier, which were definitely doing things illegally in that they were doing things that they did not have a license to do.
And you can't come along, you can't set up an organization in a foreign country and just sort of do what you want to do without, you know, without being sanctioned.
I mean, the same thing applies to the United States.
So, so there are definitely two sides of the story with that.
And why, why these young liberals want to defend, uh, want to defend these, these, like what you, how you describe them, you know, these, uh, these fronts.
I, I, I don't know.
I think it's a mistake on their part and they're opening themselves up to charges of, you know, of, of being manipulated by foreign agendas.
Yeah.
Well, and especially if we're talking about the young in general or the young in urban or whatever, the young and educated in general times on their side in every country in the entire region.
So, you know, don't blow it now.
Anyway.
Uh, I'm sorry, we're all out of time, but, uh, I hope we can continue to keep up on, uh, events in Egypt with you, Adam.
For sure.
Looking forward to it.
All right, everybody.
That's a year of the revolution in Egypt.
Uh, lots of thanks to Adam Morrow, uh, and his Fred Amad Elassie as well.
Uh, who've, uh, talked with us over the last year about what's going on over there, uh, Adam Morrow from interpress service, IPS news.net.
