All posts by tabsir

The Morsi Blues

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Obama Administration

Egypt’s Economy, the Muslim Brotherhood & the U.S.

by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen, American Center for Democracy, May 2

Under Muslim Brother Morsi’s inept economic team more than 4,500 factories have shut down. Egypt’s unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2012, have reached 13%, most of which, (77.5%) is among the 15-24 years old. Inflation has climbed much above the official 7.5% (March 2013), and foreign currency reserves declined to US $ 13,424 billion. The country spends about $14.5 billion subsidizing fuel and $4 billion subsidizing food each year. Nearly half of Egypt’s 90 million people live at or below the poverty line of $2 per day. The Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR), reports of “3,817 labor strikes and economically motivated social protests” following Morsi’s election, and more than 2,400 “between January and March” 2013.

Campuses all over the country are rocked by violent demonstrations, and “it’s getting worse by the day,” a student is quoted saying by Al-Hayat. Bloody clashes between students affiliated with Brotherhood and independent and opposition groups have been reported in Cairo’s Ain Shams University, and ongoing demonstrations in Al-Azhar University have gotten more violent after tainted food made dozen of students ill. Continue reading The Morsi Blues →

Al-Masry al-Youm wa-la-bukra

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Journalism and Media

Goodbye, Al-Masry Al-Youm
by Sarah Carr, Egypt Independent, April 26, 2013

In 2010, Abdel Moneim Saeed, then the chairperson of state mouthpiece Al-Ahram, oversaw an outrageous bit of Photoshopping on the newspaper’s front cover, when US President Barack Obama was replaced with Hosni Mubarak at the head of a group of leaders striding out of a meeting in Washington.

This Photoshop-gate inspired the inevitable deluge of derision on social media. As well as being breathtaking and hilarious in its own right, it was a bit of light relief from the tense and strange months leading up to the revolution and, in particular, another photo that went viral in 2010 thanks to social media — that of the mutilated corpse of Khaled Saeed.

Al-Ahram’s big cheeses remained belligerent in the face of the ridicule. Its editor-in-chief, Osama Saraya, described it as an “expressionist” photograph that gave a “brief, live and true expression of the prominent stance of President Mubarak in the Palestinian issue.”

In a 2010 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Abdel Moneim Saeed, meanwhile, insisted that the paper did nothing wrong, condemning the “herd mentality” that dominated the response to the picture and pointed out that the Economist “often employs graphics, pictures and illustrations to make its point.”

According to the weekly, Saeed was particularly piqued by the fact that nobody had bothered to read the report below the Photoshopping, penned by him.

He also lamented that “some in this profession mix opinion with news, thus becoming the jury and the judge. We have a long way to go on the road to advanced journalism.”

Coming from the man who ran Al-Ahram for almost four years, this statement is extraordinary. It is like a mosquito complaining about buzzing noises. Al-Ahram, like virtually all state press in Egypt, has wildly — shall we say, “expressionist” — content. It gives itself the license to report the news as it appears in the daydreams of whoever is Egypt’s most influential player on any given day, and the public purse funds this. Continue reading Al-Masry al-Youm wa-la-bukra →

Pathologizing Islam and Pax Americana

Islam in America, Islamophobia, Teaching Resources

by Timothy P. Daniels, The Islamic Monthly, April 22

In the aftermath of a week of mainstream media coverage and elite political figure’s statements related to the Boston Marathon bombing, the ongoing processes of pathologizing Islam and its significance for Pax Americana are made evident. Initial questions about whether this bombing was the work of domestic or foreign terrorists or the work of “lone” wolves quickly turned to claims about Arab individuals, international students, and dark-skinned men with foreign accents as “persons-of-interest” and “suspects.” The specter of dangerous foreign “others” in Boston overshadowed the likely homegrown white-supremacist-Christian terrorism lying behind the eerie fertilizer factory explosion in Waco, Texas close to the 20th anniversary of the FBI massacre of the Branch Davidian “cult.” Fourteen dead, scores injured, and an entire town left demolished; however this devastating event was hurriedly pushed out of the news cycle and political rhetoric without any answers for why this blast occurred. The irrationality of this differential response became even more apparent after the FBI released and posted pictures of two suspected bombers and the subsequent massive military mobilization of forces and technologies to corner, capture, and kill these young men. As their identities as Muslim Chechens became known, the media began to speculate about their links to international terrorism and their presumed religious motives. Continue reading Pathologizing Islam and Pax Americana →