Sandmonkey – “We have come to see the day”
The Mhalla riots are going into their second strong day. 50,000 people are rioting. The police is shooting tear gas, rubber bullets, you name it, and IT’S NOT WORKING. The demonstrators were originally only like 2000-3000, but the government crackdown forced the people on the street. And until today, it’s a War Zone.
Cjunk, on our openly partisan news media – “I checked BBC and they do have a piece on this, but not a headliner. Our own CTV.ca and CBC have nothing as far as I can tell. But then, they’ve got far more important things to cover, what with knuckle-dragging homophobia sweeping conservative ranks in the house.”
That about sums it up.
Let’s hope that the MB does not exploit the ensuing chaos.
Question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’ve got no brief for Mubarak, but what comes next if he falls? I hate to get all status quo, but with tensions between Israel and the Syria-Iran axis heating up, the last thing that anyone needs is a Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt.
We all know that even the “friendly” and “secular” Arab dictators like Hosni are bad news long term (it was 4 9/11 terrorists from Egypt?) but one has to be cognizant of who the organized opposition is – and in Egypt the Islamists are far better organized than the democrats.
I am really not surprised by the lack of coverage by the Canadian media. Items of “thinking” interest seem to cause a blockage in their editorial brains. Publishing anything that would have you considering excercising your grey matter would put them out of the business of thinking for you, they can’t do that. Like the polititians, they want to do all the thinking and they want us sheep to just follow the goat along.
Better the devil (Mubarrak) you know…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7335410.stm
There aren’t any MSM reporting on it because they haven’t been given the script to read that bashes Bush and the evil jooooos.
richfisher is absolutely right. They do not know how to spin this. Good bye Mubarak evil dictator(?) or welcome new Islamic overlords.
And yet the truth may lay somewhere in between, as in perhaps this is just people wanting more money and better working conditions
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20080407/egyptian-workers-riot-over-rising-prices.htm
But I dont know. Need more to come out. I am surprised there isnt any coverage given Egypt’s size and importance. Mind you a riot in an Arab country often counts as a dog bites man story lately.
The MSM are paying attention. Right now they’re in emergency meeetings to figure out how to blame this all on Bush. When they figure it out, we’ll hear from them.
Excellent post. It’s easy to see why MSM isn’t interested in following the story: Two of the three remaining presidential candidates are terrified of a foreign policy discussion of a story that they’re already on the wrong side of.
If Barak and Hillary ever teamed up, they’d make a killing selling flip flops.
Just to make it clear to all the mindless Leftbots who troll here, this here kind of mass demonstration by people pushed too far, oppressive government firing on crowds, stores burning, is what I personally, and conservatives generally, would like to AVOID.
Tax cut now please.
Phantom,
This lack of accountability is also what is driving Europeans to extremist parties like Le Pen in France and the BNP in England.
As Steyn said: if the mainstream parties won’t address the voter’s concerns, the voters will move to the non-mainstream parties.
One would like to avoid another round of Euro-extremist government. They tend to end badly for all involved. This means the insulated, elite, condescending bastards who run Europe now need to be held accountable before it’s too late.
You do this democratically or you do this undemocratically. For everyone’s sake, the former is preferable. The Eurotrash elite don’t seem to be listening. Brown won’t even allow the voters a say in the EU constitution. It’s not like they’re citizens or anything… Ditto France and the Netherlands.
The now-unavoidable social conflict will be the direct fault of the governments of Europe. The EU, ostensibley borne out of a desire to avoid conflict, will be responsible for causing it. But it isn’t too late to avoid total civil war.
Mubarak is a prime example of the double edged sword of foreign policy.
Since there is NO democracy in Egypt the only answer to his tyrany is revolt.
And so …. the Islamotards will be right there to fan the flames.
This started out in March as Egyptian bread riots.
What do these Islamofascist countries expect as they continue to retreat back to the 7th century? I’m surprised the black plague hasn’t made an appearance yet.
But this is just a warmup. It’s likely the largely illiterate population will turn to the Moslem Brotherhood as the atonement for Allah’s obvious punishment. Then watch the blood and carnage.
daisy
It will be a combination of the spanish flue, sars with a sprinkle of bird flue.
Billy Meir has always maintained the worlds population is to large. It will mysteriously appear in some over populated country. We need a few more tests like SARS just to work on our own readiness.
The whole world has or should take a vested interest in what goes on in Egypt. Why ?
The Suez Canal.
Absolutely Warwick. We’ve already done that recently in this country, reduced the Progressive (read Liberal lite)Conservatives to a two seat wreck, and replaced them with Alliance. Now we have the CPC, from which Red Tories are running to the Liberals.
The Left/Right social/economic battle is a 19th century smokescreen here in the 21st. The true battle is between individual freedom and everything else. It doesn’t matter a damn to me if the infringement on me is socialist tax-and-spend utopianism, insane Sharia law, Christians demanding I “behave properly”, Greenies telling me what to drive, eat and wear, or whatever the next nut cult to come down the pipe is going to be.
We don’t need “better” government policy, we need LESS government policy. In Egypt it seems they need the same thing. The difference between here and there is that our government still performs its basic duties properly. In Egypt they don’t even do that.
Either I’m free to say what’s on my mind, go shooting, keep the money I earn and drive a gas guzzling V8 or I’m not. If I’m not, nobody else is either and sooner or later there will be a big crowd like the one in the picture.
If 50,000 people protested Bush they wouldn’t cover it at the CBC would they?
/sarc
Any sign of an outbreak in any area of the ME lobbying for justice and basic needs against their local oppressors defies the MSM metanarrative that Bush & Co might have been correct in their pre-Iraq perceptions that the ME is ripe for change if we acted as catalysts.
The MSM silence on this is also a reflection of their other metanarrative, that Israel is the only evil one in the ME.
Bread riots could be a good thing, irwin, because the bottomline is that the Muslim Brotherhood like Hamas has no ability to feed their constituents. Arabs need to finally wrap their minds around the fact that the bags of flour they have been and are getting are from non-Muslims. That’s ultimately the hand that feeds them.
As Kissinger used to say “I wish both sides the very best of luck”
MESH has noticed the unrest:
Steven A. Cook, Mubarak Hangs On
From the comment by David Schenker:
You never heard of this kind of thing before Global Warming.
I know the alarmists predicted cannibalism (last week), and mental illness (this week) — I assume they have also been predicting “civil unrest”?
So we can probably just go ahead and blame it on AGW and make climate-change deniers the bad guys.
Mubarak represents the last significant example of the former US/Western policy of supporting whichever dictator was the friendliest – the “he may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch” strategy.
That strategy made a lot of sense during the cold-war as a part of the strategy of containment. It is a failed or failing strategy in the post-cold-war era as their is no organized yang to the west’s yin to keep those not friendly to us in line.
The opponents to the status quo largely want what we have – the opportunity to make a better life for themselves without the corruption and unfairness that dictatorial systems entail. The Muslim Brotherhood et al feed on the frustration with the status quo and the general ignorance of any other option(s) and radicalize it into a tear-down-those-who-are-above-us fundamentalism (that is a close relation to the attitudes of those on the far and not so far left BTW).
It seems that yet again the State Dept has mismanaged relations this time with Egypt by not putting far more pressure on Mubarak to reform and democratize. Can you imagine the bitterness those in the middle-class in Egypt feel when they see the US and it allies spending billions creating a democratic Iraq – a fierce enemy of the US for decades – while doing nothing of consequence to improve and democatize a pro-west Egypt?
It may now be too late to coerce and peacfully bring about the change and we may soon face a hamas (most likely) or hezbollah-type ruling group.
As Egypt is the most populous middle eastern muslim country that is heavily armed this is not a good development.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L09924069.htm
The Jack Boot comes down.