That bastard #Morsi has taken #Egypt out of the frying pan & set her on fire.

How did it come to this? Back to square one, and so quickly?

My expectations of Morsi & the Brotherhood were very low, they weren’t low enough. This so-called man, this fascist has stolen democracy from the people. Egypt is once again paying with her blood for the power-hunger and corruption of a single man.

More martyrs are being made, and for what? The ego of a man who uses God and Religion as his weapons of control and a the facade of legitimacy. A man who claims to be Muslim, yet let’s his fellow compatriots and Muslims die at his hands.

Mubarak was prosecuted and convicted in the eyes of the law that he submitted to for failing to prevent the deaths of Egyptians.

Morsi has now, in hardly any time at all caused turmoil on the streets of Egypt. He’s been chased out of the mosque, he’s united Egyptians against him in a unanimous wave of resistance to autocracy. He lies through his beard and pretends he is taking absolute power to protect the revolution, but the revolution was against autocracy. He’s insulting the intelligence of every living Egyptian, and the memory of every dead Egyptian who died to stop the tyranny that Morsi has taken to in record time.

If the man has put himself above the law, the people have no choice but to take the law into their own hands.

He has made himself extra-judicial, above all other men. Is this not a blasphemy? Did, even the prophet of Islam do that? I don’t think so!

How much more is Egypt expected to take? What was the man thinking? What did he expect? We are Egyptians.

Shame on him. Shame on those who continue to support him, whatever happened to humanity? I thought that was what religion was supposed to be about? Isn’t that what they preach?

 

 

This is Ola Shahba, the anti-Morsi activist, kidnapped & beaten by cowards

 

Egypt: An appeal to trade unionists in the UK

MENA Solidarity Network

Dear friends,

On 17 November I was invited to speak at the Unite the Resistance Conference in London, and I asked you for your solidarity with the workers’ movement in Egypt. Today we need your solidarity more than ever.

Activists have been fighting to overthrow the Constituent Assembly which represents no-one except the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi then brought out his Constitutional Declaration which makes him like a god or a new pharaoh, who controls all the institutions of the state, and means he cannot be challenged. One of his aims was to protect the Shura Council [the upper house of parliament] from dissolution, as well as the Constituent Assembly, so that he could get the new constitution passed. But he didn’t count on the anger of the Egyptian people, who have come out in their hundreds of thousands to protest in the streets against his Constitutional Declaration, and to show…

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Very well considered piece on The Brotherhood & their position on children.

DIOSCORUS BOLES ON COPTIC NATIONALISM

Egyptian girls (photograph taken by Ernest Albert Buckton in Egypt during WW2)

 – what do the Muslim Brotherhood have in store for innocent and poverty stricken Egyptian girls except female genital mutilation?

THE POSITION OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD ON THE RIGHTS OF EGYPTIAN CHILDREN

What do Muslim Brotherhood think of the rights of children?[1] Do they have any policies directed towards improving the miserable conditions of Egypt’s nearly 31 million children?[2] Egypt’s problems are enormous, and the problems of its children are some of its worst; including childhood poverty, poor education and high illiteracy rate, poor school attendance, high education dropouts, poor nutrition and health care, relatively high maternity, perinatal, neonatal, infant and childhood mortality rates, child labour, high polygamy rate, high divorce rate, child marriage, child neglect, physical and sexual abuse, high prevalence of street children, drug and substance abuse, institutionalisation of children, and the extremely high…

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Identity is a funny thing

My mother has always said that she thinks of me of not as knowing who I am – of being lost and torn between two cultures, and of having two identities competing with each other. I’ve never really felt like that, it’s just the false Western vs Muslim civilisation dichotomy that resonates in her, which she projects on to me. Perhaps because she’s a convert & sees the two ‘cultures’ as opposing, rather than just being bunches of peoples and ideas.

Like every other human, I’ve always had multiple and fluid identities, but, perhaps it was growing up within these multiple cultures and identities that has in fact, made me resolute in who I am, which is a human, with lots of solidarities and identities who exists within webs of culture and solidarities with other human beings, some of whom I identify with, some of whom I don’t. Some ideologies and identities I like/dislike, some people I like/dislike, it’s as simple as that. I have Muslim, Jewish & Christian family. I grew up with a mind that learnt very early on how complicated, yet simple, people are. We’re just individual people, in spite of our multiple identities, roles, and groupings.

I got told this week by a student that I had no right or capability of identifying myself as Muslim, as I don’t practise. It’s funny how other people can try to dictate who you are by their standards. Practising or not, it’s still my identity, which, incidentally, it’s up to me, and only me, to choose. Some aspects I can’t choose. I can’t choose my Egyptian-ness, my British-ness, my female-ness, and considering I had zero choice in my birth or upbringing, like anyone else, my Muslim-ness either. I am more than the sum of my parts, but my parts are still my parts, no matter how much the dictators would like to think otherwise. I can’t undo who I am, no matter how much anyone would like me to or try to impose on me.

Just a few thoughts, I am who I am, thankfully, and it amuses me to see peoples’ reactions to that. In a funny way, how people identify you or deal with aspects of your identity (or perceived identity) identifies a lot about them & their identities.

I still find it amusing when a question regarding something Arab or Muslim or Feminist-y comes up in seminars and I see the faces turn towards me. It makes me laugh. I do, however, find it really galling when people try & tell me what I think or believe based on their perceptions of who they think I am.

From Despair To Where? Morsi-lini, the proto-fascist dicator-daddy

Again, it’s been awhile since I’ve written. Of course, so much has happened it is hard to know where to start.

We Egyptians have known so many emotions over the rollercoasting revolution of the last couple of years. We’ve known the darkest, most despairing of experiences, and the most jubilant and liberating ones – in endless cycles of intense emotional highs and lows.

To me, it feels like we have come full circle, again, and, like millions of others, I am outraged at the shameless

 

I have gone from despair – through the gamut of possible human emotional experiences all the way back to despair again.

If you believed the (tired, old) rhetoric of our current pharoah, all those values of the revolution are being saved by our dear caring father, Morsi(lini). From Plato  to Mubarak, the justification of the Benevolent Dictator has never rung true or been successful, and Morsi will be no different. A Dictator who wants us to believe he’s our Daddy. and knows what’s best for us.

NO! WE KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR US. THAT’S WHY WE HAD A REVOLUTION, DUMMY.

We wanted a democracy for the people, by the people of the people.

What we have now is a proto-fascist dictator, who has surely gone against his own religious principles by elevating himself above the laws that other humans are expected to be held to. He’s not above the law. If the Prophet Muhammed in Islam didn’t consider himself above the law, why does this man, who will be imposing his religious and political will on the nation think he can?

If you think I’m exaggerating about Morsi-lini being a proto-fascist, at the very least, let’s hear it from the mouth of one of the biggest fascists of all, Mussolini…

 

“…it might be argued that the quest for definition of fascism has become absurdly laboured. Why opt for a long list of factors or paragraph of rococo ornateness when Mussolini, on a number of occasions, informed people he regarded as converted to his cause that Fascism was a simple matter?  All that was needed was a single party, a dopolavoro [“after work”…

, a social leisure time organization], and, he did not have to add, a Duce (with a Bocchini to repress dissent) and a will to exclude the foe (somehow defined).  To be still more succinct, as Mussolini told Franco in October 1936, what the Spaniard should aim at was a regime that was simultaneously ‘authoritarian’, ‘social’, and ‘popular’.  That amalgam, the Duce advised, was the basis of universal fascism.”  (Bosworth)

 

Dressing dictatorship in the language of Daddy isn’t going to wash with us Egyptians. It never did.

 

Down with the Dictator, Morsi. NO to this farce of an Islamist constitution. Freedom for the Egyptians, all of us. We didn’t get rid of one dictator, to have a worse one replace him. If Morsi thinks that, he’s got another think coming