JOSE ALONSO LEON

How much longer will the hypocritical relationship last?

2011-03-09T20:53:00.001+01:00

All these years they have all been giving him the Judas kiss. Time to put him up on the cross.

RELIGION "THE CANCER OF HUMANITY"

2011-03-09T12:08:00.008+01:00

The new Egypt: Leaving women behind

On International Women's Day, Egyptian women contemplate being overlooked in the formation of a post-Mubarak future.

Basma Atassi Last Modified: 08 Mar 2011 15:02 GMT

The above headline and picture as seen on Al Jazeera's web site in this article by Basma Atassi is an indication of Religion's ugly face showing up again in the streets of Cairo. Yesterday, World Women's Day was marked on Tahrir Square in Cairo by women demonstrating for their rights and being harassed and threatened by extremist religious zealots claiming these women were demonstrating against Islam and that they deserved to be punished. The women had to be escorted away by pacific by-standers. Many of the humiliated women were seen crying on their way out as they were being taken away from the demonstration for their own good to protect them against hostile Islamist fundamentalists that will not tolerate that women stand up for their rights.

That same day at least 11 people were killed and around 100 others injured in religious clashes with Muslims in the Egyptian capital Cairo.

A security source told Al Jazeera that of the 11 that were killed on Tuesday, six were Coptic, five were Muslim and that at least 25 people were arrested by the country's military police for their involvement in the clashes. Read the full article here.

Again another sign that taking down a dictator in Egypt or in any other country in the Arab world is only but the beginning. Truth is, well at least in my opinion, that these dictators have rested their power over the last decades on the basis of being the protectors against Islamist extremism in the middle east. But they were doing this in their own interest and in agreement with American and European powers that made the deals they made with these tyrants so as to avoid what happened in Iran where the regime turned to religion for their method of governing the people.

This strategy obviously was doomed to fail as it did not address the main and most important problem. Intolerance of religions, Islam or Christianity are and have been the causes of discord and fighting amongst people for thousands of years. Religion has been slowly and insidiously, just like cancer, eating away at the heart of mankind and instead of uniting humanity, it has been the cause of it's suffering and it's predictable eventual demise.

Now that Egyptians have toppled their dictator, the world is looking to see if they will topple their prejudice against women and their prejudice against other faiths. That will be the real battle, the battle of all battles. If they truly want democracy, the Egyptian people will have to accept to institutionalize the right to choose and the right for each person to express their views about their faith without feeling threatened or endangered by their desire to speak out freely about what they have always thought secretly.

During the Tahrir Square demonstrations and all others across Egypte we saw people from all faiths unit against the tyrannical dictator. Will they pursue that noble spontaneous reflex demonstrated so as to topple this more vicious and insidious dictator that is personified thru religious intolerance.

Power to the people, and not to any religion in particular.

The Son Also Slaughters

2011-03-05T10:59:00.010+01:00

The following Opinion from Omar Ashour was published on Al Jazeera on March 4, 2011 and is in my opinion a good rendition of what is going on in the empire of darkness. I combined this article with a video that was made of an interview of the sad sack by the lovely Anita McNaught. As I watched the video I could not avoid to have some thoughts such as, "I hope they don't arrest her or turn against her and hurt her", she was asking very probing and accusing questions. At the same time, I was amused to see the looks she sometime gave the liar in front of her and the audacity she demonstrated by simply being there. This was a dangerous moment in her life, is still an opinion of mine. Enjoy reading the "Opinion from Omar" and do watch this video, it's worth it.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was brought in from the cold as his second son positioned himself as an agent of reform.

Omar Ashour

"The enemy of yesterday is the friend of today ... it was a real war, but those brothers are free men now."

Thus spoke Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in March 2010, referring to the leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an armed organisation that had attempted to assassinate his father, Muammar Gaddafi, three times in the mid-1990s.
This may seem surprising. A few days ago, the very same man promised Libyans a "sea of blood" if his father’s regime was toppled. Indeed, Saif al-Islam, an elegant, soft-spoken graduate of the London School of Economics, has now become a prime suspect in massive crimes against humanity.
People like me, who study the tactics of Arab dictatorships and the causes of their persistence, are less surprised, if at all, by this turn of events. Arab authoritarian regimes, unlike others that have given way to democracy, are incapable of self-reform; they have, however, mastered the tactics needed to prolong the life spans of their aging despotisms.
Creation of a Hydra-headed security apparatus, mass-murder of opponents - both real and imagined - widespread torture, and sustained censorship and repression are some of the common tactics used by Gaddafi, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, former Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and other Arab autocrats.

Pariah to "reformist"

But Gaddafi's regime became an international pariah mainly for a series of terrorist plots abroad, not for crimes against humanity committed against Libyans. Yet oil interests and the regime's "dovish" face in recent years successfully extended its life.
Gaddafi's dovish period coincided with the rise to prominence of his second son, Saif al-Islam, and his sister Ayesha, the latter becoming a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. Saif cultivated a reputation for being "a reformer" - he called for a national reconciliation process with opposition groups, supposedly liberalised the media, supported charity and development initiatives - and most importantly, became a face that the West could talk to.
The two public fronts for those initiatives were Libya Tomorrow and the al-Gaddafi Foundation for Development. Behind them, however, Libyan Military Intelligence, headed by Abdullah al-Sanosi, was giving conditional support and setting the general direction for their activities.
The "reforms" proposed by Saif al-Islam included the release of some political prisoners, especially those, such as the LIFG, who declared their allegiance to Gaddafi’s regime. But concrete steps leading to government transparency and accountability, such as inquiries into oil wealth and state expenditure, or serious investigation of crimes against humanity, were all beyond his will and imagination.
Despite the cosmetic nature of the "reforms", other regime factions - most notably those led by Saif al-Islam's brothers Mutassim, Sa'adi and Khamis - challenged them. Behind the brothers were other security agencies: the Internal Security Forces, the Revolutionary Committees, and, to a lesser extent, the Jamahiriya Security Apparatus (Foreign Intelligence).

Defending the status quo

When I visited Tripoli in March 2010 for a "national reconciliation conference", the conflicting statements given by Saif al-Islam and security officials surprised me. The head of Internal Security Forces, Colonel al-Tuhami Khaled, another principal suspect in the crimes currently being committed against Libyans, refused to call the process a "reconciliation". For him, it was "repentance from heresy".
Given the recent wave of uprisings, it is more evident than ever that any "reform" initiatives undertaken in the Arab world previously were aimed only at sustaining repressive dictatorships and escaping punishment for criminal abuse of power. The reform "debate" within these regimes boiled down to a struggle between different branches of the security-military apparatus over the best way to preserve the status quo.
Arabs, of course, have known for years that their rulers were beyond reform. That is why, in order to have a chance to catch up with the rest of the free, developed world, many of them are now risking their lives to remove those regimes. What is happening today in the Arab world is history in the making, written in the blood, sweat, and tears of the victims of decades of violent repression.
When asked by a journalist what I would like to say to Saif al-Islam if I were ever to meet him again, I replied: "I hope to see you in the International Criminal Court, beside Mubarak and Ben Ali." Millions of Arabs of my generation and younger would probably give the same answer if asked what should become of the men who controlled their present - and sought to destroy their future.

Omar Ashour is a lecturer in Middle East politics and Director of the Middle East Graduate Studies Program at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. He is the author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source

Al Jazeera

In the footseps to freedom...

2011-03-04T11:27:00.002+01:00

Hossam El-Hamalawy is a one man army journalist, blogger, photographer. As he writes it, "being an independent journalist makes him an activist by default". In my opinion his description of an independent journalist matches quite well any of his colleagues in other parts of the world where long established fake democracies still consider this breed of journalist a threat to the regime. This is also true in the corporate enterprise system, where one cannot stand up for what is fair and just without crossing swords with top management.

Click here to read about his one day journey amidst the revolution that started late January in Egypt. Hossam delivers to us a personal testimonial of what has occurred and is still taking place everyday in that part of the world. Yesterday Tunisia and Egypt, today Libya and who knows when the rest of the Arab world will follow in the footsteps to freedom.

Wadah Khanfar and his team restored my faith in journalism

2011-03-03T21:55:00.012+01:00

We saw the Arab revolutions coming

Al Jazeera's director general asks why, when Al Jazeera saw the uprisings coming, the West did not.
Wadah Khanfar: 01 Mar 2011 08:44 GMT

On February 11, the day Hosni Mubarak stepped down as president of Egypt, Al Jazeera faced a welcome dilemma: Scenes of elation were playing out not just in Cairo but throughout the region, and even with our vast network of journalists, we found it difficult to be everywhere at once. From North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs were celebrating the reclamation of their self-confidence, dignity and hope.

The popular revolutions now sweeping the region are long overdue. Yet in some ways, they could not have come before now. These are uprisings whose sons and daughters are well educated and idealistic enough to envision a better future, yet realistic enough to work for it without falling into despair. These revolutions are led by the Internet generation, for whom equality of voice and influence is the norm. Their leaders' influence is the product of their own effort, determination and skill, unconstrained by rigid ideologies and extremism.

It is now clear to all that the modern, post-colonial Arab state has failed miserably, even in what it believed it was best at: Maintaining security and stability. Over the decades, Arab interior ministers and police chiefs devoted enormous resources and expertise to monitoring and spying on their own people. Yet now, the security machineries in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have disintegrated in short order, while the rest of the authoritarian and repressive regimes in the region can see the writing on the wall.

These revolutions have exposed not just the failure of traditional politicians but also the moral, political and economic bankruptcy of the old Arab elites. Those elites not only attempted to control their own people, but also sought to shape and taint the views of news media in the region and across the world.

Indeed, it should surprise no one that so many Western analysts, researchers, journalists and government experts failed to recognise the obvious signs of Arab youth movements that would soon erupt into revolutions capable of bringing down some of the most pro-Western regimes in the Middle East. That failure has exposed a profound lack of understanding in the West of Arab reality.

US and European allies, supporters and business partners of the Arab regimes persistently preferred to deal with leaders who were entirely unrepresentative of the new generation. They were detached from the emerging reality and had no way to engage with the social forces that now matter. It is the growing periphery of the Arab world - the masses at its margins, not its feeble and decaying centre - that is shaping the future of the region.

These unfolding transformations have been less of a surprise for us at Al Jazeera. Since our launch nearly 15 years ago, we have chosen to keep close to the Arab street, gauging its pulse and reflecting its aspirations. It was clear to us that a revolution was in the making, and it was happening far from the gaze of a tame and superficial establishment media that allied itself with the powerful centre - on the assumption that the centre is always safer and more important. Many media outlets in the region failed to recognise what was happening among the Arab grass roots. Keen to conduct interviews with high-level officials and ever willing to cover repetitious news conferences, they remained oblivious to what was happening on the ground.

At Al Jazeera we have spared no effort to search for the real actors, wherever they happen to be: Whether in the cities, in the countryside, in camps, in prisons or in the blogosphere. We have been guided by a firm belief that the future of the Arab world will be shaped by people from outside the aging elites and debilitated political structures featured so disproportionately by most other news outlets.

The real actors did not appear on most television screens or magazine covers, whether in the Arab world or in Western media. Cameras were not attracted to them; columnists rarely mentioned them. Yet that did not deter them.

Al Jazeera swam against that dominant current. We gave all the players the avenues they needed to communicate, providing diverse viewpoints on the issues. During the recent uprisings we were inundated with videos, pictures and writings from the new generation. We opened our screens to them; it is their voices that viewers found so compelling in our coverage.

We refused to compromise on our editorial policy, which gives priority to the grievances and aspirations of ordinary people. Neither threats of punishment nor promises of rewards from information ministers, intelligence agencies or royal courts persuaded us to ignore or betray the oppressed and persecuted who demand nothing but freedom, dignity and democracy.

As I tweeted during the Egyptian uprising and as our reporters were being detained in Cairo: "When opinions crowd and confusion prevails, set your sight on the route taken by the masses, for that is where the future lies."

Wadah Khanfar is director general of the Al Jazeera network. This article first appeared in The Washington Post.

The movie you can't do without watching...

2011-02-15T13:26:00.004+01:00

If you want to watch it in full screen click here to go directly to the YouTube page where you will also be able to choose the subtitles in the language of your choice.

If you want to learn more about The Zeitgeist Movement click here.

Fighting fire with fire

2011-02-14T11:59:00.000+01:00

We've heard the expression often, and in my opinion it illustrates well what took place in the recent Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. When you think about it, you come to realize that if any country in the world would instate a law that would force it's citizens to disclose not even half of the information that Facebook users disclose voluntarily, many of us would run to the barricades and oppose ourselves to this law under the pretext that it violates our universal rights to privacy and other similar rights. But yet here we have millions, soon to be billions of users that voluntarily provide the world with so many details about their lives that it sometimes feels like voyeurism into people’s most intimate moments of their lives.

And this same "social" tool is what has been used to trigger the rallies and motivate the youth of Tunisia and Egypt to take to the streets and fight the authoritarian regimes that would have eventually forced them to tell them all when in fact now they know without asking. And this tool turned against the regime and was used to connect all the people together. Fighting fire with fire is what came to mind when trying to understand this phenomenon. The regime understood what hit them only but too late when they decided to shut down the Internet. Something you can't really do completely as the whole idea of Internet is it's ability to function regardless of the oppressive measures put in place to shut it down.

As long as there are phone lines, no country can truly shut down the Internet.

OTPOR - Trailor for "Bringing Down A Dictator"

2011-02-13T23:33:00.008+01:00

Another brilliant moment in history. Forerunner movement to the Tunisian and Egyptian youth these young people from Serbia brought down their corrupt Government

Bringing Down a Dictator tells the inside story of how Milosevic was brought down -- not by smoke and flames-- but by a courageous campaign of political defiance and massive civil disobedience. Winner of a Peabody Award, the film was narrated by Martin Sheen and premiered on PBS in March 2002.

Filmmakers Steve York and Miriam Zimmerman and nonviolent conflict experts Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, make up the creative team behind A Force More Powerful and Bringing Down A Dictator. They began collaborating on projects concerning nonviolent action in 1996.

Egypt remembers | مصر تتذكر

2011-02-13T21:24:00.008+01:00

Egypt remembers | مصر تتذكر

Click on the title above to visit a page created by : Human Rights Watch; and click on this link to see more details @sabzbrach

Where you will see pictures and names of people that lost their lives during the Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrations.

Buscando Milaneses....

2011-02-13T16:00:00.009+01:00

A day in the wilderness, she was looking for Milanese casanovas...

Reporting the Egyptian revolution - Listening Post - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-13T14:35:00.006+01:00

Reporting the Egyptian revolution - Listening Post - Al Jazeera English

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-11T20:18:00.000+01:00

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream - Watch Now - Al Jazeera English

11-2-11

2011-02-11T17:58:00.002+01:00

A memorable date in the history of the world. In my opinion the resignation of Mubarak the Egyptian dictator today has the potential to surpasse as an event the fall of the Eastern Regime and the day the wall of shame in Berlin was toppled. This can become true, only if the army which allegedly will take temporary control of the country will then allow a transition of power to a free and civil government to be installed via democratically elected representatives of the people . History in the making.

Power to the people.

May they find in their actions the freedom and dignity they deserve. The world needs to pay attention to the cry for democracy and freedom by the people against tyranny and despotic rulers whether they be obvious or obscure such as the tyrannies of some pseudo democratic countries that have ruled the world in a not much les tyrannical way, even if most of the people living in them have not realized the lie in which they have been living.

Power to the people.

The speech of Mubarak is not finished yet but the people know...

2011-02-10T22:02:00.001+01:00

الخروج Get out الخروج Get Out الخروج Get out الخروج

This is what the crowed is yelling out to Mubarak

President Obama, come to Tahrir! "AJE writer in Cairo"

2011-02-10T19:58:00.003+01:00

Dear President Obama,

From here at Tahrir Square, it seems clear that you are a very confused person. In your heart, you obviously want Egypt to become a democracy — what rational, ethical person wouldn't? Yet it seems that you are being fed such a sream of propaganda and dire warmings about a take over of America's most important Arab ally by Islamists and other anti-American forces that you seem to have decided to sell Egyptians up the river Nile in order to protect US "interests" against this frightening prospect.

I could explain how this is total nonsense, how the Muslim Brothers are not at all the dominant force here, how the movement is divided, especiallygenerationally, and how Tahrir represents an unprecedented co-mingling of old and young, rich and poor, secular and religious, and political persuasions of every type. But surely you've been told that in your briefings, or at least read it in the more astute journalistic analyses of events on the ground here.

And yet you still can´t just bring yourself to throw the full weight of your office behind the most important revolution in a generation, your very own Tiananmen Square and Berlin Wall at the same time.

I have a solution for you to break the impasse inside your head; come to Tahrir Square now, before its too late. Spend one afternoon, or better one night, and I can assure you all doubts about which side in this epic struggle to support will be erased. Don't worry, you will be safe here. Indeed, you will never feel safer.

Mr President, you've no doubt heard that this is a "Facebook revolution". But in fact the real leaders are not Facebookers but five year olds, the majority of them little girls, who from 8am till 1am are carried around the square and lead the people in song, singing newly crafted limericks against Mubarak and his henchmen. In particular Vice President Omar Suleiman, of whom you seem so enamored, are the subjects of anger and scorn. You should know why this is the case, since Suleiman has plied his ugly trade of oppression and torture for the direct benefit of the US

government. Do you really want to be denounced in the same sentence as Suleiman and Mubarak? Shouldn't that give you pause?

You have clearly been convinced that unless the very people responsible for Egypt's sad state of affairs are given more power to lead the country, it will fall into anarchy. Come and let yourself be swept through a crowd of

half a million people or more, moving against each other like powerful ocean currents, which at any moment could explode into a violent stampede. And yet not a single person panics or is harmed.

Listen to the voices of hundreds of people, each one, with her or his own megaphone, shouting out their particular philosophy, ideology or agenda, while tens of thousands of people parade by, stop for a few minutes, and move on to hear the next one. What has been created here is the perfect amalgam of a pre-modern and postmodern public sphere — high-tech tweets meeting the most intimate forms of human communication. It is a glimpse of politics at its purest.

Yes, technology is crucial — it seems everyone here is either on their mobile talking to someone or snapping photos or video with their phones and updating their Facebook pages. But that's actually incidental to the most important dynamic, which is that people are talking to each other in ways that has rarely if ever happened here (and sadly hasn't happened in the US in far too long).

Americans could learn a lot from the respect and tolerance people here are showing to one another, never mind the incredible artistic creativity being displayed by long suffering Egyptians as they celebrate their freedoms and attempt to tell other Egyptians, and the world (including you), not to turn their backs on them.

Mr President, maybe you've forgotten what the struggle for freedom feels like. Maybe it's been so long since you were a community organizer. Have you have forgotten your loyalties are supposed to lie not with the forces of order and stability that want to maintain a corrupt system, but rather with the people struggling for dignity and democracy.

Please come and tell the eight-year-old boys chanting until their little voices are horse that they have to be sacrificed for the cause of security and order. Tell the mother of Khaled Said, the young man whose tortured death at the hands of police last year helped spark the revolt, and who pulled me close to kiss my head when I told her the American people, if not their government, stand with her son’s memory. I doubt they will understand and I doubt that you will be able to tell them.

Please come and explain to the thousands of people living in tents in the middle of Egypt's busiest intersection that their interests are served by a slow and orderly transition to something - what precisely you seem unwilling to say - that is not quite democracy but rather reforms that everyone here knows means a continuation of the status quo, albeit with a window dressing of free and fair elections. Would those be like the free and fair elections in the US, where corproations are equal to people and can openly buy Congressmen? Is that the best example we can offer Egyptians?

You have routinely lauded the bravery of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But what of the soldiers of Tahrir, who just yesterday, as I watched in amazement, sent a brigade outside the relatively safe confines of Tahrir to conquer and garrison the Parliament building so that the country's falsely elected Assembly could not rubber stamp Mubarak's faux reforms. Don't they deserve praise and support? How are they any different than the average people who fought against British tyranny and oppression in the American Revolution? How can you betray them without betraying our own history?

Mr President, why is it you and your chief aides can't just look squarely into the camera and say that Egypt needs democracy now? Not tomorrow, not in 7 months. Now. Sir, you cannot toss the word around like a carrot to be dangled every so often in front of Egyptians only to be pulled away before they can grab it, replaced by the far less nutritious, and indeed toxic meal of reform. People aren't stupid, you know. They understand that reform means changing things just enough, giving just enough freedom here and there, so that the game can be called and business returned to normal, with the system that Mubarak, aided by tens of billions of American taxpayers's dollars, has spent 30 years erecting.

Let me ask you, Mr. Obama, if the President of the United States had used the same discourse towards black Americans fighting for their rights half a century ago, what would you have said to him?

Would you accept it if he had supported a dyed-in-the-wool Dixiecrat to take over the country after him?

What would Dr King have said? Would he, or you, sanction the President's refusal to annul racist laws that enabled the government to arrest, silence , and oppress the people, as Suleiman has so far done with the dreaded emergency decrees, because it might lead the wrong black people (those "radicals" or perhaps just "uppity" ones who don't know their place) to take power?

Mr President, do you understand what your waffling means on the ground here? Do you really care so little about freedom? Whatever respect you gained in cairo in 2009 is buried beneath a grave of stones here in Tahrir. The protesters by and large still are happy to see Americans, but with every day of your waffling, the mood grows more suspicious of foreigners inside the square. You say that this revolution must be decided by Egyptians, but let's be honest, that's a meaningless statement. You know the US is knee - no, kneck deep - in the muck of Egyptian authoritarianism and status quo.

Yes, this is an Egyptian revolution whose fate must and will ultimately be decided by Egyptians. But whether you want to admit it or not, your actions are helping to preserve this system regardless of what ideals or people have to be sacrificed.

Some will say that doing so is a sign of your maturity and acceptance of Kissingerian realpolitik. That's an insult, sir, not least of which because Kissinger was largely responsible for a war in which his government - the same one you now head - killed upwards of three million Southeast Asians just because some of them didn't want to live under the right political and economic system. Is that really the political legacy you want to inherit?

I dont know what anyone can say to get you to change your mind, to really stand with the people of Tahrir, Alexandria, Mansoura and all across Egypt who are risking so much for such quintessentially American ideals and dreams. If only you could come here for an hour, you might change your mind, but I guess the sounds and spirit of freedom have no hope of penetrating your Washington bubble. But i can promise you this: If the Egyptian government manages to win the day here and suppress this revolution, the ghosts of Tahrir will haunt you for the rest of your presidency.

Consider that before your next call to Pharaoh.