Director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina issues message of thanks to young people he says are defending building from ‘thugs’ The director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has announced that his building, built in commemoration of the famous ancient library destroyed in antiquity, is being kept safe by Egypt’s young people during the current unrest sweeping the country. In a statement on the library’s site, Ismail Serageldin tells “friends around the world” that the library is being protected by the city’s youth from the threat of looting by the “lawless bands of thugs, and maybe agents provocateurs” who have materialised since the popular protests sweeping through Egypt’s major cities began several days ago. “The young people organised themselves into groups that directed traffic, protected neighborhoods and guarded public buildings of value such as the Egyptian Museum and the Library of Alexandria,” he states. “They are collaborating with the army. This makeshift arrangement is in place until full public order returns.” The library is to stay closed while the political uncertainty continues and a curfew remains in place, but Serageldin is sanguine for its security. “The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building from potential vandals and looters,” he promises. Makeshift militias are being formed across Egypt to prevent looters from targeting ordinary neighbourhoods amid reports on Egyptian state television of looters breaking in to Cairo’s Egyptian museum . Founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Alexandria was formerly the Egyptian capital and remains its second largest city. The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which has shelf space for 8m books, was opened in 2002 after a long campaign to recreate the lost library of ancient times. President Hosni Mubarak, against whose regime protesters are demonstrating, was a leading supporter of the project. The ancient Library of Alexandria, established under the Ptolemaic dynasty, was the largest of the ancient world but was burned down by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, with its successor building also destroyed, in the fourth century. Libraries Egypt Benedicte Page guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Omar Suleiman, Mubarak deputy who may be key to resolving Egypt protests
February 1, 2011 No Comment
Spymaster appointed to vice-presidency enjoys military’s full confidence and is authorised to tackle fundamental reforms Omar Suleiman, Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence chief and now his vice-president, is the keeper of Egypt’s secrets, a classic behind-the-scenes operator who has been intimately involved in the most sensitive issues of national security and foreign policy for nearly 20 years. Now, as mass protests continue in Cairo and elsewhere, this discreet spymaster faces intense scrutiny at home and abroad as he holds the key to the political future of the Arab world’s largest country, with profound implications for the region and the world. Late on Monday, Suleiman went on TV to announce that he had been ordered by Mubarak to tackle “constitutional and legislative reforms” and, crucially, to include opposition parties in the process. That looked like an attempt to defuse the crisis by entering a dialogue it is hoped will ensure the survival of the regime. Suleiman’s appointment as vice-president on Saturday morning carried two highly significant messages: for the first time since coming to power in 1981 Mubarak now has a designated successor, finally quashing speculation that it would be his son Gamal; and that successor has the full confidence of the powerful military. Suleiman, 74, is bald and mustachioed, and despite his military bearing has a penchant for dark suits and striped ties. Acquaintances often remark on his exquisite manners. In 1995, two years after taking over Egypt’s General Intelligence Service (known, as in all Arab countries, as the mukhabarat ), he saved the president’s life during an assassination attempt in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, having insisted his boss travel in an armoured car. He also played a key role in defeating the insurrection mounted by Egyptian armed groups such as Islamic Jihad, some of whose members went on to found al-Qaida. For 30 years before that he served in the army, fighting in Yemen as well as in the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel, rising to be director of military intelligence. Like many Egyptian officers of his generation he was trained in the-then Soviet Union. In recent years one of Suleiman’s biggest preoccupations has been dealing with the volatile Palestinian file, mediating between the western-backed Fatah movement and the Islamists of Hamas – a group with special resonance in Egypt because of its control of the Gaza Strip and its links to the banned Muslim Brotherhood. He has also been involved in the tangled affairs of Sudan and led mediation attempts between rebels and the government in Yemen. Suleiman figures prominently in the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last year. In a meeting with a US military delegation in April 2009 he explained that “his over-arching regional goal was combating radicalism, especially in Gaza, Iran, and Sudan”. The US and other western governments still see him as a safe pair of hands as Egypt’s future hangs in the balance. Egypt Protest Middle East Ian Black guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
From Tahrir Square in Cairo to the corniche in Alexandria, all over Egypt thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest against Hosni Mubarak’s government. Blogs, twitter, Facebook and mobile phone footage have all played some part in mobilising the crowds and getting messages to the wider world. And this despite a draconian crackdown on media and an unprecedented blackout of the internet by the authorities. Witness presenter Samah El-Shahat is joined by two guests who have been following media developments in Egypt. Sharif Nashashibi is the chairman and co-founder of Arab Media Watch, an independent, non-profit watchdog, set up in 2000 to strive for objective coverage of Arab issues in the British media. And Ramy Aly is a researcher who has written about social networking in Egypt.
Continue reading …
All over Egypt thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest against Hosni Mubarak’s government. Blogs, twitter, Facebook and mobile phone footage have all played some part in mobilising the crowds and getting messages to the wider world. And this despite a draconian crackdown on media and an unprecedented blackout of the internet by the authorities. In today’s Witness we look back at a film made four years ago, when bloggers were relatively few and new in Egypt. They claimed the Egyptian government was nothing better than a dictatorship, using torture, intimidation and corruption to maintain its hold on power, and they were attracting a growing audience. Back then they were already making waves – and paying a high price. But they were sewing the seeds of today’s multi-media uprising. We are also joined in the studio by two guests who have been following the development of media in Egypt – Sharif Nashashibi from Arab Media Watch and researcher Ramy Aly who experienced blogging in Egypt in 2006 and 2007.
Continue reading …
Voice-to-tweet software allows citizens to get news out despite internet blackout inside Egypt Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday. The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google’s speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate a message left on the number, which will be sent out on Twitter with the “#egypt” hashtag. Ujwal Singh, cofounder of SayNow and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and north Africa, said in a blog post that “over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection … We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.” Google listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service. They are: +16504194196; +390662207294; and +97316199855. No internet connection is required. That will be important for users there after Noor Group, which had been the last internet service provider connecting to the outside world, went dark late on Monday. It had remained online after the country’s four main internet providers – Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr – abruptly stopped shuttling internet traffic into and out of the country last Friday. At about 11pm local time Monday, the Noor Group became unreachable, said James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a security firm based in Manchester, New Hampshire which monitors huge directories of “routes”, or set paths that define how web traffic moves from one place to another. The Noor Group’s routes have disappeared, he said. Cowie said engineers at the Noor Group and other service providers could quickly shut down the internet by logging on to certain computers and changing a configuration file. The original blackout on Friday took just 20 minutes to fully go into effect, he said. However it is not clear whether the Noor Group’s disconnection was planned or accidental. Mobile phone service was restored in Egypt on Saturday, but text messaging services have been disrupted during the continuing protests. Google Twitter Internet Blogging Egypt Middle East Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media During an interview with George W. Bush which aired on C-SPAN’s Q&A discussing his book Decision Points at the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the former president was asked if he was “concerned that legislation that you passed such as the Patriot Act opens the door for potential abuse by future presidencies?”. Never mind the abuses during his presidency that failed soundly . He followed it up by saying that he was glad the Congress decided to pass The Patriot Act and renew it again no matter which party was in the majority and defended his administration’s spying and torture, or as he called it “enhanced interrogation” that he claimed was necessary to keep us safe from terrorism. He also claimed that The Patriot Act assured that civil liberties were not undermined. Nothing like some major revisionist history from Bush with no one there to push back during this softball forum from C-SPAN. CAMERATO: Good morning Mr. President. My name is C.J. Camerato and I’m from Boston Massachusetts and I’m curious, were or are you concerned that legislation that you passed such as the Patriot Act opens the door for potential abuse by future presidencies? BUSH: Great question. The law that was passed twice by the Congress, once when Republicans controlled the Congress, when we controlled the Congress and once after the ’06 election when we got soundly thumped, guarantee civil liberties and there’s a lot of safeguards in the law. And I don’t think a president can… can, through executive order preempt the safeguards in the Patriot Act. There are plenty of checks and balances in our system and throughout the book and historians will note throughout my presidency that I worked assiduously to make sure that civil liberties were not undermined. And at the same time, provide the tools necessary for a president, future presidents to be able to protect the homeland and um… look, there’s some very controversial… the Patriot Act was one of the least controversial things I did initially. And then it became a… both parts of the political spectrum became a touchstone of too much government and yet the experts will tell you that the tools inherent in the Patriot Act were necessary to disrupt terrorist’s attacks. And another interesting point in the book, I learned from history was that a lot of the actions that Harry Truman took made my life easier as president and therefore many of the decisions I made through executive order are the most controversial decisions I made through executive order, such as listening to the phone calls of people who might do us harm, or enhanced interrogation techniques, became the law of the land. In other words, after the ’04 elections and after the ’06 elections, I went to Congress and said we need to ratify through legislative action that which I had done within the Constitution by executive order. And so the Congress, in spite of the fact that we had been dumped, passed law that now enables a president to have these certain tools. People say why didn’t you just leave it under executive order? And the reason why is in some cases it might be too hard politically for a president to put out an executive order that for example our authorized enhanced interrogation techniques. But if that were law of the land as passed by a legislative body it might be easier for that person to use that technique and it was… and so one of the… I think I saw as an accomplishment was to get the Congress to pass much of what I’d done by executive order and in so doing there was embedded in law, concern for civil liberties.
Continue reading …The cries of ‘bread and freedom’, heard across the Arab world the past two weeks, are not mere rhetoric The cries of “bread and freedom”, heard across the Arab world during the past two weeks, are not mere rhetoric. The price of bread has always been as powerful a driver of revolt as the denial of liberty. The latest reminder of this has come in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, where the lethal combination of joblessness and sharply rising prices for basic foodstuffs helped to set off the current protests. In Davos last week, the leaders of global capitalism could be heard musing about how far such unrest might spread. The revolts will cause sleepless nights in many presidential palaces. Their wider effect, though, is to focus political attention on the upward spiral in world energy and food prices. The revolts mean the warnings of a new food crisis are being taken more seriously. Food security is back on the agenda in ways that echo 2008, when it was estimated that rising food prices set off violence in 30 countries . It is to the last government’s credit that, at that time, it commissioned an important study on food sustainability. So the publication of that report – The Future of Food and Farming , written by Sir John Beddington , the former chief scientific adviser – could hardly be more timely. Working out how to feed a world population that may have grown to 9 billion (or even 11 billion) within the next 40 years, at a time when a sixth of the current population of 6.5 billion already goes hungry (and another billion is malnourished) is a mammoth task. But finding a way to do it that does not exacerbate climate change, nor otherwise do lasting damage to the environment, is arguably the single greatest collective challenge the world faces. The Beddington report is an admirably clear account of the difficulty of devising an affordable, equitable and sustainable solution. It rightly identifies the need to contain the demand for resource-intensive foods (also known as meat), the problem of avoidable waste, and the weaknesses of political and economic governance of the food industry. It cannot be faulted for its careful mapping of a complex problem. But the report lacks an answer to the enduring difficulty posed by the power politics of the globalised food industry: food security and free markets can be uneasy bedfellows in the absence of social safety nets provided by strong institutions. Higher prices for agricultural products are not necessarily bad: in cash crops like cocoa and cotton, they can transform the balance sheets of some of sub-Saharan Africa’s poorest countries. But most countries of sub-Saharan Africa are net importers of grain. They are now suffering the consequences of the new volatility of cereal-price speculation on the world’s commodity markets . This magnifies every change in price and distorts the relationship between production and prices. Nor is that the only area where the needs of poor countries conflict with the desires of the rich. Demand for biofuels is reducing the amount of land available for food and driving up the price. So is the strategic land grab mounted by fast-growing countries like China and South Korea, investing in political stability by ensuring food supplies. The report rightly highlights the weaknesses of infrastructure – poor roads, lack of storage – but can no more impose an answer to them than it can solve the problems of global distribution. It is right to argue that agriculture subsidies in rich countries distort food production; but it pays little attention to the question of national food security (and the environmental impacts of food imports). It notes the concentration of corporate power in the food supply chain, but argues that the market can be left to sort it out for itself. It puts its faith both in promoting agricultural research and best practice in poorer countries, and in the introduction of GM crops and cloned animals in the richer ones. In short, the Beddington report has analysed a failing system and then wanly concluded that what will work best is more of the same. Egypt Middle East guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The challenge for the US this week is to raise the temperature delicately, rather than seeking to call the global shots On an emotional level, everyone wants Barack Obama to thunder that Hosni Mubarak must go. And there are bad reasons why the US
Continue reading …
As the nation prepares to pay tribute to former President Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth on February 6, it is amazing to consider that his success at turning the U.S. away from 1960s-style liberalism was accomplished in the face of a daily wave of news media hostility. The media’s first draft of history was more myth than reality: that Reagan only brought the nation poverty, ignorance, bankruptcy, and a dangerously imbalanced foreign and defense policy. The Media Research Center has assembled a report documenting the “objective” national media’s most biased takes on President Reagan, his record and his times. It's now posted at MRC.org (complete with PDF), including 22 video clips and matching MP3 audio: I. Reagan the Man : Reporters often agonized over why the American public liked Reagan, that they couldn’t see through the White House spell and see Reagan in the contemptuous light that the media did. II. The Reaganomics Recovery : Reagan’s policies caused a dramatic economic turn-around from high inflation and unemployment to steady growth, but the good news was obscured by bad news of trade deficits, greedy excesses of the rich, and supposedly booming homelessness. III. Reagan and National Defense : Ronald Reagan may have won the Cold War, but to the media, the Reagan defense buildup seemed like a plot designed to deny government aid to the poor and hungry, and was somehow the only spending responsible for “bankrupting” the country. IV. Reagan and Race : Using their definition of “civil rights” — anything which adds government-mandated advantages for racial minorities is “civil rights” progress — liberal journalists suggested that somehow Ronald Reagan was against liberty for minorities. V. The Reagan Legacy : The media painted the Reagan era as a horrific time of low ethics, class warfare on the poor, and crushing government debt. EXTRA: Reagan, Slammed by Celebrities . Ronald Reagan’s long Hollywood career earned him no credit among celebrities, who ridiculed him and even inserted anti-Reagan jokes into everyday entertainment programming. Our introduction contemplates Reagan's amazing record: As America marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, stories abound of the man and the President — his leadership and vision, his humanity and optimism, his deep love of country and belief in the power of freedom. But any measure of his accomplishments has to begin by noting his unique placement in history as a firmly conservative president arriving at the end of an era dominated by liberalism — in both parties. Everything he accomplished he did by the force of his personality and words, aiming to pick up easily embarrassed moderate Republicans as well as conservative Democrats. Everything he changed he managed to do against a daily wave of news media hostility to his agenda. Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC’s George Will, who appeared once weekly as a panelist on This Week with David Brinkley . In the prologue to his book on Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, “Sovietologists” and journalists — were the dummies.
Continue reading …It’s too early to judge Obama on Egypt – but advice for him is plentiful | Simon Tisdall
January 31, 2011 No Comment
US commentators say Obama is caught between the need for reform and security imperatives, and advice has been pouring in It’s too early to say that Barack Obama has mishandled the Egypt crisis. But so far at least, his administration has not covered itself in glory. In under a week, secretary of state Hillary Clinton went from describing Hosni Mubarak’s regime as “stable” to demanding an “orderly transition” to democracy. The truth, as many American commentators tell it, is that Obama is stuck in an “impossible hole”, caught between the need for reform and security imperatives. Sensing his hesitation, gratuitous and contradictory advice has been pouring in from all sides. But on one point mostly all agree: Hosni Mubarak is finished. Foreign policy veteran Leslie Gelb urged Obama to take a “realist” approach. “Let’s stop prancing about and proclaiming our devotion to peace, ‘universal rights’, and people power,” he wrote . The US must act swiftly to protect its political, economic and security interests. Mubarak was the “devil we know”. Chief among the devils we did not know was Egypt’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. “Baloney and wishful thinking aside, the MB would be calamitous for US security … If they gain control, it’s going to be almost impossible for the people to take it back. Just look at Iran,” Gelb argued. Obama should keep quiet in public while privately trying to persuade Mubarak to begin a gradual transition, culminating in UN-supervised elections in 12 months’ time, Gelb added. Defenestrating Egypt’s wounded pharaoh now would only convince other regional allies that the US could not be trusted. Peter Beinart, also blogging in the Daily Beast , took an opposing view. The Egyptian protests, like leaked Israeli-Palestine peace negotiations documents, were evidence that “the Middle East is spinning out of America’s control”. He continued: “It’s time for Obama to choose … It’s time to stop insulating Mubarak and [Palestinian president] Mahmoud Abbas from a reckoning with their own people.” Beinart added there were potential advantages in the current situation. “Osama bin Laden has never looked more irrelevant than he does this week as tens of thousands march across the Middle East not for jihad but for democracy, electricity and a decent job.” Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser to George Bush, told Washington Post readers that the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts were “exploding, once and for all, the myth of Arab exceptionalism” – meaning the erroneous idea that, somehow, Arabs were “beyond the reach of liberty”. Regime change was desirable, Abrams agreed, but how to achieve it? “Every day Mubarak survives in power now, he does so as a dictator propped up by brute force alone. Election of his son Gamal as his successor is already a sour joke … [but] the three decades Mubarak and his cronies have already had in power leave Egypt with no reliable mechanisms for a transition to democratic rule.” Abrams lambasted Obama for abandoning Bush’s freedom agenda, calling it “nothing short of a tragedy”. Obama’s attempts at quiet persuasion had failed to advance reform in Syria, Iran and Egypt (and Russia). “This has been the greatest failure of policy and imagination in the administration’s approach,” he said. Newsweek carried an insider assessment of the White House’s performance. It described how Obama advisers expected Mubarak to resign when he spoke on television on Friday night. Instead, he was defiant. “As Mubarak ended his address, someone in the [White House situation] room voiced the thought on everyone’s mind: ‘Well, what do we do now?’”, it reported. Time magazine concluded that, whoever was responsible for past policy failures, Mubarak’s usefulness now was at an end. “Even if he tried to fight his way out of the crisis, the autocrat’s ability to serve as a bastion of stability will have been fatally compromised,” it said. Columnist Anne Applebaum offered cheerful reassurance for Obama . Some things were simply beyond US control and options were limited. “But there are a few and we should exercise them immediately,” she said. “We should speak directly to the Egyptian public, not only to its leaders. We should congratulate Egyptians for having the courage to take to the streets. We should smile and embrace instability. And we should rejoice – because change in repressive societies is good.” Egypt Middle East Obama administration United States US politics Simon Tisdall guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …