A couple of hours after Mohamed Morsi’s supporters greeted the democratic election of the first Islamist president in the Arab world with cries of "Allah-o-Akbar", a young Egyptian Christian woman walked up to my coffee table and told me that she had just been to church. "I have never seen the place so empty," she said. "We are all afraid."

I’d like to say that Morsi’s placatory speech on June 24 – CNN and the BBC made much of his all-inclusive message because it fits in with the western narrative on the Middle East (progressive, non-sectarian, etc) – was a pretty measly effort in which the army got as much praise as the police for Egypt’s latest stage of revolution.

Put bluntly, Morsi is going to be clanking down the road to Egyptian democracy with tin cans dangling from his feet, fear and suspicion mingling among the old Mubarakites and the business elite and, of course, the Christians, while the uniformed bulldogs of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – its acronym, SCAF, is somehow appropriate to its inefficiency – go on biting off the powers that any president of Egypt should hold. He’s got no Constitution, no Parliament and no right to command his own country’s army.

Morsi’s friendly tone towards Iran on June 25 will, of course, enrage the same beasts. The Saudis allegedly poured money into the Muslim Brotherhood campaign and now they find Morsi smiling upon the Shia regime they so much detest and suggesting they resume "normal relations". The Brotherhood must at least be happy that Crown Prince Naif – the scourge of the Brotherhood and the man who could still entertain Mubarak’s ex-security boss last November – is dead and buried and can never be king of Saudi Arabia. And anyone who doubts the dangers to come should reread the vicious coverage of the presidential election campaign in the Egyptian press. Al-Dostor claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood planned a massacre if Morsi won while Al-Fagr claimed that the Brotherhood planned an "Islamic emirate" in Egypt. The novelist Gamal al-Ghitani vouchsafed that "we are living a moment that may be similar to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power", an exaggeration that would have been less offensive if a certain Anwar Sadat had not once been a spy for Rommel.

Clearly, the Brotherhood has to watch out. Saad al-Katatni, the short-lived speaker of the democratically elected Parliament – its throat cut by the SCAF last week – has been insisting that Egypt won’t see an "Algerian war" even if the army has legalised their almost exclusive power for years to come. When Algeria’s generals cancelled the second round of elections in 1991 – because Islamists would have won – they ignited a war against their political enemies that left 2,00,000 dead. "The Egyptian people are different and not armed," he said. "We are fighting a legal (sic) struggle via the establishment and a popular struggle."

Egyptians may be different than their Algerian cousins – whether they are unarmed is a quite different matter. And the Brotherhood has itself been drawn, in the words of the Egyptian journalist Amr Adly, "into the web of legalistic and procedural entrapment set up by the military".

For as the army has shut down the Parliament, taken over budgets, produced an interim Constitution taking away most of Morsi’s power and reintroduced martial law – not to forget the dishonouring of its own promise to stand down after presidential elections – so a strange but not unfamiliar phenomenon has reappeared in Egypt: fear of the foreigner. Public service broadcasts, Mubarakite in their witlessness, have urged Egyptians to watch what they say in front of foreigners. Cameras in the hands of foreigners are increasingly regarded as spy machines. Egyptian film-makers meeting in Paris have described how the explosion of popular "image-making" during last year’s revolution is now being effaced as distrust grows.

And civic law is being flouted across Egypt. In the Delta, for example, a smallpox of illegal building sites has spread across agricultural lands – 5,000 alone in the last few weeks, according to farmers – after Morsi’s opponent, ex-Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafik, reportedly said that "those who have built houses in violation of the law on agricultural lands will be indemnified and their situation legalised". Since Egypt’s agricultural land is growing smaller by the year, this is, in the words of one Egyptian agronomy professor, "a crime against all citizens".

For the "real" revolutionaries, the young of last year’s rebellion against Mubarak, are going to have to connect with the poor of Egypt who voted for Morsi and abandon many of their slogans. It was the Tunisian leftist Habib Ayeb who told an Egyptian journalist on June 24 that those who called his country’s uprising the "Jasmine Revolution" failed to realise that the original Tunisian revolutionaries of Sidi Bouzid had probably never seen jasmine in their lives. And there are many Egyptians today who believe they never saw an "Arab Spring".

The above article was published in The Independent on June 26 2012. www.independent.co.uk

Archived From Communalism Combat,  July 2012. Year 18, No – 167. Arab Spring.
 

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There is a fox in Tahrir Square. Bushy-tailed and thickly furred, he claims to hear everything. And this is what he says: that 50.7 per cent of Egyptian voters cast their ballot for Mubarak’s former prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, in last month’s elections; that only 49.3 per cent voted for Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party; but that the military were so fearful of the hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood supporters who would gather in Tahrir Square, they gave the victory to Morsi.

Now, foxes can be deceitful. But this is a well-connected fox and he claims that Morsi actually met four leading members of the SCAF in Egypt four days before the election results were proclaimed and that he agreed to accept his presidency before the Constitutional Court rather than the newly dissolved Parliament – which is exactly what he did on June 30. He says there will be another election in a year’s time although I have my doubts.

Now, behind this piece of Reynard-gossip is a further piece of information – shattering if true – that the Egyptian army’s intelligence service is outraged by the behaviour of some members of the SCAF (in particular, the four who supposedly met Morsi) and wants a mini-revolution to get rid of officers whom it believes to be corrupt. These young soldiers call themselves the New Liberal Officers – a different version of the Free Officers Movement which overthrew the corrupt King Farouk way back in 1952.

Many of the present young intelligence officers were very sympathetic to the Egyptian revolution last year – and several of them were shot dead by government snipers long after Mubarak’s departure, during a Tahrir Square demonstration. They admire the current head of military intelligence, soon to retire and to be replaced, so it is said, by another respected military officer with the unfortunate name of Ahmed Mosad.

I have to say that all Cairo is abuzz with "the deal" and almost every newspaper has a version of how Morsi got to be president – though I must also add that none have gone as far as the fox. He says, for example, that the military intelligence services – like some of the SCAF officers – want a thorough clean-out of generals who control a third of the Egyptian economy in lucrative scams that include shopping malls, banks and vast amounts of property. Where does Morsi stand in relation to this? Even the fox doesn’t know.

Nor is there any plausible explanation as to why Shafik set off for the United Arab Emirates the day after the election results were announced, reportedly to perform the Umrah pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. There is much talk of a court case against Shafik going back to Mubarak’s era.

One man who was not present at the Morsi-SCAF meeting, says the fox, is Mohamed ElBaradei but he may well be asked to be Morsi’s prime minister. The Nobel Prize winner and former nuclear "watchdog" has expressed a profound lack of interest in such a role. ElBaradei’s appointment would help Morsi keep the streets calm and allow Egypt to come up with an economic plan to persuade the International Monetary Fund to loan the country the money it needs to survive. There is also talk of great tensions between the military intelligence and the staff of the interior ministry, some of whom are fearful that another mini-revolution will have them in court for committing crimes against Egyptian civilians during the anti-Mubarak revolution.

There are persistent rumours that the plain-clothes baltagi thugs who were used to beat protesters last year were employed to prevent Christians voting in some Egyptian villages. Interestingly, when Farouk Sultan (head of the election commission) ran through election irregularities before announcing the presidential winner on June 24, he said he didn’t know who prevented the village voters getting to the polling station.

All of which is quite a story. Not the kind that can be confirmed – but Egypt is not a country which lends itself to hard facts when the Egyptian press (a mercifully wonderful institution after the dog days of Mubarak’s newspapers) makes so much up. But one fact cannot be denied. When he wanted to show that he was a revolutionary animal, the fox held out his back paw. And there was a very severe year-old bullet wound in it.

 The above article was published in The Independent on July 2, 2012. www.independent.co.uk

Archived From Communalism Combat,  July 2012. Year 18, No. 167 – Arab Spring.

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While 50 million Egyptians were waiting on June 24 to hear that they had elected a Muslim Brother-hood mediocrity over a Mubarak bag-carrier, I paid a visit to the home of Saad Zaghloul. Not for an interview, you understand (Zaghloul died 85 years ago and is buried opposite his house in a mausoleum styled like a pharaonic temple), but as a pilgrimage to a man who might have served Egypt well today, a revolutionary and a nationalist whose Wafd Party stood up to the British empire and whose wife, Safeya, was one of the country’s great feminists.

Mohamed Morsi is no revolutionary. No feminist. Not much of a nationalist. And the army elite has already laid its traps for him. But the "deep state" represented by his opponent, Ahmed Shafik, receded yesterday. Up to a point – and only up to a point – Zaghloul would have approved.

My shoes squeak on the wonderful, polished old wooden floor of his two-storey home, a reassuring memento of an age before Cairo became a canyon of traffic. Zaghloul’s photograph hangs on almost every wall – there, at least, he has something in common with Egypt’s dictators – and at the top of the stairs sit the remains of his two pet parrots, tied (not nailed) to their perches. There is even a canary in a cage that went to meet its maker in the 1920s.

I am shown into a room with a vast, pink-covered bed and shuttered windows: "10 p.m., 23 August 1927", it says in the corner. "This is the bed where he passed away," a lady in a black veil says softly, as if the old boy is still lying there.

It is the same bedroom into which British soldiers stormed, on December 23, 1921, to send him off to exile in Malta; the guide wrongly claims we packed him off to Aden but there is an air of unreality about the whole place. The Zaghloul bathroom, for example, with a wicker chair to sit in while showering, and all those photographs of the early Wafd members, a fez on every one of them. There is even Zaghloul’s ceremonial dress as prime minister, a cross between a major-domo’s coat and an opera jacket, with the gold livery of a field marshal embroidered down the front.

Unlike Morsi however, Zaghloul wanted to live in a modern, progressive, secular Egypt, saying of his party in 1919 that "the present movement in Egypt is not a religious movement – for Muslims and Copts demonstrate together – and neither is it a xenophobic movement or a movement calling for Arab unity". Egypt for the Egyptians. You can see why he might be missed today, after an election campaign in which the words "Islam" and "security" seemed interchangeable platitudes.

Zaghloul wasn’t a perfect man. He failed to make any impression on delegates to the Versailles peace conference after the first world war (they foolishly ignored his demands for independence) and he has been accused of cheating on his expenses during his trip to Paris. He abused one of his closest friends by claiming he was only brought into the Wafd because he was rich. In later days, he grovelled to the British.

After assassins shot dead Sir Lee Stack, the military governor of Sudan, the British demanded, and got, a formal apology and an indemnity of £500,000. Stack survived for two days in the house of Lord Allenby but Zaghloul thought it was all a plot against him. "The bullet that took his life was not aimed at his chest but rather at mine," he said. Someone did try to kill Zaghloul at Cairo railway station. His grey jacket hangs behind glass outside his bedroom, his blood still staining the material.

But the ordinary people, the street-sweepers and the villagers and the poor, loved him. His lean, mustachioed face with the inevitable fez on top was as familiar to Egyptians as Arafat’s was to Palestinians. Huda Shaarawi, perhaps a greater feminist than Safeya, wrote an infinitely sad letter to Zaghloul in 1924, quoted at length by her biographer, pleading with him to resign as prime minister.

"The country does not want to let you go," she wrote. "It made you its leader in the hope that you would keep your promise of achieving the total independence of both Egypt and the Sudan. However, the longer you stay in power, the greater is the distance between the reality of what is happening in this nation and what you promised. In the light of your failure as a statesman, I am urging you not to become an obstacle yourself." Zaghloul, said Shaarawi, "should rid us of the embarrassment to which we have been subjected by stepping down…"

In the great 1919 revolution Zaghloul led against the British, hundreds of Egyptians were killed while Safeya and Huda led protest marches through Cairo, banging on the doors of foreign embassies and demanding independence. Safeya’s library is still intact – a French edition of Alfred Milner’s England In Egypt nestles beside volumes on Turkey and a book intriguingly titled The Psychology of Contemporary England. It is, of course, the psychology of contemporary Egypt we must now study, an Arab nation whose army commanders will try to ensure that Morsi’s powers, such as they are, will be further stripped from him. Zaghloul might have glanced at the crossed-sword epaulettes of the Egyptian generals and been reminded of General Allenby. Armies know how to safeguard their own power.

And, for a man born long before his time, it is a dismal fact that Zaghloul died despairing of his own people. "Cover me, Safeya," were his last words, uttered on that pink-covered bed. "It’s of no use." 

The above article was published in The Independent on June 25, 2012; www.independent.co.uk

Archived From Communalism Combat,  July 2012. Year 18, No. 167 – Arab Spring

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A political failure outstripped by history

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday (May 2). And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American president turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body’s secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron thought it “a massive step forward”. India described it as a “victorious milestone”. “A resounding triumph,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find bin Laden, pray let us have no more “resounding triumphs”. Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come, by the little groupuscules in the West, who have no direct contact with al-Qaeda. Be sure, someone is already dreaming up a “Brigade of the Martyr Osama bin Laden”. Maybe in Afghanistan, among the Taliban.

But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qaeda was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic caliphate. But these past few months millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

In his own eyes, his achievement was the creation of al-Qaeda, the institution which had no card-carrying membership. You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qaeda – and you were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There was no computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While the Arab dictators ruled uncontested with our support, they largely avoided condemning American policy; only bin Laden said these things. Arabs never wanted to fly planes into tall buildings but they did admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But now, increasingly, they can say these things. They don’t need bin Laden. He had become a nonentity.

But talking of caves, bin Laden’s demise does bring Pakistan into grim focus. For months President Ali Zardari has been telling us that bin Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan. Now it turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan. Betrayed? Of course he was. By the Pakistan military or the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew where he was.

Not only was Abbottabad the home of the country’s military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott of the British army in 1853 – but it is the headquarters of Pakistan’s Northern Army Corps’ Second Division. Scarcely a year ago I sought an interview with another “most wanted man” – the leader of the group believed to be responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by uniformed Pakistani policemen holding machine guns.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched the mass revolutions unfold in the Middle East this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

Of course, there is one more obvious question unanswered: couldn’t they have captured bin Laden? Didn’t the CIA or the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? “Justice,” Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, “justice” meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the sons of Saddam, bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be taken alive – and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he died.

But a court would have worried more people than bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia’s former head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980.

Oddly, he was not the “most wanted man” for the international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001. He gained his Wild West status by al-Qaeda’s earlier attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in Dhahran. He was always waiting for cruise missiles – so was I when I met him. He had waited for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his bodyguards refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk over the mountains to Pakistan. Some of his time he would spend in Karachi – he was obsessed with Karachi; he even, weirdly, gave me photographs of pro-bin Laden graffiti on the walls of the former Pakistani capital and praised the city’s imams.

His relations with other Muslims were mysterious; when I met him in Afghanistan, he initially feared the Taliban, refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training camp – he handed me over to his al-Qaeda lieutenants to protect me on the journey the next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics and all dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate with Iraq’s ex-Baathists against the country’s American occupiers, and said so in an audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never praised Hamas and was scarcely worthy of their “holy warrior” definition on May 2 which played – as usual – straight into Israel’s hands.

In the years after 2001, I maintained a faint indirect communication with bin Laden, once meeting one of his trusted al-Qaeda associates at a secret location in Pakistan. I wrote out a list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one weekend, waiting to give a lecture in St Louis in the US, I was told that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from bin Laden. And one by one – without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes, he wanted the Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could destroy them.

When Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading with bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl and his wife had looked after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in 2001; he even gave me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told that bin Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been murdered. Or so he said.

Yet bin Laden’s own obsessions blighted even his family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been killed in Sunday’s American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him if he was happy. He said “yes” in English. But in 2009 he published a book called Growing Up bin Laden and – recalling how his father killed his beloved dogs in a chemical warfare experiment – described him as an “evil man”. In his book, he too remembered our meeting; and concluded that he should have told me that no, he was not a happy child.

By midday on May 2, I had three phone calls from Arabs, all certain that it was bin Laden’s double who was killed by the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that Saddam’s sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In due course, al-Qaeda will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and it was a double, we’re going to be treated to yet another videotape from the real bin Laden – and President Barack Obama will lose the next election.

This article was published in The Independent on May 3, 2011; www.independent.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden
 

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The Middle East earthquake of the past five weeks has been the most tumultuous, shattering, mind-numbing experience
in the history of the region since the fall of the Ottoman empire. For once, “shock and awe” was the right description.
The docile, supine, unregenerative, cringing Arabs of orientalism have transformed themselves into fighters for the freedom, liberty and dignity which we westerners have always assumed it was our unique role to play in the world. One after another, our satraps are falling and the people we paid them to control are making their own history – our right to meddle in their affairs (which we will, of course, continue to exercise) has been diminished for ever.

The tectonic plates continue to shift with tragic, brave – even blackly humorous – results. Countless are the Arab potentates who always claimed they wanted democracy in the Middle East. King Bashar of Syria is to improve public servants’ pay. King Bouteflika of Algeria has suddenly abandoned the country’s state of emergency. King Hamad of Bahrain has opened the doors of his prisons. King Bashir of Sudan will not stand for president again. King Abdullah of Jordan is studying the idea of a constitutional monarchy. And al-Qaeda are, well, rather silent.

Who would have believed that the old man in the cave would suddenly have to step outside, dazzled, blinded by the sunlight of freedom rather than the Manichaean darkness to which his eyes had become accustomed. Martyrs there were aplenty across the Muslim world – but not an Islamist banner to be seen. The young men and women bringing an end to their torment of dictators were mostly Muslims but the human spirit was greater than the desire for death. They are Believers, yes – but they got there first, toppling Mubarak while bin Laden’s henchmen still called for his overthrow on outdated videotapes.

But now a warning. It’s not over. We are experiencing today that warm, slightly clammy feeling before the thunder and lightning break out. Gaddafi’s final horror movie has yet to end albeit with that terrible mix of farce and blood to which we are accustomed in the Middle East. And his impending doom is, needless to say, throwing into ever sharper perspective the vile fawning of our own potentates. Berlusconi – who in many respects is already a ghastly mockery of Gaddafi himself – and Sarkozy and Lord Blair of Isfahan are turning out to look even shabbier than we believed. Those faith-based eyes blessed Gaddafi the murderer. I did write at the time that Blair and Straw had forgotten the “whoops” factor, the reality that this weird light bulb was absolutely bonkers and would undoubtedly perform some other terrible act to shame our masters. And sure enough, every journalist is now going to have to add “Mr Blair’s office did not return our call” to his laptop keyboard.

Everyone is now telling Egypt to follow the “Turkish model” – this seems to involve a pleasant cocktail of democracy and carefully controlled Islam. But if this is true, Egypt’s army will keep an unwanted, undemocratic eye on its people for decades to come. As lawyer Ali Ezzatyar has pointed out: “Egypt’s military leaders have spoken of threats to the ‘Egyptian way of life’… in a not so subtle reference to threats from the Muslim Brotherhood. This can be seen as a page taken from the Turkish playbook.” The Turkish army turned up as kingmakers four times in modern Turkish history. And who but the Egyptian army, makers of Nasser, constructors of Sadat, got rid of the ex-army general Mubarak when the game was up?

And democracy – the real, unfettered, flawed but brilliant version which we in the West have so far lovingly (and rightly) cultivated for ourselves – is not going, in the Arab world, to rest happy with Israel’s pernicious treatment of Palestinians and its land theft in the West Bank. Now no longer the “only democracy in the Middle East”, Israel argued desperately – in company with Saudi Arabia, for heaven’s sake – that it was necessary to maintain Mubarak’s tyranny. It pressed the Muslim Brotherhood button in Washington and built up the usual Israeli lobby fear quotient to push Obama and La Clinton off the rails yet again. Faced with pro-democracy protesters in the lands of oppression, they duly went on backing the oppressors until it was too late. I love “orderly transition”. The “order” bit says it all. Only Israeli journalist Gideon Levy got it right. “We should be saying ‘Mabrouk Misr!’,” he said. Congratulations, Egypt!

Yet in Bahrain, I had a depressing experience. King Hamad and Crown Prince Salman have been bowing to their 70 per cent (80 per cent?) Shia population, opening prison doors, promising constitutional reforms. So I asked a government official in Manama if this was really possible. Why not have an elected prime minister instead of a member of the Khalifa royal family? He clucked his tongue. “Impossible,” he said. “The GCC would never permit this.” For GCC – the Gulf Cooperation Council – read Saudi Arabia. And here, I am afraid, our tale grows darker.

We pay too little attention to this autocratic band of robber princes; we think they are archaic, illiterate in modern politics, wealthy (yes, “beyond the dreams of Croesus”, etc) and we laughed when King Abdullah offered to make up any fall in bailouts from Washington to the Mubarak regime and we laugh now when the old king promises $36bn to his citizens to keep their mouths shut. But this is no laughing matter. The Arab revolt which finally threw the Ottomans out of the Arab world started in the deserts of Arabia, its tribesmen trusting Lawrence and McMahon and the rest of our gang. And from Arabia came Wahhabism, the deep and inebriating potion – white foam on the top of the black stuff – whose ghastly simplicity appealed to every would-be Islamist and suicide bomber in the Sunni Muslim world. The Saudis fostered Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Let us not even mention that they provided most of the 9/11 bombers. And the Saudis will now believe they are the only Muslims still in arms against the brightening world. I have an unhappy suspicion that the destiny of this pageant of Middle East history unfolding before us will be decided in the kingdom of oil, holy places and corruption. Watch out.

But a lighter note. I’ve been hunting for the most memorable quotations from the Arab revolution. We’ve had “Come back, Mr President, we were only kidding” from an anti-Mubarak demonstrator. And we’ve had Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi’s Goebbels-style speech: “Forget oil, forget gas – there will be civil war.” My very own favourite, selfish and personal quotation came when my old friend Tom Friedman of The New York Times joined me for breakfast in Cairo with his usual disarming smile. “Fisky,” he said, “this Egyptian came up to me in Tahrir Square yesterday and asked me if I was Robert Fisk!” Now that’s what I call a revolution.

Courtesy: The Independent; www.independent.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2011,Year 17, No.155 – Revolution
 

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