January 30, 2011
Robert Fisk joins protesters atop a Cairo tank: "It is over."
Robert Fisk in The Independent:
The Egyptian tanks, the delirious protesters sitting atop them, the flags, the 40,000 protesters weeping and crying and cheering in Freedom Square and praying around them, the Muslim Brotherhood official sitting amid the tank passengers. Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest? Climbing on to an American-made battle tank myself, I could only remember those wonderful films of the liberation of Paris. A few hundred metres away, Hosni Mubarak's black-uniformed security police were still firing at demonstrators near the interior ministry. It was a wild, historical victory celebration, Mubarak's own tanks freeing his capital from his own dictatorship.
In the pantomime world of Mubarak himself – and of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Washington – the man who still claims to be president of Egypt swore in the most preposterous choice of vice-president in an attempt to soften the fury of the protesters – Omar Suleiman, Egypt's chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four heart attacks to his credit. How this elderly apparatchik might be expected to deal with the anger and joy of liberation of 80 million Egyptians is beyond imagination. When I told the demonstrators on the tank around me the news of Suleiman's appointment, they burst into laughter.
Their crews, in battledress and smiling and in some cases clapping their hands, made no attempt to wipe off the graffiti that the crowds had spray-painted on their tanks. "Mubarak Out – Get Out", and "Your regime is over, Mubarak" have now been plastered on almost every Egyptian tank on the streets of Cairo. On one of the tanks circling Freedom Square was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Beltagi. Earlier, I had walked beside a convoy of tanks near the suburb of Garden City as crowds scrambled on to the machines to hand oranges to the crews, applauding them as Egyptian patriots. However crazed Mubarak's choice of vice-president and his gradual appointment of a powerless new government of cronies, the streets of Cairo proved what the United States and EU leaders have simply failed to grasp. It is over.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 03:12 AM | Permalink
Comments
Gotta love Robert Fisk.
In trying to explain why an octogenerian establishmentarian general may not be an ideally suited candidate for the poor and disenchanted, he finds nothing better to say than that Suleiman was chief negotiator with Israel and that he visited Tel Aviv and Jerusalem four times. That is the problem with Suleiman?! That is a problem period?!! Is this Robert Fisk's objective reporting on the state of mind of the Egyptians (i.e. that the Egyptian people are blood thirsty crazies whose sole problem with the Mubarak regime is that its predecessor made peace with Israel and stopped the insanity of the war mongering Nasser days) or is this Robert Fisk's own nastiness and craziness coming to the fore, in which he expresses his own bloodthirsty cravings and projects them on the poor people of Egypt?
Posted by: falk lover | Jan 30, 2011 3:33:40 AM
Mubarak seems to be on his way out. But what next? Will Egypt after Mubarak be like Iran after the Shah? Is there any hope of a liberal democracy emerging out of the current chaos?
Posted by: Subodh | Jan 30, 2011 4:07:30 AM
"Should this be compared to the liberation of Bucharest?"
oh, yes.
The "liberation" of Bucharest was probably orchestrated by the Soviet State Security Services and by Gorbachev, using of course apublic discontent.
"A chronology of events in Romania during December 1989, reportedly written by former Securitate officers, surfaced in September 1990 in the pages of Democratia. According to this, between 11 and 15 December there were 'massive arrivals of so-called Hungarian tourists in Timisoara and Soviet tourists in Cluj'.138 No doubt these were the Soviet 'eyes' that Falin claimed were trained on Romania. In what seems like an exaggerated account of events in Timisoara, the chronology described how the 'tourists' first incited protesters and then fired shots into the air and 'began to shoot and knife demonstrators'. The chronology then accuses various key figures in the coup of having been intelligence agents, including Militaru (purportedly a KGB-CIA double agent) and the former Securitate officer and adviser to Ceausescu, Dumitru Mazilu (purportedly a CIA agent), and Silviu Brucan (purportedly both a CIA and KGB agent). The con-clusions presented in the chronology - that the CIA and KGB plotted together to oust Ceausescu - are simply not credible. But the theory presented is important for illustrating the paranoia some Romanians have felt as a result of more credible reports of foreign involvement in the events of December 1989."
http://www.ceausescu.org/ceausescu_texts/revolution/december_revolt_moscow.htm
Who are the organisers of Tunis, Egypt, Yemen? who are those that started this instruction chain?
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activists-action-plan-translated/70388/
However it is not 1989 (fall of Ceausescu regime) but a repeat of 1979( The Islamic Revolution). Hear the specialist or even someone who knows more than us:
New Middle East is taking shape based on Islam: Iranian cleric
TEHRAN, Jan. 28 (MNA) -- Tehran Friday Prayer Leader has said that the United States’ dream of creating a new Middle East under its domination did not come true and a new Middle East, based on Islamic principles, is taking shape.
The remarks by Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami were made in reference to the unrest which has gripped certain Arab countries including Tunisia and Egypt.
Tunisian President Zine El Abidine’s government fell on January 14 after weeks of bloody protests over unemployment and high food prices.
The spirit of Tunisia also engulfed Egypt, one of the United States’ closest Middles East allies, where police fought with thousands of Egyptians who defied a government ban on Wednesday to protest against President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.
Ayatollah Khatami told worshippers at the Tehran University campus, “Today, an Islamic Middle East is taking shape and this is a new Middle East which is based on Islam, religion, and religious democracy.”
He added that former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had assumed a new Middle East would be created in favor of the U.S. and the Zionist regime.
Rice first introduced the term “New Middle East” to the world during the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.
“It is time for a new Middle East. It is time to say to those that don’t want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not,” she said.
Rice also described the aggression and the plight of the Lebanese people as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” saying Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.
“Whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East,” Rice stated.
Developments in Arab world echo Islamic Revolution
Ayatollah Khatami also said that the recent developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab states echo the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Khatami added that the ousted Ben Ali “copied what happened during the ruling of (Iran’s) shah” and faced a similar fate.
http://mehrnews.com/en/newsdetail.aspx?NewsID=1241084
Posted by: Mirel | Jan 31, 2011 12:30:35 PM
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