Lupercal, I don't have the time or energy to go over myriad reasons why you are totally wrong about what's happening in Egypt. I'll try to sum it up in point form:
1) Egypt's economy under the current regime is run entirely according to the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank. There is literally no light between these global predators and their Egyptian cat's paws. The current Minister of Finance is Youssef Boutros Ghali, a deeply corrupt and hated sociopath who has been rewarded for all his great work destroying Egypt's economic infrastructure with an appointment to the board of the IMF (in addition to his remaining Egypt's Finance Minister, needless to say). The current Minister of Investment Mahmoud Mohieldin has been similarly rewarded for his faithful service to the foreign interests with a job as
Managing Director of the World Bank Group. This regime, in other words, is a co-conspirator in the gutting of the Egyptian economy, causing massive suffering to the Egyptian people, on behalf of Western (and zionist) "interests".
2) The Egyptian regime has been selling Egypt's strategic gas at below-market prices to Israel, even as Egyptians suffer from acute shortages; it has been implicated in selling cement to Israel, also at below-market prices, even as the cost of cement was skyrocketing here in Egypt; the same with steel.
3) The Egyptian regime has been collaborating with Israel in the latter's criminal and barbaric siege against Gaza and even, shockingly, injected poisonous gas into tunnels that serve as a lifeline for people in Gaza, killing several people.
4) The Egyptian regime has conducted through its media a systematic campaign of defamation and incitement against Israel's enemies, especially targeting Hamas and Hizbullah with fabrications and lies, and has harassed not only Palestinians but Egyptians who express their solidarity with the Palestinian struggle to be free.
5) The Egyptian regime has collaborated with the US and Israel in building a steel underground barrier between Gaza and Egypt to prevent the transfer of goods between the two sides and has made it very difficult or almost impossible for Palestinians to travel out of Gaza even to seek desperately needed medical treatment.
6) Under this regime, Egyptian prime public lands have been sold to foreign developers of luxury residential compounds and tourist resorts for obscenely low prices; factories have been dismantled and their workers kicked out; agricultural lands have been deprived of water and left to desertification while vast swathes of desert have been transformed into golf courses. Public schools have been scandalously starved of funds, contributing to the proliferation of for-profit foreign-run private schools for the rich and no real access to education for the poor.
7) Under this regime, Egypt has become almost totally dependent on foreign imports for its food; we import 90% of everything we need. Meanwhile, Egypt's prisons are full of farmers who have been forced to take loans from banks at high interest rates to buy imported fertilizers and seeds, but when the seeds failed or the government deprived their land of water, they couldn't pay back the loans and were arrested.
8 ) The regime's policies have completely eradicated the cultivation of the world-famous Egyptian cotton, which Egyptian farmers can no longer afford to grow. We now import inferior cotton from China and Israel, instead.
9) Israeli agricultural "cooperation" has resulted in Egypt's entire stock of domestically-produced seeds having been eradicated and replaced with Israeli GM seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, upon which Egyptian farming now is based.
10) The proliferation of heavy industrial polluters (many of them foreign-owned or partnerships between high-ranking members of the regime and foreign corporations), the import of cancer-causing chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the spiraling price of healthy food, and the systematic neglect of public works to serve Egypt's 80% or so who live just above, at, or far below the poverty line has caused a massive and rapid decline in public health during the 30 years that this regime has been in power.
This is just a small sample of what has led to Egyptians' desperation to get rid of this regime. To put it in simple terms: we hate them, and experience has taught us that it's either them or us. (The feeling is mutual).
Meanwhile, Israel and its Western allies very much need this regime, or one just like it, because any Egyptian government that is at all representative of, or accountable to, the Egyptian people will most certainly NOT serve these predators' interests. At all.
Au contraire, mon cher.Re: Hillary Clinton's comment about Egypt, what I heard was desperation and simmering anger that the Egyptian regime was ruining everything, that it had gone too far and that something had to be done to push the genie back in the bottle before the whole thing blows. What Clinton was calling for is palliatives, placebos, just enough faux-democracy to keep the rabble quiet and release some of the pressure. I was especially interested to hear her call for a greater role for "civil society" in view of the fact that hinky organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and others have been quite active here in recent years, spending lots of money but for some reason not really succeeding in connecting with ordinary Egyptians, or gaining their trust.
The thing that Ms. Clinton and her zionist friends need to realize is that it's too late: Egyptians have not only their own considerable and rather bitter experience to draw on, but all the lessons of the now-discredited "color revolutions" and bullshit controlled "opposition" politicians, activists and journalists, "Al Hurra" and other propaganda outlets, etc., all of which have been thoroughly exposed, the whole bag of tricks.
Similarly, the attempts to divide Egyptians along sectarian lines, to fan the flames of religious fanaticism via mysteriously-funded satellite tv stations beaming their poisonous messages of hate, have failed. As have the regime's and its Western allies' efforts to portray Arab people as driven by irrational, reactionary "Islamo-fascists". To quote Monty Python, "We fart in their general direction" and get on with the business of getting ourselves free.
The genie is already way out of the bottle, and it has discovered that what was in the bottle was only a part of itself: the Tunisian genie, the Palestinian genie, the Sudanese genie, the Lebanese genie, the Egyptian genie etc., etc., have re-membered that they once were one and are once again ONE.
It doesn't matter, lupercal, whether you know it or not. We know what's happening, and our enemies know what's happening. Like any cornered, desperate animal, they will lash out viciously, they will use every cunning trick they have, but in the end they will lose.
I will now bow out of this discussion and leave it to the rest of you all to argue back and forth about what's real and what's not.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
