An account from Cairo

[sabotabby]

Via eumelia, an anonymous personal account from Cairo:

We are a generation not raised on a culture of confrontation; we have had fear built into us since we were born. We are a generation whose intellectuals have been terrorized by the ruling regime, taught to conform and obey. Now is the time to learn the rules of the game.

Via Lenin's Tomb: the U.S. State Department says that Egypt is not ready for democracy, but Biden says that Mubarak is not a dictator. (WHAT?)

I think Egypt is, uh, ready for democracy:


Lots and lots of protesters, demanding democracy.

More ready than we are, anyway.

Here, have a primer.

If you're in Toronto, there's a demo in solidarity with the people of Egypt and Tunisia tomorrow at 1 in Dundas Square.

Comments

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

They're more ready than us, for sure.

I keep hearing people say Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood and you know what, I'd like to see what happens, because lessons can be learned from Iran when it comes to other totalitarian regimes...

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

I think what people aren't considering is that Egypt is not Iran and that the Muslim Brotherhood is not the Ayatollah's revolutionary goons. Egypt is neither Tunisia, another fallacy I see coming from the all-knowing scribblers and pundits.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

No doubt one the biggest problems when it comes to talking about the Middle East/North Africa is the great generalisation of Muslim countries and the various political factions and powers within.

The comparison to Tunisia comes about due to the snowball effect and of course the proximity.

I'm not seeing a lot of News regarding Yemen, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

I find this fascinating.

What do you think of El-Baradei(sp?) I heard him on Bougie Radio (sorry, NPR) after he and some of the people he was with in the marches, I guess, got hit with waterhoses. On the one hand I think it would be good to have someone not from a radical faction (though, from what I hear, Muslim Brotherhood has stood outta the way so far - but probably just being smart)... But is he just another puppet in waiting? Then again, would he be much more of a puppet than anyone else who would ostensibly be ready to take the reins of power? And wouldn't a puppet who, hopefully, stays true to the claim of being democratic, while still a puppet, at least give *more* of a voice to people than a complete dictator puppet? Is it even possible to be a democratic leader and a puppet? Am I making any sense? Probably not.

[sabotabby]

I wish I had a more insightful analysis, but I got nothin'. I didn't even see this coming.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Speaking of internet outages... Supposedly, this is a live-updated chart showing the current Egyptian network activity. Looks pretty silent. Hopefully it's just due to a time thing (i.e. night, etc...) and not cuz of a shutdown?

http://stat.ripe.net/egypt

[orpheus42.livejournal.com]

What the State Dept. says: "Egypt is not ready for democracy"

What it means: "we like them just the way they are'

or: "their evil dictator isn't quite as evil as other evil dictators we've supported, like Hussein, Marcos, and Pinochet"

or: "LOLZ democracy! Silly brown people."

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

the U.S. State Department says that Egypt is not ready for democracy,

I think a lot of people were saying that about another country in 1776.

[hopita.livejournal.com]

OK, here's the thing I've been noticing, and please feel free to school me on whatever nuance I may be missing:

That picture you posted, and every image I've seen on TV have been missing one very important thing: women. It troubles me when an image with that many faces has nary a woman in the bunch. Yes, I'm certain that it's, bare minimum, a cultural thing, but I'm personally very wary of any so-called revolution that appears to be a "Boys Only; No Girlz Allowed" club.

Caveat repeated: This is just my perception from the images I've seen. If someone wants to educate me as to why I'm wrong, I'm all ears.

[sabotabby]

I see a few.

Here are some more, and I have seen some firsthand accounts from women in the protests before they shut off Egypt's internets. It might be a case of who's organizing what kind of protest in what area of town.

[dustyasymptotes.livejournal.com]

I don't want to be too harsh but I think that observation is as much your preconceived bias as anything else. In the clearly visible portions of the picture alone that sabotabby posted I saw at least 2 with a quick glance.

There are numerous voices and poignant images coming out of Egypt from women, of women. The fact that you find them missing from mass media speaks more to the erasure of Arab and/or Muslim women, especially if they don't conform to Liberal Western forms of the feminine (a la the icon-ism adopted during the Iran protests*), than it does to the women's absence from the protests.

None of this detracts from the very specific and real harms that befall women under repressive conditions, including the police brutality in the form of rape and sexual assault that they suffer in detention, which might prevent women from taking part in protests in a way that does not deter men.

Your crude method of counting heads as CNN or Fox or whatever else flashing by does little justice to the actual issues facing women in Egypt, the wider Arab world, or any other situations of oppression.

*Latoya Peterson's article speaks to this phenomenon very well. A more recent post from Muslimah Media Watch about the Western media portrayal of women in recent events in Tunisia.

[hopita.livejournal.com]

I see one woman in sabs' posted photo. But even if you see two, that's out of how many people? (I've never been good at that game, giving a number to a massive crowd). Even the "Here are some more" link that sabs provides in response to my comment is pretty minimal; the self-proclaimed "Photos [of] young women in Egypt protests" only feature women in the first six photos, and of those six, three feature the same three women, and one of those three is a duplicate photo.

Maybe it's the Western media portrayal -- I can only see what I'm shown, after all. What I'm trying to say is that I've been struck by a profound lack of female faces in the footage I've seen, and that it troubles me. Whether it's because they're not participating in the actions, or whether the media is choosing not to show them, it troubles me to see entirely -- or, at the very least, overwhelmingly -- male crowds.

[hopita.livejournal.com]

I saw that image today as well, via feministing.

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

al-Jazeera English is broadcasting live: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

The government may be falling, or about to fall. It appears to depend on which way the Army will jump.
What's interesting is that the entire country "went dark" on the Net just after their midnight local time, as the government completely cut off Internet access.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting that. It looks like the army is out on streets and the NDP's HQ has been torched.

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

*People are clamoring on the tanks, the army isn't fighting them.