Former CBS News president Richard Salant (1961 - 64 and 1966 - 79) explained the major media's role: "Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." ...and to this very day most Americans haven't noticed they're being brained washed! ~ N. Hooben
Monday, July 8, 2013
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Six decades getting Egypt wrong...
"In February, the government advised the people to eat less and cut back the food subsidy to about 400 calories a day — which even Nanny Bloomberg might balk at. Amidst all the good news of the Morsi era — the collapse of Western tourism, the ethnic cleansing of Copts, the attacks on the Israeli embassy, sexual assaults on uncovered women, death for apostasy, etc. — amidst all these Morsi-era success stories, even a Muslim Brother has to eat occasionally."
The Princess and the
Brotherhood
For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity.
By Mark
Steyn @ National Review Online
After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time
the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi,
the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died
in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a
few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the
modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a
kingdom, and seven years before
Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.
A long life
reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian
monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the
doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid
third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within
24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power.
In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to
the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his
ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire
country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the
citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on
less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom,
most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity.
The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in
nothing flat.
And so the
“Arab Spring” ricochets from one half-witted plot twist to another. Morsi was
supposedly “the first democratically elected leader” in Egypt’s history, but he
was a one-man-one-vote-one-time guy. Across the Mediterranean in Turkey, Prime
Minister Erdogan could have advised him “softly softly catchee monkey” — you
neuter the army slowly, and Islamize incrementally, as Erdogan has done
remorselessly over a decade. But Morsi the “democrat” prosecuted journalists
who disrespected him, and now he sits in a military jail cell (next to
Mubarak’s?). And so the first army coup in Egypt since King Farouk’s ejection
in 1952 is hailed as a restoration of the idealistic goals of the “Facebook
revolution,” although General Sisi apparently has plans to charge Morsi with
“insulting the presidency.” That’s not a crime any self-respecting society
would have on its books — and anyway the Egyptian presidency itself is an
insult to presidencies. Morsi’s is the shortest reign of any of the five
presidents, shorter even than the first, Mohamed Naguib, who was booted out by
Nasser and whose obscurity is nicely caught by the title of his memoir, I Was an Egyptian President.
In the 2011
parliamentary elections, three-quarters of the vote went to either the Muslim
Brotherhood or their principal rivals, the Even More Muslim Brotherhood. So,
statistically speaking, a fair few of the “broad-based coalition” joining the
Coptic Christians and urban secularists out on the streets are former Morsi
guys. Are they suddenly Swedish-style social democrats? Human Rights Watch
reports that almost 100 women were subjected to violent sexual assault over
four days in Tahrir Square, which suggests not. The Jerusalem Post’s
Caroline Glick argues that the coalition that’s supplanted the Muslim Brothers
will wind up controlled by neo-Nasserite fascists.
For my part, I would bet Egypt’s fate will be largely driven by its fiscal ruin. Morsi is a good example of what happens when full-blown Islamic rule is put into effect in a country without the benefit of oil. He’s your go-to guy when it comes to ramping up the clitoridectomy rate, but he’s not so effective when it comes to jump-starting the economy. In February, the government advised the people to eat less and cut back the food subsidy to about 400 calories a day — which even Nanny Bloomberg might balk at. Amidst all the good news of the Morsi era — the collapse of Western tourism, the ethnic cleansing of Copts, the attacks on the Israeli embassy, sexual assaults on uncovered women, death for apostasy, etc. — amidst all these Morsi-era success stories, even a Muslim Brother has to eat occasionally. Egyptians learned the hard way that, whatever their cultural preferences, full-strength Islam comes at a price. Egypt has a wheat crisis, and a fuel crisis, and the World Food Program estimates that 40 percent of the population is suffering from “physical or mental” malnutrition. For purposes of comparison, when King Farouk was overthrown in 1952, Egypt and South Korea had more or less the same GDP per capita. Today Egypt’s is about one-eighth of South Korea’s.
For my part, I would bet Egypt’s fate will be largely driven by its fiscal ruin. Morsi is a good example of what happens when full-blown Islamic rule is put into effect in a country without the benefit of oil. He’s your go-to guy when it comes to ramping up the clitoridectomy rate, but he’s not so effective when it comes to jump-starting the economy. In February, the government advised the people to eat less and cut back the food subsidy to about 400 calories a day — which even Nanny Bloomberg might balk at. Amidst all the good news of the Morsi era — the collapse of Western tourism, the ethnic cleansing of Copts, the attacks on the Israeli embassy, sexual assaults on uncovered women, death for apostasy, etc. — amidst all these Morsi-era success stories, even a Muslim Brother has to eat occasionally. Egyptians learned the hard way that, whatever their cultural preferences, full-strength Islam comes at a price. Egypt has a wheat crisis, and a fuel crisis, and the World Food Program estimates that 40 percent of the population is suffering from “physical or mental” malnutrition. For purposes of comparison, when King Farouk was overthrown in 1952, Egypt and South Korea had more or less the same GDP per capita. Today Egypt’s is about one-eighth of South Korea’s.
Washington has
spent six decades getting Egypt wrong, ever since the CIA insouciantly joined
the coup against Farouk under the contemptuous name “Operation Fat F***er.” We
sank billions into Mubarak’s Swiss bank accounts, and got nothing in return
other than Mohammed Atta flying through the office window. Even in a
multicultural age, liberal Americans casually assume that “developing
countries” want to develop into something like a Western democracy. But Egypt
only goes backwards. Princess Fawzia is best remembered in the Middle East as,
briefly, the first consort of the late shah of Iran, whom she left in 1946
because she found Tehran hopelessly dull and provincial after bustling, modern,
cosmopolitan Cairo. In our time, the notion of Egypt as “modern” is difficult
to comprehend: According to the U.N., 91 percent of its women have undergone
female genital mutilation — not because the state mandates it, but because the
menfolk insist on it. Over half its citizenry subsists on less than two dollars
a day. A rural population so inept it has to import its food, Egyptians live on
the land, but can’t live off it.
Ninety years
ago, Fuad I’s kingdom was a ramshackle Arab approximation of a Westminster
constitutional monarchy: Even in its flaws and corruptions, it knew at least
what respectable societies were supposed to aspire to. Nasser’s one-party state
was worse, Mubarak’s one-man klepto-state worse still, and Morsi’s antidote to
his predecessors worst of all — so far. You can measure the decay in a tale of
two consorts. After she left the shah, Princess Fawzia served as the principal
hostess of the Egyptian court. In tiara and off-the-shoulder gowns, she looks
like a screen siren from Hollywood’s golden age — Hedy Lamarr, say, in Her
Highness and the Bellboy (1945). Sixty years later, no Egyptian
woman could walk through Cairo with bare shoulders without risking assault.
President Morsi’s wife, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, is his first cousin, and covered
from head to toe. If you were a visiting foreign minister, you were instructed
not to shake hands, or even look at her. If you did, you’d notice that the
abaya-clad crone bore an odd resemblance to the mom of the incendiary Tsarnaev
brothers. Eschewing the title first lady, she preferred to be known as “first
servant.” Egypt’s first couple embodied only the parochial, inbred dead end of
Islamic imperialism — what remains when all else is dead or fled.
This week, the
Brotherhood was checked — but not by anything recognizable as the forces of
freedom. Is it only a temporary respite? Certainly, in the age of what Caroline
Glick calls “America’s self-induced smallness,” Western ideas of real liberty
have little purchase in Cairo. Egypt will get worse, and, self-induced or not,
America is getting smaller.
— Mark Steyn,
a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn
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