☫ Egypt: deja entendu

Analysis  Revolutions needn't colors when they are the colors

Egypt: deja entendu

This alliance that we (Israel) have with Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is an alliance of anxiety.

Asher Susser, Director of Moshe Dayan Center, University of Tel-Aviv

While the US Department of State has recently urged its media machinery to attempt distancing themselves from falling allied Pharaohs in North Africa, in a desperate drive to dodge future political repercussions (New York Times), the reality remains inescapable:

The Egyptian Mubarak dictatorship has consolidated itself through the last decades as the third biggest recipient of US foreign aid in the entire world (USAID: From the American People), only topped by the US own occupation of Iraq and the Tel-Aviv regime.

The American administrations have not hesitated to justify their financial, political, and propagandist support for secular nationalism around the Nile basin. In one of the most memorable examples, CNN's leading advocate for Muslim secularization, Fareed Zakaria, presented us the Egyptian dictator-to-be, Gamal Mubarak (Hosni's son) in March of 2009. In his GPS show, Zakaria introduced Gamal to his audience not just as a legitimate politician, but a hero for Muslims in Arabia, by setting the claim that his father's secularist tyranny had achieved more for the spread of Islam than any other movement in the Muslim world (CNN) --in tacit omission to the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Zakaria remarks that such progress has been observed "particularly in the (secular, US-allied) Arab world."

Added to the yearly 2 billion US dollars in foreign aid to Cairo, scenes like those of Fareed Zakaria pouring praises over the heads of cold-blooded oppressors of the Arab peoples have been showcased non-stop for as long as Egyptians were still too scared to take to the streets (Nur ein Wort). All along, the so-called torchbearers of democracy in Washington could save face wrapped up in claims of a supposed three-long-decades democratic reelection of Hosni Mubarak. 

Yet today the images of uncompromising protests spreading through Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, can't help but to remind of the scenes once widely fanned by Western media in 2009 Iran. What seems more slippery to the collective memory is how those protests ended: not with Iranian leaders reading a script redacted in Washington for engaging into reforms. They ceased, fading into the annals of media propaganda campaigns, when millions of grassroots faithful Iranians poured to the streets of dozens of cities nationwide in support of the Islamic Republic (IRIB).

Thus while Hosni Mubarak goes into the telecast, with the same instructions once handed to the last Shah of Iran (BBC), a very key question comes into the table: whatever happened to those masses who supposedly got Mubarak reelected for three consecutive decades and who legitimized the billions of dollars of American taxpayers going into the pockets of the Mubarak family?

And when the ghost-like nature of those missing pro-Mubarak masses is precisely the cause to the protests which today threaten an important US-Israeli pillar for the humiliation of Palestinians, will our Western media also --as has been methodically instructed to it in the case of Iran (FOX, Boston Globe, Guardian, Wikipedia, New York Times, BBC)-- fanatically prefix the mentions of Egyptian elections as "disputed"?

//