Adalah-NY and supporters creatively protest the performance of the “Brand Israel” Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on February 22. In the background, celebrated Irish composer and prominent activist for Palestinian rights, Raymond Deane, appreciates the innovative music of The Whitewash Apartheid Orchestra*.
Credit: Ellen Rachel DavidsonCredit: Ellen Rachel Davidson
“Tonight we sent a clear message to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israeli government’s “Brand Israel” campaign that their music cannot drown out Palestinians’ calls for justice.” The US protests respond to the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to boycott cultural institutions like the IPO that work to normalize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and whitewash the oppression of Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and in exile.
Hundreds of well-dressed concert-goers paused on the edge of the sidewalk in front of Carnegie Hall, and looked across the street at the protesters’ signs, and listened to their chants and songs. Many were handed a mock IPO program that featured a cover photo of a past IPO performance in front of Israeli tanks for the Israeli army, and, on the inside, the PACBI’s call for an international boycott of the IPO.
Protesters held signs saying, “Israel Fiddles while Palestine Burns,” “Justice Presto not Lento,” “Without Justice There’s No Harmony,” and “Boycott the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra;” and they carried a banner with the words “Don’t Harmonize with Israeli Apartheid,” surrounded on each side by a violin with a rifle barrel as its neck. Protesters chanted, “We love Gustav, we love Mahler, but occupation makes us holler;” “For liberation take a stand, don’t let Is-ra-el rebrand;” and “Muslims, Jews, Atheists and Christians, stand for justice like Egyptians.”
In a street theater skit, a protester-turned-IPO conductor asked the crowd, “How can apartheid continue without us promoting the new, positive, aesthetically vibrant and civilized Israel? Don’t forget, there is “art” in “apartheid.” The conductor instructed three violinists to play progressively louder in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to drown out and cover up Israeli crimes against Palestinians that kept welling up behind the orchestra.
Support BDS in Marrickville – send a Marrickville Councillor a note of encouragement for their important stand for human rights. CJPP Carry Bags – An environmentally-friendly, Palestine-friendly, ecosilk shopping bag. Strong, light and compact, to fit in your handbag or pocket. A stylish alternative to plastic bags!
One village resident told Pajhwok Afghan News that foreign forces intercepted a vehicle taking the wounded father to hospital, halting it for two hours. “The troops beat us and tied our hands,” the man, Psarlay, said. “Meanwhile, Patang died because of excessive bleeding.”
Another resident, 26-year-old Ezatullah, told the Wall Street Journal: “The house was completely destroyed by the strike. Only two children [aged] four and six survived.” He added that “thousands of people attended the funeral of the slain family Monday and are planning a protest against coalition forces Tuesday”.
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of Defense rose to $533.8 billion. Adding spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to $663.8 billion.[1][2]
When the budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense’s budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested.[3] An additional $37 billion supplemental bill to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was expected to pass in the spring of 2010, but has been delayed by the House of Representatives after passing the Senate.[4][5] Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $319 billion and $654 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $1.01 and $1.35 trillion in fiscal year 2010.[6]
While the US ambassador to the UN, “>Susan Rice disingenuously claimed that “We think it unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians” with regard to the UNSC resolution against illegal Israeli settlements, the fallout against the US and Israel may turn out to be a decisive factor in unifying Palestinians in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank along with consolidating the resistance of Arabs across the Middle East against US imperialism and its belligerent, expansionist, apartheid special friend.
In Gaza, Hamas described the US position as outrageous and said Washington was “completely biased” towards Israel.
Ibrahim Sarsour, an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said it was time to tell the US president, Barack Obama, to “go to hell”.
“Obama cannot be trusted,” he wrote in an open letter to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. “We knew his promises were lies. The time has come to spit in the face of the Americans.”
The Egyptian foreign ministry said the US veto would “lead to more damage of the United States’ credibility on the Arab side as a mediator in peace efforts”.
The use of the veto for the first time under Obama will strengthen perceptions in the Arab world that for the US, protection of its ally Israel overrides its desire for a just outcome for Palestinians in the decades-old conflict.
There’s also the strong possibility that the US interactions with Abbas were stage-managed – had Abbas not stood firm backing the UNSC resolution, his leadership likely would be challenged by outraged Palestinians in the West Bank. Now, the US’s investment in their collaborator satrap for converting the West Bank into neoliberal-friendly, pliant industrial zones and encouraging by default the growth of illegal Israeli settlements has outweighed any justice dividend. This US decision seems likely to prove unwise, damaging US credibility across the globe and adding fuel to burgeoning anti-imperialism in the region and beyond. With grass-roots revolutions for democracy in Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia. Yemen and Libya flourishing, the days of US hegemonical control of the vast resources of the Middle East may be numbered.
In other outrages, the US has refused a visa for Palestinian BDS leader Omar Barghouti, preventing him from attending his speaking tour in the US to promote his latest book. Barghouti squarely nails the problem Palestinians, and other folks in the region face, and the appropriate response.
Freedom, from the US establishment’s perspective, amounts to the “liberty” to bow to their hegemony and accepting their multinationals’ pillage of the world as fate. We shall continue to speak truth to power no matter what the consequences. We shall continue to struggle for nothing less than full freedom, full justice, full self determination, and full emancipation from US imperial hegemony.
The Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement lauded McEwan’s support for its cause.
“Ian McEwan today joined a long list of figures – including former President Jimmy Carter, writer Mario Vargas Llosa, and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahanman – who honored the protestors with their presence,” group member Avner Inbar said.
“The message has come through to me that they can’t meet me. They won’t meet me. Pressure has been brought to bear – I guess, of a parallel but probably much more vigorous kind than was brought to bear on me”
After all for more than 43 years the Israelis have been whittling away at the substance of the two state consensus embodied in unanimous Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), contending at every phase of the faux peace process that an agreement must incorporate ‘subsequent developments,’ that is, unlawful settlements, ethnic cleansing. In the end, the Israelis may turn out to have been more clever by half, creating an irresistible momentum toward the establishment of a single secular democratic state of Palestine that upholds human rights for both peoples and brings to an end the Zionist project of an exclusive ‘Jewish state.’
Oslo demands relocation of Israeli embassy : City officials say embassy poses security threat to surroundings; demands it be moved to an alternate site within a year. Ambassador: No one wants to sell us property
As the contagion of democracy protests spread in the Arab world last week, Bahrain’s far less disciplined forces decided, in effect, that the Saudis, who are their next-door neighbors, were right. They drew two lessons from Egypt: If President Obama calls, hang up. And open fire early.’
Libya Links
Live Blog – Libya
@AJELive Moftah, Benghazi protester, told Al Jazeera earlier that security and military forces have withdrawn and the city is run by “young people”. #
Concern over rising Libya violence – Top US diplomats condemn crackdowns on protesters but stopped short short of calling for a change of government. Libya clashes spread to Tripoli – Clashes between anti-government protesters and Gaddafi supporters escalate as army unit ‘defects’ in Benghazi.
@freeourlibya: PLEASE RT URGENT Google Speak2tweet 4 #LIBYA. Numbers: +16504194196 (ct) http://deck.ly/~NRc5r #
The US has signalled that it will be vetoing the resolution currently before the UN Security Council against Israeli settlement expansion, despite the resolution’s consistency with existing US policy and previous votes in the UN.
M J Rosenberg considers that this US veto “violates broader US interests”, is a function of US domestic policy and the power of the campaign finance from the ubiquitous Israel lobby is to blame:
This is from AFP’s report on what Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“We have made very clear that we do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues,” Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg told the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee.
“We have had some success, at least for the moment, in not having that arise there. And we will continue to employ the tools that we have to make sure that continues to not happen,” said Steinberg.
There is so much wrong with Steinberg’s statement that it is hard to know where to start.
First is the obvious. Opposition to Israeli settlements is perhaps the only issue on which the entire Arab and Muslim world is united. Iraqis and Afghanis, Syrians and Egyptians, Indonesians and Pakistanis don’t agree on much, but they do agree on that. They also agree that the US policy on settlements demonstrates flagrant disregard for human rights in the Muslim world (at least when Israel is the human rights violator).
Accordingly, a US decision to support the condemnation of settlements would send a clear message to the Arab and Muslim world that we understand what is happening in the Middle East and that we share at least some of its peoples’ concerns.
The settlement issue should be an easy one for the United States. Our official policy is the same as that of the Arab world. We oppose settlements. We consider them illegal. We have repeatedly demanded that the Israelis stop expanding them (although the Israeli government repeatedly ignores us). The administration feels so strongly about settlements that it recently offered Israel an extra $3.5bn in US aid to freeze settlements for 90 days.
It is impossible, then, for the United States to pretend that we do not agree with the resolution (especially when its language was carefully drafted to comport with the administration’s official position). So why will we veto a resolution that expresses our own views?
Steinberg says that “We do not think the Security Council is the right place to engage on these issues.”
Why not? It is the Security Council that passed all the major international resolutions (with US support) governing Israel’s role in the occupied territories since the first one, UN Resolution 242 in 1967.
He then adds, with clear pride that:
“We have had some success, at least for the moment, in not having that [the settlements issue] arise there.”
Very impressive. The United States has had no success whatsoever in getting the Netanyahu government to stop expanding settlements — to stop evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem to make way for ultra-Orthodox settlers — and no success in getting Israel to crack down on settler violence, but we have had “some success” in keeping the issue out of the United Nations.
The only way to resolve the settlements issue, according to Steinberg, “is through engagement through the parties, and that is our clear and consistent position”. Clear and consistent it may be. But it hasn’t worked. The bulldozers never stop.
Of course, it is not hard to explain the Obama administration’s decision to veto a resolution embodying positions that we support. It is the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is lobbying furiously for a US veto (actually not so furiously; AIPAC doesn’t waste energy when it knows that its congressional acolytes — and Dennis Ross in the White House itself — will do its work for them).
The power of the lobby is the only reason we will veto the resolution. Try to come up with another one. After all, voting for the resolution (or, at least, abstaining on it) serves US interests in the Middle East at a critical moment and is consistent with US policy.
But it would enrage the lobby and its friends who will threaten retribution in the 2012 election.
Simply put, our Middle East policy is all about domestic politics. And not even the incredible events of the past month will change that.
That is why US standing in the Middle East will continue to deteriorate. We simply cannot deliver. After all, there is always another election on the horizon and that means that it is donors, not diplomats, who determine US policy.
Yet the power of campaign finance and political pressure from the Israel lobby cannot be separated from the skewed system which facilitates corruption of imperial power. Other interests wilfully operate against people’s welfare within and without the empire besides the Israel lobby – big tobacco, big pharma, big banks, big chemicals, big oil and big defence are also empowered disproportionately by the US campaign finance and lobbying system.
A fundamental overhaul of the plutocratic US political system which presently permits the rich to rule courtesy of campaign bribery and extortionist lobbying would assist greatly the reassertion of balanced US foreign and domestic policy.
UPDATE
It seems the US is attempting to head off the UNSC settlements resolution by supplanting a mealy-mouthed statement.
The U.S. informed Arab governments Tuesday that it will support a U.N. Security Council statement reaffirming that the 15-nation body “does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” a move aimed at avoiding the prospect of having to veto a stronger Palestinian resolution calling the settlements illegal.
But the Palestinians rejected the American offer following a meeting late Wednesday of Arab representatives and said it is planning to press for a vote on its resolution on Friday, according to officials familar with the issue. The decision to reject the American offer raised the prospect that the Obama adminstration will cast its first ever veto in the U.N. Security Council.
Still, the U.S. offer signaled a renewed willingness to seek a way out of the current impasse, even if it requires breaking with Israel and joining others in the council in sending a strong message to its key ally to stop its construction of new settlements. The Palestinian delegation, along with Lebanon, the Security Council’s only Arab member state, have asked the council’s president this evening to schedule a meeting for Friday. But it remained unclear whether the Palestinian move today to reject the U.S. offer is simply a negotiating tactic aimed at extracting a better deal from Washington.
Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, outlined the new U.S. offer in a closed door meeting on Tuesday with the Arab Group, a bloc of Arab countries from North Africa and the Middle East. In exchange for scuttling the Palestinian resolution, the United States would support the council statement, consider supporting a U.N. Security Council visit to the Middle East, the first since 1979, and commit to supporting strong language criticizing Israel’s settlement policies in a future statement by the Middle East Quartet.
. @PJCrowley for goodness sake, just support the UNSC resolution against Israeli settlements – mealy-mouthed statements aren’t sufficient! #
The guests: Rashid Khalidi, JPS editor and a professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University; Clovis Maksoud, the director of the Center for the Global South; and Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and Seymour Hersh.
The interviewees are: Mehran Kamrava, the interim dean of Georgetown University, Qatar; and Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.
While a radical regime in Egypt would threaten Israel directly but not America, a radical anti-Western regime in Saudi Arabia—which produces one of every four barrels of oil world-wide—clearly would endanger America as leader of the world economy.
‘Soon after the 9/11 attack, a long, typed anonymous letter was sent to Quantico Marine Base accusing the long-suffering Assaad, Zack’s victim in 1991, of plotting terrori…sm. This letter was received before the anthrax letters or disease were reported. The timing of the note makes its author a serious suspect in the anthrax attacks. The sender also displayed considerable knowledge of Dr. Assaad, his work, his personal life and a remarkable premonition of the upcoming bioterrorism attack.
After interviewing Assaad on Oct. 2, 2001, the FBI decided the letter was a hoax. While major newspapers noted that an anonymous letter had accused Dr. Assaad of bioterrorism, none followed up on it after his innocence was established. Zack’s name never surfaced again as one of the 30 suspects.
When the Washington Report asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, “Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.”
It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation.
When asked if Hatfill was part of the group that ganged up on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, Dr. Rosenberg answered, “Hatfill was NOT one of the persecutors of Assaad.”
She is convinced that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters but isn’t arresting him because he knows too much about U.S. secret biological weapons research and production. But she isn’t naming names. Neither is Dr. Assaad, who did not return calls from the Washington Report.’
Egypt will almost certainly return to its Arab base, liberate its foreign policy and restore its leadership role. That means a liberated Arab League and a constructive restoration of the Arab political structures that have deteriorated for the last four decades to the point of irrelevance.
The new Egypt will be a much-needed catalyst for change.
Alarming as it may sound for Israel and its Western backers (those who keep lecturing us about democracy but are the first to resist our struggle to achieve it), it actually is the right, peaceful and accurate course for stability and better relations of cooperation within and beyond the region.
Democracies in Tunisia and Egypt – and perhaps elsewhere – would be more likely to build relations with the US and the rest of the world on the basis of mutual respect and equality, not hegemony and exploitation in favour of Israel.
Israel would never choose to enter into serious negotiations with its Arab neighbours while they are weak, disunited and powerless. If we are at the beginning of a process that will reverse the situation that has existed until now, we have every reason to be optimistic about the region’s future.
In effect, the Obama administration was seeking to keep Mubarak in office as long as possible, and to keep his police state alive thereafter. For all the recent talk about supporting Egyptian democracy, what is ultimately vital to American policymakers is Egypt’s geopolitical alignment with the United States and its acquiescence in Israel’s regional hegemony — a policy Mubarak, and under him Suleiman, have long facilitated. These core interests could well be affected by a fully democratic Egypt that sought to play a role commensurate with its size and history in regional politics and that represented faithfully the wishes of its people (as the current democratic Turkish government does).
A democratic Egypt might challenge American support of Israel’s Middle Eastern nuclear monopoly, refuse to collude in Israel’s illegal and immoral siege of Gaza, actively back a genuine inter-Palestinian reconciliation, or otherwise assert its independence from American and Israeli policies. It might do so even while respecting the letter of the (highly unequal) peace treaty with Israel and existing accords with the U.S. Given the blinders worn by American policymakers, such an Egypt would be a policy headache in Washington on the level of that caused by all three major regional powers, Israel, Turkey and Iran.
The most bizarre show on earth – opened by the support act of Obama, leader of the hegemon, gave imprimature to the proceeding freak main acts. Looking like a saturnine Count Dracula, Mubarak handed over ‘some powers’ to his selected successor, US pet and arch-torturer, ‘Egypt is not ready for democracy’ Omar Suleiman. A’sad Abukhalil commented:
This speech will go down in history as the dumbest speech ever delivered by a dictator.
The anguish of the Egyptian masses that their debased tyrants would not abdicate echoed around the planet. Egyptians marched to the state television tower and presidential palace though after his address Mubarak had swiftly fled to his holiday residence at Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea. And then, a few hours later Suleiman announced:
“Citizens, during these very difficult circumstances that Egypt is going through, president Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down as the president of the republic and has entrusted the High Council of the Armed Forces to carry out the dealing of the country”.
…
The military says the cabinet will be sacked, the parliament suspended and they will work with the judges of the Supreme Court to amend the constitution to allow for fair and free elections currently scheduled for September.
So the military’s promise that the people would get what they wanted has been partially honoured – the peopleare unlikely to settle for less than complete fulfillment. According to Tariq Ali:
And so it ended badly for Mubarak and his old henchman. Having unleashed security thugs only a fortnight ago, Vice-President Suleiman’s failure to dislodge the demonstrators from the square was one more nail in the coffin. The rising tide of the Egyptian masses with workers coming out on strike , judges demonstrating on the streets, and the threat of even larger crowds next week, made it impossible for Washington to hang on to Mubarak and his cronies. The man Hillary Clinton had referred to as a loyal friend, indeed “family”, was dumped. The US decided to cut its losses and authorised the military intervention.
Omar Suleiman, an old western favourite, was selected as vice-president by Washington, endorsed by the EU, to supervise an “orderly transition”. Suleiman was always viewed by the people as a brutal and corrupt torturer, a man who not only gives orders, but participates in the process. A WikiLeaks document had a former US ambassador praising him for not being “squeamish”. The new vice president had warned the protesting crowds last Tuesday that if they did not demobilise themselves voluntarily, the army was standing by: a coup might be the only option left. It was, but against the dictator they had backed for 30 years. It was the only way to stabilise the country. There could be no return to “normality”.
The age of political reason is returning to the Arab world. The people are fed up of being colonised and bullied. Meanwhile, the political temperature is rising in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.
This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they’ve done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence — not terrorism, not mindless killing — but nonviolence, moral force that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.
And while the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can’t help but hear the echoes of history — echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice.
As Martin Luther King said in celebrating the birth of a new nation in Ghana while trying to perfect his own, “There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom.” Those were the cries that came from Tahrir Square, and the entire world has taken note.
Today belongs to the people of Egypt, and the American people are moved by these scenes in Cairo and across Egypt because of who we are as a people and the kind of world that we want our children to grow up in.
The word Tahrir means liberation. It is a word that speaks to that something in our souls that cries out for freedom. And forevermore it will remind us of the Egyptian people — of what they did, of the things that they stood for, and how they changed their country, and in doing so changed the world.
The reign of madness is over. 7000 years of Pharaonic rule is broken. Now, the fate of other dictatorial vampires of the region hangs in the balance. We are all Tunisians and Egyptians now – watch out Israel, liberation of Palestinians is coming!
“He gave me a lesson in democracy and said: ‘We see the democracy the US spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that’s the fate of the Middle East,'” Ben-Eliezer said.
“‘They may be talking about democracy but they don’t know what they’re talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,'” he quoted Mubarak as saying.
Ben-Eliezer said Mubarak expanded in the telephone call on “what he expects will happen in the Middle East after his fall.”
“He contended the snowball (of civil unrest) won’t stop in Egypt and it wouldn’t skip any Arab country in the Middle East and in the Gulf.
“He said ‘I won’t be surprised if in the future you see more extremism and radical Islam and more disturbances – dramatic changes and upheavals,” Ben-Eliezer added.
Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of an Iran-style Islamist revolution in Egypt should Mubarak’s Muslim Brotherhood rivals eventually take over.
“(Mubarak) was looking for an honorable way out,” Ben-Eliezer said.
“He repeated the sentence, ‘I have been serving my country, Egypt, for 61 years. Do they want me to run away? I won’t run away. Do they want to throw me out? I won’t leave. If need be, I will be killed here.'”
Someday, we’ll get the back story on how, in just 24 hours, the military went from evidently backing Mubarak to ditching him. This was crucial, and I doubt very much the US played no role in this. I’d wager that Pentagon chief Robert Gates and Mike Mullen, the heads of the joint chiefs of staff, had quite a lot to do with that.
With the Egyptian army relying on US military aid basically to exist, their words surely carried weight. Maybe all that aid over years, excessive as it has been in many ways, paid important dividends in the last two weeks. The army behaved professionally, not like some tinhorn’s personal secret security service. That was one of the most breathtaking things about this, and could stand as one of the most hopeful in terms of serving as a model for future situations like this.
There’s a long way to go from here, of course. This is a happy beginning, not a happy ending. But now, the US can and should start playing the less ambiguous role it took on, as of Thursday night. We need to be on the side of democracy and rights and freedoms, and stay on that side, and we do need to continue to be concerned with the positive aspects of regional stability to which Egypt has contributed. There are more needles to thread.
Finally: no, I will not say that Obama deserves much credit for this. At the same time, I have no doubt in my mind that if President McCain had given a speech on democracy in Cairo 20 months ago and now this happened, the neocons and Fox News and the usual suspects would be calling it “the McCain Revolution” and baying about how it proved that a bold stance by an American president had made all the difference.
I won’t parrot that kind of inanity. I’ll simply say that, from his Cairo speech until today, Obama has helped this process more than he’s hindered it. And we didn’t have to invade two countries, either. That’s the right side – for him, and for us, the people of the United States. Now, we need to stay there.
In Ramallah, the protesters repeated a slogan calling for the end of internal Palestinian divisions (which, in Arabic, rhymes with the Egyptian call for the end to the regime), as well as demanding an end to negotiations with Israel – sending a clear message that there will be no room left for the Palestinian Authority if it continues to rely on such negotiations.
Israel’s leadership, from the very beginning of the state, has believed that security is a function of alliances with the West and military force in the region. They have never sought any meaningful compromises with their neighbors. Their only “friends” in the region are dictators who cooperate with Israel because they fear it and because the Americans pay them to do so. This is not a good basis for long term security. Israel’s strategy of security through the application of force is now being revealed as inadequate.
So a self-appointed committee, called the “Wise Men Committee” has been issuing opinions and commands and is trying to mediate between the people of Egypt and the regime of Mubarak. Their first idea was to donate Egypt to the head of Mubarak’s secret police, `Umar Sulayman. The Egyptian billionaire, Najib Sawiris, is a member of the committee and that troubles me greatly. What would have Marx thought about an initiative of a billionaire at a time of revolutionary change. Sawiris, of course, has been close to Jamal Mubarak and is an opportunist who shifts and flip flops, even on Palestine. I trust him like George Habash trusted Yasir `Arafat. `Amr Musa is another well-known opportunist: a servant of Mubarak has just saw the light because Sha`ban `Abd-Ar-Rahim likes him. But the protesters are impressive: when one member of the Committee (Abu Al-Majd) tried to talk today in Tahrir Square, he was shouted down and interrupted and sent home.
The ‘youth manifesto’ is here (for the English version in .pdf format, go here)
At Al Quds newspaper in the UK, there’s a story which I’ve google-translated and which indicates that the wise-men committee was submitted by Cairo, whilst the Youth manifesto says the youth did the selection. One has to wonder, therefore, who in fact prepared the Youth manifesto.
‘Cairo presented a so-called Committee of Wise Men in Egypt, a set of proposals for the youth of the demonstrators to be the center of the dialogue between them and the Egyptian government.
According to press sources, on Friday evening said that when Dr. Ahmed Kamal Abul Magd, a member of the Committee, the dumping of the proposals on the demonstrators in Tahrir Square boycotted and rejected a large number of them to listen to these proposals, which forced him and most of the members of the Committee of Wise Men to return to the headquarters of the League of Arab States, near Tahrir Square amid bitter divisions between supporters of the proposals and Ravdiha for different reasons.
The statement of the wise men to ensure a wide range of points to calm the demonstrators, most important of which are assigned to Alsidamr Solomon Vice President managing the transition.
Among the statement included also be a place for young people and clear in the national dialogue and to be “institutionalized dialogue” is selected any of its functions and objectives and the participants in a clear and specific.
The statement should also be developed in political reforms and not to limit the dialogue to the traditional parties are provided sufficient guarantees for a peaceful transition of power, with an estimate of the role played by the military at this point.
Taking Committee confirmed that it sought to “complete agreement between the parties regarding the solution,” and expressed hope that the resulting proposal to reach a solution “in the coming hours”, the Commission invited the young protesters to choose the leadership of their representative and drew in contrast to the “Muslim Brotherhood” pledge Under this proposal, failure to submit a candidate for the forthcoming presidential elections.
Includes a committee of elders of both the thinker Ahmed Kamal Abul-Magd and the world, Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and businessman Naguib Sawiris, the Secretary General of the League of Arab States Amr Moussa, head of the Central Auditing Agency Malt and the President of the Islamic Front Party Democratic Osama Ghazali Harb, and Dr. Amr Hamzawy, Munir Fakhri Abdel the light and the media Mahmoud Saad. ‘
’1610 GMT: Al Arabiya reports that the 10-man wise men committee has gotten positive feedback from President Mubarak about handing over power to VP Omar Suleiman. No one else has confirmed this’
The Guardian has learned that delegates from these mini-gatherings then come together to discuss the prevailing mood, before potential demands are read out over the square’s makeshift speaker system. The adoption of each proposal is based on the proportion of cheers or boos it receives from the crowd at large.
Delegates have arrived in Tahrir from other parts of the country that have declared themselves liberated from Mubarak’s rule, including the major cities of Alexandria and Suez, and are also providing input into the decisions.
“When the government shut down the web, politics moved on to the street, and that’s where it has stayed,” said one youth involved in the process. “It’s impossible to construct a perfect decision-making mechanism in such a fast-moving environment, but this is as democratic as we can possibly be.”
“Genuine opposition politics in this country has always relied on people taking the initiative, and that’s what we’re seeing here – on a truly astounding level,” said Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian author who has been closely monitoring the spontaneous political activity on the ground. “There is more transparency and equality here in Tahrir than anything we’ve ever seen under the Mubarak regime; anyone and everyone can have their say, and that makes the demands that come out of the process even more powerful.”
The document that has emerged from Tahrir details calls for the election of a founding council of 40 public intellectuals and constitutional experts, who will draw up a new constitution over the coming months under the supervision of the transitional government, then put it to the Egyptian people in a referendum. Following the passage of the new constitution, fresh elections would be held at a local and national level.
Such a scenario would go far further than the piecemeal constitutional reform offered by the present government, and would preclude any delay in Mubarak’s departure or any transitional governing role for existing members of country’s ruling elite.
The demands, which have been endorsed by the so-called “300” – the loose coalition of online activists who were behind last month’s call for the “day of rage” on 25 January, the event that sparked the current uprising – are also more radical than those put forward earlier this week by a group of senior judges, diplomats and businessmen in the Egyptian daily newspaper Al Shorouk. The latter group’s statement endorsed the idea of Suleiman as a transitional president, an outcome firmly rejected by the majority of those camped out in Tahrir.
Other demands to have come out the square include the end of the country’s Emergency Law, the dismantling of the state security apparatus, and the trial of key regime leaders, including Mubarak.
“The regime is trying to demonise protesters as agents of foreign powers, fomenters of chaos, and so on,” says Hossam el-Hamalawy, a journalist and blogger. “But go down to Tahrir, sit on a corner, and within a few minutes you’ll be in the middle of a spontaneous political discussion – the energy of people’s ideas is inspiring. It’s down there that the legitimate voice of the protesters and our revolution can be heard.”
A self-declared group of Egypt’s elite — called the “group of wise men” — has circulated ideas to try to break that deadlock. Among them is a proposal that Mubarak “deputize” his Vice President Omar Suleiman with his powers and, for the time being at least, step down in everything but name.
The “wise men,” who are separate from the protesters on the ground, have met twice in recent days with Suleiman and the prime minister, said Amr el-Shobaki, a member of the group. Their proposals also call for the dissolving of the parliament monopolized by the ruling party and the end of emergency laws that give security forces near-unlimited powers.
Late Friday, a delegation from the protesters themselves meet with Shafiq to discuss ways out of the impasse, said Abdel-Rahman Youssef, a youth activist who participated in the meeting.
Youssef told The Associated Press on Saturday that the meeting was not a start of negotiations. “It was a message to see how to resolve the crisis. The message is that they must recognize the legitimacy of the revolution and that president must leave one way or the other, either real or political departure,” he said.
The protesters are looking into the proposal floated by the “wise men,” said Youssef, who is part of the youth movement connected to Nobel Peace laureate and prominent reform advocate Mohamed ElBaradei.
“It could be a way out of the crisis,” Youssef said. “But the problem is in the president…he is not getting it that he has become a burden on everybody, psychologically, civicly and militarily.”
…
Protesters, however, are wary of a trap. They fear that without the pressure of protesters in the streets demanding democracy, the regime will carry out only superficial reforms while keeping its grip on power. So they are reluctant to end the demonstrations without the concrete victory of Mubarak’s ouster and assurances on what happens next.
el-Shobaki, of “the wise men,” said Suleiman did not respond to their proposal that Mubarak deputize him.
“The stumbling point ,” el-Shobaki said.
The “wise men” are comprised of about a dozen prominent public figures and jurists, including former Cabinet minister and lawyer Ahmed Kamal Aboul-Magd, businessman Naguib Sawiris and political scientist academics like el-Shobaki. “We don’t represent the youth on the ground. We keep in touch with them,” said el-Shobaki.
The protest organizers themselves are a mix. The majority are young secular leftists and liberals, who launched the wave of protests though an Internet campaign, but the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood also has built a prominent role. They have succeeded in drawing a startlingly broad cross-section of the public, including the urban poor, lower middle class and young upper class.
Protest organizers have formed a committee that will carry out any future negotiations with the government over reforms. The committee includes ElBaradei, the Muslim Brotherhood and representatives of the youth factions.
According to the State Department, U.S. military aid to Egypt totals over $1.3 billion annually [5] in a stream of funding known as Foreign Military Financing.
U.S. officials have long argued that the funding promotes strong ties between the two countries’ militaries, which in turn has all sorts of benefits. For example, U.S. Navy warships get “expedited processing” through the Suez Canal.
Here’s a 2009 U.S. embassy cable recently released by WikiLeaks that makes essentially the same point [6]:
President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as “untouchable compensation” for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.
The military funding also enables Egypt to purchase U.S.-manufactured military goods and services, a 2006 report [7] from the Government Accountability Office explained [PDF]. The report criticized both the State Department and the Defense Department for failing to measure how the funding actually contributes to U.S. goals.
Movement in the NDP:
From @SultanAlQassemi
BREAKING Al Arabiya: President Mubarak has resigned as head of the ruling NDP party
Al Arabiya now speaking to corrupt NDP tycoon Ibrahim Kamel (who was pushing for Gamal to be president) “This is a natural development”
…
To clarify to all: Mubarak is still a member of the NDP, as a technicality he must remain a member, however he is no longer head of the NDP.
Breaking Al Arabiya: Gamal Mubarak, Safwat El Sarif, Mufeed Shehab & Zakaria Azmi no longer members of the NDP (this is what I see onscreen)
Breaking Al Arabiya: The new leadership of the NDP party are: Hossam Badrawi, Mohamed Ragab, Mohammed Abdallah & Magid Sharbini
“Gamal Mubarak resigns from Egypt ruling party in gesture to protesters” http://bit.ly/i2DTb0 Gamal is no longer …a member of the NDP party
RT @weddady: RT @bbclysedoucet student protestor Tahrir Sq:we want 2 get rid of cancer but they’re giving us aspirins -reaction NDP resignations #jan25
RT @5thEstate: Arabiya retracts report #Mubarak resigned as heading of ruling NDP (Rtrs) #jan25 #oops
CIA weasel! RT @5thEstate: U.S. crisis envoy to #Egypt, Frank Wisner, says #Mubarak must stay in power to steer changes (Rtrs) #jan25
‘”We need to get a national consensus around the pre-conditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes,” Frank Wisner told the Munich Security Conference.’
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking to a security conference in Munich, said it was important to support Mr. Suleiman, a pillar of the Egyptian establishment and Mr. Mubarak’s longtime confidante, as he seeks to defuse street protests. Mr. Suleiman has promised repeatedly to reach out to opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, but there were few indications that any genuine dialogue with opposition leaders had begun.
Ms. Clinton’s message, echoed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, was a notable shift in tone from the past week, when President Obama, faced with violent clashes in Cairo, demanded that Mr. Mubarak make swift, bold changes. The change appears to reflect worries that rapid change in Egypt could destabilize the country and the region.
“That takes some time,” Mrs. Clinton said. “There are certain things that have to be done in order to prepare.”
But Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who has been chosen to negotiate on behalf of the protesters and other opposition groups, said the American-backed transition plan was a nonstarter. “I do not think it’s adequate,” he said in an interview. “I’m not talking about myself. It’s not adequate for the people.
“Mubarak needs to go,” he said. “It has become an emotional issue. They need to see his back, there’s no question about it.”
From @exiledsurfer:
The 7 Demands of the Tahrir protesters: 1. Resignation of the president 2. End of the emergency state. 3. Dissolution of The People’s Assembly and Shora Council. 4. Formation of a national transitional government 5. An elected Parliament that will ammend the Constitution to allow for presidential elections. 6. Immediate prosecution for those responsible for deaths of the revolution’s martyrs. 7. Immediate prosecution of the corrupters & those who robbed the country of its wealth. (via @ioerror, @suzeeinthecity, @kyrah) #tahrir #jan25 #egypt #cairo #suez #alexandria #feb1 #departurefriday
Egypt has potential natural gas reserves of 62 trillion cubic feet (1.7 trillion cubic meters), the 18th largest in the world.
Egypt began providing Israel with natural gas in February 2008 under a deal by which it will sell Israel 60 billion cubic feet (1.7 billion cubic meters) a year for a period of 15 years.
The deal raised controversy at home, with some in the Egyptian opposition saying the gas was being sold at below-market rates. Others resent Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and say Egypt shouldn’t supply energy to Israel.
“The deal (to sell gas) was a blow to the pride of Egyptians and a betrayal,” former diplomat Ibrahim Yousri told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Yousri led a high court challenge to try halt Egypt’s sale of gas to Israel. Although the high court ruled in his favor in February 2010, the ruling was widely ignored by the government.
