What happen to the democracy in Egypt?

[bigrebnc1775]

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Egyptian Military Using Live Fire Ammunition Against Protesters

A disturbing video of Egyptian protests near Tahrir Square shows police and armed forces using live ammunition against innocent protesters.

In the YouTube video entitled, "The Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street," a series of video clips depict security forces wantonly firing live ammunition at protesters who are at a distance and offering no immediate threat to the police.

In the past week. Egyptian protesters have taken to the streets to criticize the military for not handing over power to a civilian-led interim government.

Protesters and international organizations have condemned police brutality in the crackdown, especially on the streets around Tahrir Square, where fighting has been intense and not obvious to the international media present on the square.

Egyptian Military Using Live Fire Ammunition Against Protesters
This link is the translated version
Video: Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street (w/ English Subtitles) | Wil Ya Wil

This is the youtube version
‫!

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Is this what obama supported in Egypt?

 

[JStone]

Arabs are the most fucked up losers in the history of the world.

Arab Author Anwar Malek...

The Arabs are afflicted with fantasies and obsolete bravado. False, empty bravado, which does no good to anybody. The Arabs invented or discovered the zero--but what did they do with it? Some of them sat on it, some put it on their heads, while others wore it around their waists and began shaking their hips, their belies, and their breasts in order to sell to the world the idea that modern Arabs are doing something

Today, the Arabs constitute nothing but thousands of zeros to the left. The Arabs have lost their worth, their humanity, their culture, and everything. There is nothing to suggest that the Arabs can be relied upon to produce anything. This false bravado is deeply rooted in the Arabs to an unimaginable degree. It is so deeply rooted that the Arabs believe they can go to the moon. If you asked your viewers whether the Arabs would be able to reach the moon by 2015, they would say, "Yes, the Arabs will get to the moon" By Allah, the Arabs will not go more than a few hundred kilometers from their doorsteps.

In all honesty, the Arabs are backward and are not fit for civilization at all. I am talking about the Arabs of today who have begun to export shawarma, falafel and lupin beans to Europe and they purport to be bringing something Arab to Europe

the reality of the Arabs is one of defeat, hitting rock bottom We are defeated, politically and militarily and economically, socially, and even psychologically. We have a discourse of conspiracy, and we blame everything on others. Take Egypt--What does Egypt--that superpower--have to offer? Nothing, it is incapable of doing anything. It has nothing but lupin beans. It is incapable of anything.

Look at how the Arabs live in the West. By Allah, they are a bad example. If you hear about thieves, they are always Arabs. Whenever a young man harasses a girl on the streets of London or Paris, he turns out to be an Arab. All the negative moral values are to be found in the Arab individual

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYgrziadQIo]Algerian author Anwar Malek talks about the arab world. - YouTube[/ame]

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Egypt's new prime minister claims more powers


CAIRO (AP) – Egypt's military rulers picked a prime minister from ousted leader Hosni Mubarak's era to head the next government in a move quickly rejected by tens of thousands of protesters, while the United States ratcheted up pressure on the generals to quickly transfer power to a civilian leadership.

Egypt's new PM claims more powers

 

[JStone]

The Economist Magazine: Arab World Self-Doomed To Failure

WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can.

One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And, over the past 20 years, growth in income per head, at an annual rate of 0.5%, was lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less than ten years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, means vanishing jobs. Around 12m people, or 15% of the labour force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could rise to 25m by 2010.

Freedom. This deficit explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment. The great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are both sharply limited. Freedom House, an American-based monitor of political and civil rights, records that no Arab country has genuinely free media, and only three have “partly free”. The rest are not free

•Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all. One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

•Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. How can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Arab development: Self-doomed to failure | The Economist

 

[Flopper]

I don't recall the last time Mubarak massed killed his people. This is the worse kind of dictatorship

The problem with a benevolent dictator is that his successor is likely to be another dictator who may or may not be benevolent.

You are correct maybe obama should have supported Mubarak a little more.

Americans seem to think that introducing American style Democracy is right for every country which is just not so. Because people riot to protest the leadership may simply mean they are looking for a more benevolent dictator and not really a democratic government. If the US keeps hands off in Egypt, the new government may not to our liking.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

The problem with a benevolent dictator is that his successor is likely to be another dictator who may or may not be benevolent.

You are correct maybe obama should have supported Mubarak a little more.

Americans seem to think that introducing American style Democracy is right for every country which is just not so. Because people riot to protest the leadership may simply mean they are looking for a more benevolent dictator and not really a democratic government. If the US keeps hands off in Egypt, the new government may not to our liking.

Did you take a few minutes to watch that video in my next to last post showing two men being tortured?

 

[Katzndogz]

This IS democracy in Egypt! This is just what the people wanted.

 

[waltky]

Muslim Brotherhood Set to Take Half the Seats...

Islamists Hold Early Lead in Egypt Polls
DECEMBER 1, 2011 — Election officials in Cairo counted ballots on Wednesday. Official results from the first stage of parliamentary elections are expected Thursday.

Unofficial initial results from the first two days of Egypt's parliamentary elections pointed to a dominant showing for Islamist candidates, fulfilling most analysts' expectations that conservative religious politicians could have the upper hand in next year's drafting of a new Egyptian constitution. Initial tallies put the powerful Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, or FJP, in a leading position, followed by the Nour Party, which represents the ultraconservative Salafi school of Islam, FJP said. An FJP official said the party's vote-counting observers expect the group to win as much as 50% of the vote. A Nour Party spokesman said the early returns point to a Salafi capture of about 10% to 15% of seats in the incoming Parliament.

The Egyptian Bloc, a list of liberal parties dominated by the left-leaning Social Democrat Party and the pro-market Free Egyptians Party, appeared to be in third place. Official early results are expected to be announced on Thursday, the High Elections Commission said. The results are far from final—a second and third round of elections covering two-thirds of Egypt's 27 governorates are scheduled to take place in December and January. Individual candidate races that didn't secure at least 51% will face runoffs beginning next week. But the early results indicate that Egypt—the largest Arab country and under former President Hosni Mubarak one of the region's staunchest defenders of secular governance—is set to pivot toward political Islam. The next voting rounds include mostly smaller Egyptian cities and villages, where Islamist rule is popular.

Such an outcome would surprise few Egyptians or political observers. Egypt's deeply religious population grated under the ousted regime's secular policies, and Tunisia and Morocco have recently awarded pluralities to moderate Islamist parties. But the early tally raises questions about how the long-suppressed Islamist political community will apply its newfound political empowerment to the thorny task of policy making. Both Salafi and Brotherhood representatives said it was too early to say whether the two groups would form a coalition in Parliament—an alliance that would give Islamists a powerful majority.

Just as before the revolution, the incoming Parliament will hold a subservient role to the executive branch that is now occupied by the council of generals who assumed power when Mr. Mubarak stepped down in February. But a strong Islamist showing in the coming weeks may give the incoming Parliament enough of a political mandate to confront the military and force it to yield at least some of its hold on power to the elected assembly, said Omar Ashour, a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. "There will be a constant push toward controlling, monitoring and holding accountable the security establishment and possibly the military establishment," Prof. Ashour said. "This is if we get a Parliament that's gutsy and willing to punch above its weight."

[urlk=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204397704577070063237428728.html]MORE[/url]

See also:

Arab Spring takes toll on expats' quality of life
11/30/2011 - Some cities plunge in global ranking while others hold up better.

The quality of life for foreigners living and working in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has certainly taken a turn for the worse over the past year, but they might be surprised to find that some of the cities where the biggest drops occurred were by no means the ones most seriously affected by war, protests and strikes. The annual quality of living survey by Mercer, a British firm that advises companies on compensation for their employees living abroad, found that some of the steepest drops in quality of life occurred in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, whose ranking plunged 16 places in 2011 to 110. Cairo’s ranking dropped nine spots to 135 among 221 cities ranked.

Tunisia was the birthplace of the Arab Spring, but the mass protests that led to the ousting of long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali lasted less than a month, after which the country settled into relative quiet and held elections in October. Some 800 people were killed in 18 days of protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but since the level of violence has dropped and this week the country successfully conducted its first free and fair vote. By contrast, Damascus dropped only six places to 179 even though nine months of conflict between Syrians rebels and the government has claimed some 4,000 dead and shows no sign of ending. Less surprisingly, Tripoli fell 35 places to 202 as the Arab Spring’s only full fledged civil war raged while Sana’a, the capital of Yemen shed 22 places to 216 amid an uprising that has led to about 2,000 deaths.

Mercer’s rankings aren’t just a popularity contest for cities hosting expatriate executives. Companies and governments use them to decide how much hardship pay they will give employees to endure everything from poor health services to inadequate transportation. A poor rating raises the cost of posting employees in a city and might deter companies from sending them altogether. Needless to say, getting kidnapped or killed is an important factor and the Arab Spring, whatever long-term benefits it may bring, hasn’t helped MENA’s already low standing worldwide.

More Arab Spring takes toll on expats

 

[rdean]

What happened to Democracy in Iraq? I thought that was supposed to be such a success?

The Iraqi people weren't even allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush. How free was that?

 

[bigrebnc1775]

What happened to Democracy in Iraq? I thought that was supposed to be such a success?

The Iraqi people weren't even allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush. How free was that?

Your trollness is dully noted

 

[rdean]

What happened to Democracy in Iraq? I thought that was supposed to be such a success?

The Iraqi people weren't even allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush. How free was that?

Your trollness is dully noted

You do know they weren't allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush, right? Is that "free" or not?

 

[bigrebnc1775]

What happened to Democracy in Iraq? I thought that was supposed to be such a success?

The Iraqi people weren't even allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush. How free was that?

Your trollness is dully noted

You do know they weren't allowed to keep their shoe monument to Bush, right? Is that "free" or not?

Your trollness is dully noted

 

[Ancient lion]

Muslim Brotherhood's political wing won 40 per cent of votes.

The first round of elections for Egypt's lower house of parliament began on Monday, when voters from nine of the country's 27 governorates went to the polls.
The electoral commission has promised to release official results on Thursday, though only for the seats contested by individual candidates.
Results for the party list seats, which make up two-thirds of the People's Assembly, will not be available until January.
Unofficial numbers have begun to leak out, though, mostly from sources within the parties.
A source in the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood's political party, said on Wednesday that it had won roughly 40 per cent of the vote, according to its own exit polls.

http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=articles&id=173477​