I wonder if Anderson Cooper is surprised or confused that he was punched in the head ten times by a mob of pro-Mubarak thugs. All in all, it was fairly tame and harmless, but Cooper is a kind of proxy for all Americans. We always seem surprised when we discover that our government is unpopular in many foreign countries. It’s because we have developed a national character that is almost completely incapable of introspection. News outfits like Anderson’s CNN are responsible for this. So, it’s kind of fitting that pissed off Egyptians would punch Cooper in the head. It almost doesn’t matter what side of the dispute the Egyptians are on. Any side would have plenty of reason to want to wail on a corporate American teevee reporter.
In any case, the cable channels are now doing what they almost never do. They are showing us the real Cairo. We can learn for ourselves about the nature of our great friends and allies in the Egyptian government. We can learn what kind of regime we’ve been enabling and coddling so that the peace agreement with Israel would not be second-guessed. We can see what it takes to be the first Arab country to recognize both Israel and Iraq’s new government when your people don’t agree. And we can discover why a man like Mohammed Atta might think our government’s relationship with his government is so heinous that he needs to fly an airplane into the World Trade Center to let us know how he feels about it.
There is another side to this argument. Egypt has been a good friend to our country. They have given Israel a thirty-year window to live in peace and find a resolution to the Palestinian question. They have aided us in combating terrorism. They have been a great customer for our arms industry. They’ve opposed the spread of fundamentalism and political Islam. We have had good reason to be friendly with Mubarak’s regime. But we never hear about the downside of this relationship. And, because we don’t get all the information, we are caught by surprise when a mob grabs us and punches us in the face.
And then there is this:
http://twitter.com/JNSmall/status/32911161141764096
from fellow Villager Jay Newton-Small. The corporate media in this country can’t die soon enough.
I hardly find any of the positives you’ve listed to actually be positives; especially not for the people writ large.
1.) They’ve given Israel a thirty-year window because of bribery. Not to mention the dictator benefits from our backing. The people suffer while he lives in a palace.
2.) Yeah, they’ve taken our renditions and tortured our prisoners. I know they’ve helped intelligence wise, but we wouldn’t need such help if not for the bellicose nature of our foreign policy in the first place.
3.) This should read “Good supporter of the Military Industrial Complex,” something I know you don’t think is positive. And this is one reason I do not believe the Israeli Lobby is as powerful as the left makes it to be. This line of reasoning seems to place full or most of the blame on the lobby, absolving America and its leaders. “Oh no, we’d have great foreign policy if not for The Lobby! We’re helpless victims of an all-powerful lobby, please end their reign in the halls of Washington!”
Full disclosure: I have everything to lose if that industry is ever brought down, as that’s where my job industry is.
4.) See number 2. I think political Islam would still be a problem, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as bad if not for us and the USSR.
5.) We have a good reason to be friendly with Mubarak if the “we” you speak of is a multinational military corporation or a Zionist. Israelis, Americans, Arabs and citizens of the world with any shred of decency should have no reason to be friendly with dictators or tyrants.
Add to this, we’ve been friendly with Egypt’s government — not at all the same thing as being friendly with or a positive forces in the lives of Egypt’s people.
Al Jazeera’s reporters have been getting arrested and roughed up for the last week by security forces (and, today, their sponsored thugs), and journalists from a lot of countries have been targeted by the pro-Mubarak people.
I’d take just the opposite reaction to Booman; I don’t think they went after Cooper because he was an American teevee star. They went after him because he was a journalist with a camera and a microphone, and today the harassment of journalists expanded to cover the foreign (Western) journalists as well. They didn’t attack Cooper becauae he’s special; they attacked him because he wasn’t. He’s just another person who might potentially tell a story they don’t want told. And the surprise of Cooper, and his audience, was that the Egyptians don’t think he’s anything special.
They went after him because he was a journalist with a camera and a microphone, and today the harassment of journalists expanded to cover the foreign (Western) journalists as well. They didn’t attack Cooper becauae he’s special; they attacked him because he wasn’t.
I think that is spot on, it was my gut reaction to the news of the incident as well.
I don’t think you give enough credit to Mubarak for what I view as an extraordinary act of courage in maintaining peace with Israel. Recall for a moment how it was that Mubarak came to power. Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel, and for his efforts was assassinated, in the presence of Mubarak. The naural thing would have been for Mubarak to take the hint and abrogate the treaty. He didn’t.
Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the importance of the Camp David Treaty. Prior to the treaty, Egypt and Israel had fought four wars between 1948 and 1973, as well as innumerable skirmishes. After 1978, a generation of soldiers didn’t have to be killed in an endless war.
So, by all means, let freedom ring in Egypt, but let’s hope that the future leaders hold by a treaty that has worked, and let’s not forget the good that Mubarak has done.
And now you see exactly what Mubarak’s fighting these people for. He knows he’s on his way out, but his resistance has everything to do with preserving that treaty. Sadat offered Israel peace in 1971, they rejected it because they wanted to continue their occupation of the Sinai.
You might have convinced me before 1967 that the treaty was about peace, but I do not think it is about that at all. See Hurria’s post. Mubarak deserves no credit. He’s a paranoid tyrant, as most dictators are. He’s had many attempts at his life, and they weren’t because he’s such a great man holding the peace. It’s because he is a paid puppet of our imperialism. He’s somewhat comparable to the mercenaries in Afghanistan; mercenaries have no friends but to the all-mighty dollar.
Yes, and Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for his “efforts”, too. So?
As for Mubarak abrogating the treaty, why would he when the perks of being Israel’s right hand man far, far outweighed the risk?
Prior to the Camp David treaty Israel had aggressed against Egypt on a regular basis (as in several times a year), most notably in 1956 and 1967. As for 1948 the more historical information and non-Israel-centric analysis comes to light the more clear it becomes that Israel was far from an innocent victim attacked on all sides by Arab hordes. 1973 is the only one of the wars clearly initiated by Arab states, and that war had the clear and limited goal of retrieving sovereign territory that Israel was occupying, illegally colonizing, and clearly had no interest in returning, ever. The 1973 war was a direct result of Israel’s intransigence.
The fact is that Arabs have little to no interest in continuing the conflict with Israel. If Israel really wanted to live in peace it could have done so a long time ago. Instead it regularly gives the middle finger to Arab peace initiatives (as it has done since 1948 and before), including a unanimously-approved offer from the Arab league that includes peace, formal recognition, and normal diplomatic and economic relations with all Arab League states in exchange for minimal compliance with international law pertaining to the territories Israel continues to occupy and colonize. That offer has remained continuously on the table since 2002, and been offered and re-offered, and Israel won’t even pick it up and look at it.
Mubarak doesn’t deserve one iota of credit. He has acted 100% in his own self-interest. Keeping the treaty helped make him into a very rich and very powerful man while he did his best to keep the people of Egypt in squalorous poverty, misery, and ignorance. A pox on him and his brutish regime.
“Egypt has been a good friend to our country.“
First, as should be obvious by now Mubarak is not Egypt. Egypt is its people, not the corrupt, brutal regime that rules it thanks largely to the support it receives from the Empire. It is not Egypt but Mubarak that has been a “good friend” to the United States, and Mubarak is a “good friend” only if you consider bought-and-paid-for friends to be good friends. I consider them to be highly unreliable friends. The United States will find good friends in the Arab world only if and when it starts respecting the sovereignty and human rights of Arab states and the people who live in them.
“They have given Israel a thirty-year window to live in peace and find a resolution to the Palestinian question. “
Complete bullshit. What they have really given Israel is a paid assistant in its suppression of Palestinian rights. What Egypt has given Israel has nothing to do with peace or with resolution to the question of Palestinian rights.
Have to agree. The idea that Mubarak has protected us from radical Islam must be countered by the apparent fact that Mubarak probably did more to stimulate radical Islam than to keep it under wraps.
And the same paradox I believe applies to America’s role: we have created our own enemies and now have to strip at airports in order to protect ourselves from them.
“we have created our own enemies“
Right on, as you so often are.
News this morning that the military is rounding up journalists ‘for their own good’.
MSNBC reporting that a 76 year old woman from WA state who is an Eqyptologist is trapped in her apartment, the thugs have been battering her door and screaming at her, she came on the phone and said she is prepared to defend herself with hot water and a rolling pin… She also said she contacted the US Embassy but never got a return call.
Richard Engel is probably the most interesting to listen to but the voices from the ground on Twitter are more powerful as for the first time information is not filtered as it comes to us.
Oh fer chrissake, Booman.
You write:
An American teaching story:
Who “we”, Booman?
I watched a clip last night of Christiane Amanpour looking absolutely confused when some Egyptians basically told her to get fucked, that they hated all Americans. “But…why!!!???” she said. (Was she acting or is she totally numb from the neck up? I favor the former idea myself, but if so, she is a very good actress.) The Egyptian just kind of helplessly rolled his eyes and looked at his companions as if to say “What’re ya gonna do? They’re all stupid.”
Are “we” all stupid?
Just exactly who are “we?”
I am an American. My family is American too. Four generations on one side, about 20 generations on the other. Of the six members of the generation that preceded me, the four members of my generation and the two members of the following generation that I have known personally, only three of them would have been in any way “surprised” at what is happening in Egypt, at the depth of the hatred that is felt in most of the world for the US. Three out of twelve. 25%. And they are all long gone. But almost 100% of the mainstream news reports seem to be trying to give the ipmression that “we”…the U.S…and U.S. citizens in general are completely innocent of any wrongdoing regarding Egypt and the Middle East in general. (Yes, I dipped my beautiful mind…thank you for the phrase, Barbara Butch[er]….into that media cesspool for a couple of hours yesterday. Research, don’tcha know. Disgusting research.)
Whether…as in the case of Ms. Amanpour…this attitude is the result of sheer stupidity, the ordered spin of the U.S. news world or some hideous combination of the two is beyond my level of expertise. But one thing that I do know is that “we”…the American people…are not natively dumb as a stick. “We”…the ones who have succumbed to repeated whackings upside the head of the massive Pravda-like propaganda machine of the PermaGov that we laughingly call “The News”…should be treated as victims just as are the people who are damaged in dictatorships, natural catastrophes and the pharmacological carousel that we equally laughingly refer to as “medicine” here in the United States of Omertica.
Please, Booman…do not use that “we” word in this sort of context, even to make a point.
Please.
It ain’t right, somehow.
It just ain’t right.
Later…
AG
But, AG, that feeling of aversion you’re feeling is exactly what I was going for.
I know.
It just pisses me off. Especially coming from someone who has proven over and over again (at least to my mind) his credulous acceptance of American PermaGov government as “the real thing”, as something to which we should pay close (and in truth quite undeserved) attention. You have been hypno-mediated into taking our own front/government as the real thing just as have many even more credulous people taken the American myth of righteous action as fact.
There are “we’s’ ” within “we’s’ ” here, Booman. Just at there are wheels within wheels in our security state. You cannot disbelieve any of them without disbelieving all of them. You should not do so, anyway.
So I ask again…in slightly altered form:
Inquiring minds want to know.
Really.
Not this “we”, Booman.
I watch ’em like they wuz a hawk.
‘Cuz they are.
A very justified hawk.
Bet on it.
AG
All I’m saying is that we’re all Cooper and Amanpour.
No.
You are hanging out with the wrong people if that’s your take on it.
AG
.
Is a top notch reporter with plenty of experience in conflicts and wars: Christiane Amanpour Biography
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."