August 19, 2013 - Somewhere in New York. Listening to the BBC on my radio, through my I phone - what a world.... My CD player broke, but through a contraption my Brother Paul loaned me, I have been able to listen to BBC most of the time. Such a different take from our news. Warning in advance: this is a political entry....
I've been struck in the listening of both BBC and NPR about the utter black and white of the reporting on Egypt, a subject I do know a little about. I'm not sure how I fully feel about all I am seeing going on, but I do know this: the Egyptians as a whole are fed up with the Brotherhood and appear to be fully supportive of the response of the military - with the exception of the Brotherhood.
Most people over here will have missed the Grand Imam of Al Azhar's call to the Brotherhood to stand down. Al Azhar is the respected center of learning and the spiritual center of Sunni Islam. They and others on the ground know this history of flawed elections. They attempted to work with the Brotherhood leadership, but that leadership was committed to its limited vision of the state - to the exclusion of the at least three quarters of the population who did not initially select the former President, Morsi. Few people recall that Morsi only won 25% of the vote in the Presidential election - and triumphed in a close run off over a Mubarak regime candidate 51.8% to 48.2%. Far from a mandate - this was an invitation to work to build a grand coalition that could have set Egypt on a path of stability and possibility. Over 50% of the population had picked candidates that supported reform and the revolution rather than the former regime or Morsi's Brotherhood. Morsi chose instead to try and accrue all power to himself - even declaring this past December that his edicts could not be challenged. Few also either forget or did not know that it was Morsi who removed the last head of the military (Tantawi) and replaced him with his personal pick: al-Sisi, who is still the Defense Minister and the architect of both Morsi's removal and the crackdown.
These are nuanced facts that require some trust of the Egyptian people to sort out. John McCain's recent incoherent rantings and the profound utterances of a press that is only now trying to come up to speed on all that has happened are interesting to me in light of how little that same press seemed to care when tens of thousands of Iraqi's were being killed daily.... All the characters are there for this kind of drama - a military man in sunglasses, a wronged democratically elected President, bullets and marches... but this time it may not be what it seems. This time the Butler may not have done it....
At home here I am struck by the detention story of reporter Glenn Greenwald's partner. He was held for nine hours under the Terrorist Act in Britain - something so rarely done that the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary have both felt obliged to comment on it as an error. It will undoubtedly lead to investigations in the U.K. and, though the U.S. has denied asking that it be done, I suspect that it will find its way back to us - and another "least untruthful" comment will likely be what we hear next.... I am saddened by how much we keep discovering about how much we are not told about how much we aren't supposed to know about or that our government can't comment on.... It is perhaps a bit ironic that we rail about how democracy looks in Egypt, when we don't even seem to remember what it looks like at home.