Egypt's Salafists on edge of political exile as their candidates are disqualified
By HANNAH ALLAM
Hollande, Sarkozy heading to French vote runoff Egypt terminates gas deal with Israel Iceland court to give verdict on ex-prime minister Swing-state unemployment down, Obama's chances up Egypt's Salafists on edge of political exile as their candidates are disqualified Government investigating stalling school buses Women visit Spanish town to ease a bride shortage Why investors aren't impressed with profits Iraq oil exports jump nearly 15 percent in March Hollande victory could impact US markets this week Dutch FM flies home to discuss future of austerity Pakistan orders new plane inspection after crash Paper: UBS head calls tax flap 'economic war' Murdoch to be quizzed on his UK political sway Japan to forgive $3.7 billion of Myanmar's debt TV game-changer Fox marks 25th year Sunday Unauthorized biography spills Simon Cowell secrets BofA's $20M settlement faces court challenge Michelin recalls 77,000 tires for safety problem Report: Wal-Mart hushed up bribe network in Mexico CAIRO -- Egypt's ultraconservative Salafists, long political exiles here, surged onto the stage after Hosni Mubarak was forced from the presidency last year, winning a surprise quarter of the seats in Parliament and broadening their support in remote provinces through efficient charity networks, a half-dozen satellite TV channels and huge town hall meetings across Egypt. But after that rapid ascent, the Salafists find themselves adrift and divided just weeks before the first presidential election since Mubarak's ouster. The country's election commission has disqualified both the candidates likely to get Salafist support, leaving Egypt's most rigid Islamists largely disenfranchised and wondering what to do next.
Despite a long history of living side-by-side, tensions are rising between Egypt's Christian Coptic community and ultra-conservative Muslims.
At the Coptic museum in Cairo, evidence of Egypt's storied diversity is on full display. Veiled female art students are hunched over sketchbooks, laboring at drawings of a limestone frieze from an ancient church. In the museum gift shop, icons of Christian saints share shelf space with miniature replicas of the pyramids and Pharaonic idols that predate Christianity by centuries.
Sarwat Malak, who runs the gift shop, says he's heard about growing tensions between ultraconservative Muslims and Egypt's Christian minority, but he's not worried.
With Egypt's constitutional assembly suspended by a court, the Muslim Brotherhood should step back and recognize that majority rule in Egypt will not protect minorities or assure individual freedom.
The People's Assembly, Egypt's lower house of parliament. (Gallo / Getty Images / April 14, 2012)
Fourteen months after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a new Egypt is still a work in progress -- or possibly regress.
The opposition that swelled Cairo's Tahrir Square has fractured into Islamist and secular factions. The Islamist-dominated parliament continues to compete for influence with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. And last week a presidential election scheduled for May was thrown into confusion. First an administrative court suspended the work of a 100-member assembly charged with writing a new constitution, raising the possibility that a president will be elected before the nature of the new Egyptian state is defined. Then on Saturday an election commission disqualified 10 presidential candidates, including the three front-runners: Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's intelligence chief; Khairat Shater, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Hazem Salah abu Ismail, an ultraconservative Islamist. They were given two days to appeal the decisions.
Whether the French president did so for the mere purpose of political gain, or to send a clear message to advocates of extremism and violence to say there is no place for them in his country, his decision is a step towards restarting the battle over the limits of freedom and public responsibility. It has also prompted the Islamists to reconsiders their stances and be aware that what they say on their platforms comes with a price.
Like the Turkish AKP, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will be exposed not a new period of civil power in Muslim society, but as a party working toward the installation of permanent clerical authority.
Representatives of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) arrived in Washington DC on April 3, an event that was predictable after the pan-Islamic movement won pluralities in the recent elections in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt. The aim of their journey to the Potomac was to improve the organization's image as a leading force in radical Islam. Members of the MB delegation hoped to convince American lawmakers, media, and experts that they represent a "moderate" variety of Islamist doctrine. According to the Voice of America, they were "one of five Middle Eastern Islamist political parties taking part in meetings with U.S. officials in Washington as well as a conference organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace." In reality, all five parties at the Carnegie conference were branches of the MB: from Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Libya.
Egypt presidential race: From exchange of accusations to death threats
Suleiman, sworn enemy of Islamists before revolution, vows not to drop out of May 23-24 election despite threats from Islamists.
Suleiman: No one can bring back ousted regime
CAIRO - Former spymaster Omar Suleiman lashed out at the Muslim Brotherhood and said his own candidacy for the presidency aimed to restore security and stability in Egypt, in an interview published on Monday.
The Brotherhood, which dominates parliament and is heavily tipped for the presidency, has "lost a lot of its popularity," said Suleiman, who was military intelligence chief under ousted president Hosni Mubarak.
By Pamela Constable, Friday, April 6, 4:32 PMThe Washington Post
When Egypt’s autocratic regime collapsed early last year amid an unstoppable wave of protest, Sherif Mansour leaped at the chance to help promote and shape a nascent democracy in his Muslim-majority homeland. Mansour, who works at the District-based human rights group Freedom House, traveled to Cairo, applied for a government permit, opened an office and hired local staff.
Arguments over the drafting of Egypt's new constitution have raised fears among minority groups. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA
When millions of Egyptians took to the streets last year and chanted "the people want to bring down the regime," they were clear about what they wanted the regime to do, but not about the kind of system they would like to replace it with. Since Hosni Mubarak's fall in February last year, debate over the country's identity has been fierce amid a power vacuum characterised by no clear plan or time frame for a peaceful transition of power and to democracy.
Salafist Leaders Celebrate Death of Coptic Pope in Egypt
Open contempt for head of church of more than 40 years bodes ill for Christians.
By Wayne King
CAIRO, Egypt, March 23 (Compass Direct News) – As Christians across Egypt continued to mourn the loss of Pope Shenouda III this week, Islamist leaders of the Salafist movement issued a litany of insults, calling the late leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church the “head of the infidels” and thanking God for his death.
The vitriol indicated the level of hostility the Salafists, who now make up 20 percent of Egypt’s parliament, have toward Christians. In a recorded message released on the Facebook page of one leading Salafi teacher, Sheik Wagdy Ghoneim, the sheik celebrated the pontiff’s death.
The death of His Most Blessed Beatitude Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria Shenouda III comes at a perilous time for Egypt’s Christian minority.
Christians have a long history in the country – longer than their Muslim compatriots – and make up more than 10 percent of the country’s 80 million strong population.
But the rise of extremist forms of Islam has made their lives more difficult in recent years. A series of attacks, including one on the cathedral in Alexandria in January 2011 in which 23 died, left the community feeling vulnerable and fearful.
Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament to play pivotal role in drafting new constitution
By Associated Press, AP
CAIRO — Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament on Saturday voted overwhelmingly in favor of ensuring that its own lawmakers make up a large portion of a panel writing the country’s first constitution after the ouster of longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.
Lawmakers at a joint meeting of both houses approved a quota giving lawmakers half of the seats on a 100-member panel that will draft the new constitution.
The remaining 50 panel members will be chosen by parliament, and are likely to be legal experts, academics and Muslim and Christian scholars.
CAIRO (Reuters) - At the end of January, a guest speaker drew an unusually large audience of diplomats to the 33rd floor auditorium at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry headquarters in Cairo. For latecomers, there was standing room only.
The video above shows a strange cartoon from Egypt. It's of Uncle Sam looking sinister and mean, hunched over a door with a keyhole. The implication, I suppose, is that the U.S. is spying on Egyptians. Another cartoon shows him with a pistol and he's pointing it at an Egyptian man with a cannon. The caption in Arabic says "dignity". The point here is quite clear: Americans are robbing Egyptians of their dignity.
On October, Foreign Minister John Baird toured the former fortified compound of Moammar Gadhafi in Tripoli, the first visit by a foreign minister to the compound since it was seized by Libya's rebel forces.
Photograph by: Sean Kilpatrick, Reuters , Ottawa Citizen
When the Libyan people rose up against Moammar Gadhafi one year ago this week, his regime's retaliation was immediate, and brutal. The world reacted almost as swiftly. Western leaders lined up to condemn the colonel they had once wooed and backed the rebels with warm words of support and relentless airstrikes. In Part 1 of a three-part series, David Pugliese looks at why we went to war - and what was missed in the rush to act.
Associated PressCivilians flee from fighting after Syrian army tanks enter the northwestern city of Idlib, Syria, Wednesday. Syrian President Bashar Assad ordered a referendum for later this month on a new constitution that would allow political parties other than his ruling Baath Party, the centerpiece of reforms he has promised to ease the crisis, even as the Syrian military on Wednesday besieged rebellious areas.
After a year of bloodshed, the so-called Arab Spring is veering dangerously off course. The revolutions are seemingly more Khomeini and less Jefferson; theocracy is trumping democracy. U.S. policy appears to be more about wishful thinking than Islamic realism.
With the United Nations revved up about freedom in the Middle East, it's time to wonder whether radical Islam and democracy are even compatible.
Romany Rashed stands in what was a furniture shop owned by Christian businessman that was looted and burned by angry Muslim mobs. The shop is across the street from Romany's home, where he hid as the mob tried to break into his house in Sharbat, a village near Alexandria in Egypt.
Terrified of the secular/modern/liberal
demonstrators who made their presence known in Tahrir Square, as well as of the soccer hooligans, Mohamed Tantawi and Egypt's
Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with the country's Islamists,
thereby blocking their joint opponents from power. Very clever – but maybe too
clever by half. Here's why:
Over half of Egypt's caloric consumption comes from abroad, leaving the country vulnerable to international staple prices.
In Egypt, which imports more than half
its caloric intake, wages must keep up with the price
of food or people begin to starve. Yet the country appears to be heading for a
monumental financial collapse in 2012,
Christians fear losing freedoms in Arab Spring movement
CAIRO—From her home in a labyrinth of stonewalled alleyways, Samia Ramsis holds a key chain bearing the face of the Virgin Mary as she sits in her yellow pajamas on the morning of Orthodox Christmas.
Sunlight pours in through a window. Outside, visitors come to look upon the spot where Egypt’s Christians—most known as Copts—believe the Holy Family found refuge after fleeing Bethlehem and assassins sent by King Herod to kill the baby Jesus.
Once crowded with Christians, Cairo’s Coptic quarter where Samia lives with her husband, Mounir, and two children is home to fewer than 50 Christian families.
تساقطت دموعى رغم إرادتى.. حينما رأيت أبناء وطنى يتساقطون واحداً تلو الآخر وكأننا أمام حرب أهلية.. فالمجلس العسكرى حاكم لا يحكم أو شاهد ماشفش.... وكل الأجهزة الاستخباراتية والرقابية أجهزة من ورق.. سبعة أجهزة رقابية تدعى عدم المعرفة.. مما يعطينا مؤشرا لانعدام مصداقيتهم وتصريحاتهم وأعمالهم أيضا. لقد شاهد العالم بأسره كيف أسيلت الدماء المصرية وزهقت أرواح شباب مصر.. على أرض مصر.. بأيدٍ مصرية!.. فى أحداث بورسعيد المروعة والتى راح ضحيتها 74 من خيرة شباب مصر، فقدوا أرواحهم بيد الخسة والغدر.. الأيدى الخفية المعروفة للجميع.. والتى لم تحاسب حتى الآن... إنه حادث مروع بكل المقاييس.. يوم احتفال كروى يتحول إلى مناحة فى البيوت المصرية.. لتتحول الفرحة إلى دمعة.. والبسمة إلى آهات ولقاء الأحباب إلى فراق..
Apologists say that Bacha Bazi or 'Boy Play' is a very old cultural practice in Afghanistan and part of that nation's mainstream.
Citing the Afghanistan strategy review, Vice President Joe Biden reported "great progress" in the counterterrorism effort that has significantly degraded al-Qaeda and the Taliban, particularly their leadership. Lagging behind, he said, is progress on the counterinsurgency front – eliminating terrorist safe havens in Pakistan and building a stable Afghan government.