Despite the military’s brutal crackdown, the Ikhwan al-Muslimoon are not down and out. They are able to mobilize the street power to pose a continuous challenge to the military-backed regime and the illegal coup.
The July 3 coup in Egypt has set the people of Egypt back by many decades. The brutal crackdown on supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and mass killings prove the military’s evil intentions.
The confirmation on June 24 that Muhammad Mursi, the candidate representing the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, had been elected President of Egypt, has a certain air of inevitability.
Thousands of peaceful protesters were back in the now-demolished Pearl Square in Bahrain’s capital city Manama on September 23 demanding serious and wide-ranging reforms to give the overwhelming majority the right to vote in free, fair and transparent elections.
Given its tiny size (1.215 million population and 290 sq. miles of territory), Bahrain would not warrant a second glance yet its un-elected, tribal rulers rub shoulders with leaders at the world stage. Originally from Kuwait, the Khalifah family moved to Bahrain displacing Banu ‘Utbah nearly 200 years ago.
The people of Egypt are gradually waking up to the reality that it is one thing to drive a dictator out, even one that has been around for as long as Hosni Mubarak — 30 years — and quite a different matter to change the political system and the culture of entitlement that has grown within it. There are many constituencies that have unfairly benefitted under the old system; they are not likely to give up their privileged positions so easily, Mubarak or not.
In characteristic arrogance, the Saudi regime sent in its army backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers to the tiny island of Bahrain on March 13 to crush the people’s movement for freedom and dignity. Some 2,000 troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) including 1,000 Saudis were rushed to Bahrain to attack protesters that had peacefully rallied in Manama’s Pearl Square for a month.
The Egyptian Military High Council apologised on February 26 about attacking civilians in Tahrir Square on Friday night. The protesters were demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq.
The 10-day Libyan revolution has taken a bloody turn, as Qaddafi mobilizes paramilitary groups against protesters demonstrating for regime change.
The people of Egypt refuse to be intimidated by curfews, violence and US-supplied tear gas shells fired at them by the police. For several nights, people have defied the curfew as government control begins to crumble.
Those arrested included students, journalists, lawyers and even bystanders. Ugly scenes of police attacking and knocking people to the ground and putting handcuffs on them were seen on television.
Mubarak was vice president at the time of Sadat’s killing and succeeded him...
Just weeks after the Arab governments humiliated themselves with their utter failure to support the Palestinian intifada at their Arab League meeting in Amman on March 28, Islamic Iran showed the way forward with the unqualified support offered to the Palestinians at the opening of its International Conference on the intifada and the zionist problem in Tehran on April 24.
Living up to his reputation as the “Butcher of Beirut,” Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has unleashed still more assaults on the besieged Palestinian civilians with helicopter-gunships, mortars and artillery shells in the West Bank and Ghazzah over the last two weeks.
President Husni Mubarak stepped up his assault on the Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt earlier this month by issuing a presidential decree transferring the cases of 20 of the movement’s most senior and prominent members, who were arrested last month, from the civil court system to military courts.
