From Chomsky's "Notes on Anarchism" (1970)

Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule.

Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun (1943)

Bertrand Russell - To Our Descendants

The Fallacy of Liberal Democracy

Until recently, I used to naively believe that Social Darwinism ended along with dark boorish years of colonialism. The notion that the Creator had enthroned a certain race and nation to be perpetually reign over all others; to guide us, to feed us, to show us, to institutionalize us. Then end up leaving us to marinate in our own disillusioned moral, social, and religious decay. Suck the life out of the people and soil, and then deem the action social justice, democratic liberation, free enterprise. But, was I ever so wrong. If anything, Social Darwinism has indisputably evolved into a collective mentality; a mutual recognition of politically, socially, and intellectually inferior and inept societies; a deference to what we’ve been conditioned to credit as emulation-worthy figures and institutions. Social Darwinism had long ago been an intellectual warfare that has been deemed won by the West since the post-Cold War era.

It seems that every capitalistic, white supremacist, self-righteous, holier-than-thou endeavor that the West has taken, bears the outright deceptive yet ornamented marque of “liberation” and of course the infamous “self-determination”. A voyage donning the unanimously commendable, if not valiant, demeanor of “anti-terrorism” and the obsessive compulsive nuclear non-proliferation spiel.

In my foreign policy class, you seldom ever hear any lament over the spoils of American wars; only its Jeffersonian overtones. God forbid, such discourse might discredit the American Crusader ideal. Personal experience has taught me that sitting through these discussions could very possibly induce an embellished fit of rage.

Sitting in a perfectly conditioned classroom, while earlier waking up from a warm bed, a functioning shower, and driving a luxury car to boot, she firmly believed that America’s war on Iraq was genuinely liberational as well as the best decision Bush had ever made. She defended the guy as if he had cured the HIV her youngest uncle caught on his last trip to Thailand. I knew it was coming – Saddam Hussein was Satan, and we’re the Middle East’s one and only choice for deliverance from evil.

For a second, my circulation seemed to have found a detour to my cheeks.

Being a weak spoken polemicist, I barely got my grievances across to this lovely moronic young woman. Encountering individuals such as herself has engendered my most passionate political insights. Opinions of individuals such as herself are still, to this day, further accrediting every last one of my theories on ultra-sanctimonious American self-perceptions. I’m well aware of the reproach you might be wishing to express on my lack of “freedom of opinion” tolerance and all that jazz; frankly, I don’t buy it. I’m a firm believer that some opinions out there do not deserve a microscopic morsel of my respect. Hence, I shall feel free to reject them and maliciously impale their flawed substantiation. (Don’t like it? Stop reading)

What I said next, in response, was merely a reminder of the lurid heinous torture methods that American insurgents practiced on Iraqi prisoners and civilians. The freedom package that America was so kind as to give away to Iraq as alleviation from years of being downtrodden, chewed on, spit out, and stepped on turned out to only be an expired shipment of rusty shackles from Uncle Sam’s dirty cold basement. Iraqis were delivered from a bad situation to an even worse one, it’s undeniable. Liberal democracy that’s being propagated in this case is all-inclusive of demolishment of infrastructure and facility, lack of electricity and water, as well as the perennial trepidation of a much too Hobbesian need for self-preservation amid a state of nature that the US singlehandedly managed to simulate.

The American Dream Delusion

Here’s a statistic that I still can’t wrap my mind around: 70-80% of the American population isn’t remotely engaged in matters of American foreign affairs.

Ironic right?

A few weeks back I blatantly stated that the American society is plagued with a dry consumerist internationally absent mentality. I’m kind of hesitant calling it a mentality since it’s more like a complete absence of one. Unfortunately, I got responded to with sentiments such as “you obviously hate America”. Plain and simple. I’m an Arab Muslim so it really doesn’t take me by surprise that that is the default reaction.

This concept of political ambivalence was visited innumerable times by my college professors. Given materialistic incentives to mobilize and enliven capitalistic enterprises, individuals have no psychological vacuum (let alone need) to fabric politics into their interests. Living in this country, it’s not very difficult to identify this theory as a reality; I like to call it United States of Entrepreneurship. In a nation where you can gain a substantial sum of money as a result of the death of your spouse, it’s not really a challenge to identify its priorities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not venting here. Not at all.

What baffles me is this: despite American apathy to its, and not to mention our, political alignments, we still hold “American Democracy” as the holy grail of modern day liberalism. The “American Dream” as that of modern day living. Knowledgeable figures, such as Francis Fukuyama, went so far as to conjure up a discourse on American Exceptionalism. As a result, we, the peoples of peripheral societies, became enamored with the concept of “libertarianism”. Unfortunately this concept has mutated into something of a social disease. Liberalism has been translated into the belief system of loose morality and abandonment of restraint.

I’m sure you would all agree that in the Middle East when an individual outright states that he/she is “very liberal” it often connotes morally/religiously indifferent. My question is: why did we neglect the American judiciary system and Supreme Court structures, civil and criminal laws, admirable judicial temperament and professionalism, hard work and self-discipline and merely focused on the very much coveted lack of moral restraint? For some mysterious reason, we took “liberalism” and tailored it to cater to our deprivation of social freedom.

Post January 25, I heard people left and right commending American democracy and “liberalism” holding it capable of molding our currently-fragile Egyptian society around. There’s an essential difference between liberalism and libertarianism. The former is political and the latter social. Politically, Egypt is desperate for progressivism and change. Socially, we have a responsibility to NOT be internally imperialized by Western lifestyle.

Call me crazy but I’d much rather not have homosexuals, PDA, teenage moms, failed marriages, and alcoholism taking the country over. We're a conservative society for a reason.

What we’ve seen so far in 2011 only accentuates the incredible democratic drive that Arabs possess. The Arab revolution has become emblematic of change and shackle-breaking. We inhabit the holiest region on the planet having hosted the nascence of monotheism and tradition. Let’s think twice before proposing to adopt a hollow indifferent ideology mindlessly negating all that we have stood for.

Rationalization of Stereotypes

Since the last time I've written, I've had the most eye-opening conversation involving political discourse among Egyptians living abroad.

What I've heard infuriated me to no end. It's the type of talk that makes stereotypes completely justifiable and even rather commendable.

I'm not going to try to be objective in delivering to the reader the main arguments of the conversation. You are free to judge for yourself whether you think what this particular person said is of any substance. The reason I’m sharing this encounter is to fortify this following claim:

Every stereotype, alleged weakness, or speculated threat is fully reinforced by certain Arab-indigenous catalysts who take part in Western foreign policy/intelligence institutions and/or media outlets.

It is excruciatingly ironic how the sugarcoated ideal of Arab ambassadorship helps us sleep at night while these very entities are willing and able to stab us in the back whenever they see fit. The insufferable truth is this: Once you entrench yourself in a certain executive structure, you become a cog in a vast mechanism of self-righteous group think. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of the potential volume of their own voices; it’s tempting to give in to the general conventional wisdom in this given environment. For instance, if your line of work involves intelligence operations covering global terrorist networks, it wouldn’t make sense to vocalize contentions that are not parallel to the philosophy and nature of your job (which, consequently, rationalize the need for this particular organization in the first place). Unfortunately, this certain philosophy starts to intrude on your political and social perceptions, tainting them with unsubstantiated condemnatory rhetoric with your line of work being the rationalization.

With that said, I’d like to share what this particular conversation comprised (I’ll refer to my adversary in this conversation as X): In a status on Facebook, I intoned the quintessential importance of political pluralism in any democratization process (which would undoubtedly accommodate any Islamist and/or leftist organizations), there’s no possibility of us calling ourselves democratic while still condemning certain groups to social and political fringes; common sense, right? Why should we allow petty futile banter on religious superiority eclipse the infallible nationalist stride of the people’s revolution? X’s main arguments were evidently very enamored with utopian American principals and believed it was appropriate for Egypt’s upcoming regime to adopt them as constitutional foundations. I replied to X stating that a relatively young nation-state such as Egypt cannot be assimilated to a Western liberal model since our society is hungry for incorporation of tradition in policy. We cannot rule out cultural groups for the sake of mimicking a foreign (and very dissimilar) nation. Post-revolution transitional government is required to tailor a modified democratic process that doesn’t step on anybody’s toes while simultaneously providing lacked human rights. Throughout our debate, X would tease out imaginary claims out of my arguments to reinforce his own beliefs on the subject.

I was quoted for saying: Arab culture is incompatible with democracy; Islam is a hindrance to the democratic process; and, the best one, I HATE/CODEMN THE US.

What I found to be exceptionally droll was the manner in which X would be critical of my way of writing instead of the actual content; a very tactical fake demeanor of authority. Although this person claims to have a “respectable” background in academia, I found myself doubting the merit of his discourse.

In case I didn’t explicitly and clearly spell it out: X’s occupation is attributed to US terrorism intelligence and surveillance services. X only holds the Egyptian passport but has lived his entire life in America.

I personally had to question the authenticity of his “Egyptianness” when he said, and I quote: “Egypt will never have honor. They are not civilized, and never will be”.

It’s funny how we’re usually wondering how Americans are inspired to firmly believe that we’re backwards, weak, and lesser than core countries. We’d be asking ourselves: How did 9/11 convince an entire nation that 1.57 billion Muslims are militarized and angry? Simple, self-proclaimed Arabs took part in the very institutions that implement foreign policy contributing their opinion of how Muslims (and most Arabs) do not welcome democratization and push an anti-Western agenda.

Why wouldn’t you believe a native about his own homeland? He must be portraying reality, right?

I cannot imagine how many of these people are infiltrating American executive offices. Who knows what kind of information they deliver about us. What’s worse is the covertness of these situations; we can’t be fully aware of them if they are done behind closed doors. We only get to experience the outcome of these policies; and then we start to wonder why stereotypes run international relations.

Please stop using your religion as a weapon. Muslims are not anyone’s antagonists; Muslims are not democracy’s enemy; Muslims are not taking over your country and suppressing your women.

We’re constantly being played against each other against our will.

Wisen up.

February 24, 2011

Left and right, they are all trying to understand.
Attempting to apply political analysis and knowledge to comprehend this overwhelming and allegedly "shocking" collective Arab uprising. But to no avail.
What we are witnessing in history is beyond science, it's beyond sociology, way beyond economics and class dynamics.
It's occurrences like these that are utter bafflement to analysts but ultimate elation to historians.
The irony is that we're so efficient at studying power struggles and ego trips, yet we're nowhere near close to understanding raw nationalist sentiment.
Most would not know how to give you a satisfactory definition of patriotism yet they are very capable of filling pages and pages on the science of control and authoritarianism.

There's no possible way of determining how these series of revolutions were ignited. Our only option is the metaphysical and the emotional. Faith, justice, frustration, vendetta, dignity, and humanity.

Arabs at this moment in history Arabs are collectively fearless. This is not about breaking stereotypes or proving ourselves to anyone. This is a matter of pure human dignity. Things that core nations take for granted and easily manipulate. Most "Western" nations cannot grasp the concept of being or having a member of their family incarcerated for years upon no criminal/civil indictment while suffering humiliation well beyond human threshold.
We complain about debt, responsibilities, work. They complain about suffering a back injury from a rocket-propelled grenade while hiding from mercenaries them down in hospitals. For the sole reason of speaking.

See, these people don't have the luxury of "complaint". They are not entitled to reprimanding their government representatives for federal budgets or health care.
You speak? You get ostracized, raped, beaten, killed.

Two days ago, Libyan protesters in Eastern Libya were killed with acid by the regime.
Dry charred residues of former selves, they were put on display on the streets of Benghazi to send the rest of the protesters home.
Yet the protesters' reaction is the zenith of revolutionary art.
They don't budge. They get even deeply moralized. Martyrdom further fuels purpose. It's a constant reminder of what it is that sent you to the streets in the first place.

Aside from politics, victory of Tunisians and Egyptians magnifies divine ethereal blessing. The drive of this revolution is more than human. It's beyond us yet it pulls us.

Most are hungry to witness Muammar Qadhafi suffer the savagery similar (if not harsher) to the very one he has been orchestrating upon Africans as well as his people for the past four decades. As much as I would love to see nothing but him be indicted in international court, no method of purgatory will be comparable to what he will suffer the day the sun rises from the West.

February 15th, 2011

Last weekend, Egyptians did something that Arabs have not had the guts to do for the past 60 years. They changed the world's perception of the Middle East forever.

No longer will we be dubbed as subservient, scared, or oppressed.

Singlehandedly, Egyptians overthrew a 30-year-old thick skinned tyrant regime. The 3 week protests brought forth to the world the essence of being Egyptian. Nonviolence, lightheartedness, determination, resilience, and courage.

One thing, however, that amazed me all throughout this struggle, was the unbelievable unity that overcame the entire population. Apparently, that unity was very short-lived.

Repeatedly, I came across individuals expressing anger to the fall of the regime and the bleak prospect of a Muslim theocracy. It amazes me how in the midst of beautiful victory of the people, we still manage to hunt down those small petty ethnic differences that will result in nothing but tension and unnecessary antagonism.

This is not the time to attack the "other". This is not the time to extrapolate politico-religious competition. We don't need to move from one issue to the other so fast.

Let's not forget what ignited this entire movement in the first place: we wanted equality, peace, and natural human liberties within the political arena.

Nobody is threatening secularism, nobody is vying for religious supremacy. Egyptians, as a nation, made this happen. For the sake of universal legitimate rights.

Let's check ourselves before undoing all of last weeks' hard work. We're better than this.

Nothing Left to Say.

This is what some of us have decided is OK to go on for another couple of months. Does it make any sense to you? THIS is the man who has promised us just yesterday that things are going to get better. Wake up.

February 4th, 2011

During the past week, something had caught my attention.

Everybody has officially become a political analyst.

Whenever the subject of what's going on in Egypt comes up, EVERYONE has a political opinion to share.

Although I'm all for freedom of speech and press, I still believe we should place certain boundaries on each other. For the sake of sanity.

You find people that do not even know what the Muslim Brotherhood is telling you that they fear an Islamist state after Mubarak leaves.

You find people that are oblivious to the apparatus of Western intelligence bureaucracies telling you that Israel is our biggest threat.

Having so much information be available to you with such easy access definitely has its dark side.

You are overwhelmed with opinion, and a fraction of truth lost in the fringes.

You develop an abusive relationship with media networks, picking favorites and staying loyal to them.

You don't read half the amount you should be reading in order to even come remotely close to understanding a certain concept, individual, or event.

You don't criticize where you are getting all your information from and thus ride on the coattails of bullshit conspirators.

It's unbelievable the amount of ignorance and arrogance some people have showed. An amount of self-confidence that leaves you speechless.

Talk about the Brotherhood, El Baradei, Mubarak's Egypt, Israeli government, etc.

All I have is one very small request, which I don't think is unreasonable: Do not speak of theories unless you are well informed on the facts upon which you are building certain assumptions.

It pains me to see this naivety that has colonized the hearts of once passionate Egyptians. Ones that do care for their nation but are unfortunately hungry for kind words and thus jump at any promising rhetoric.

We've been called brave, we've been called jealous. We've been called adamant and we've been called weak.

These are defining times. Where are we going to stand? In the midst of the battlefield against tyranny, or on the sidelines?

To make things clear, I'm not sitting here with a holier-than-thou attitude preaching at you, God forbid.

It just tears me up inside to watch such phenomenal nationalistic momentum for change instantaneously collapse due to people jumping at the possibility of the slightest, and dimmest, light at the end of the tunnel.

Let's think reasonably for a second. Let's remember what has initiated this uprising in the first place.

I'm digressing, though. I'm actually writing this entry as a reaction to Glenn Beck's theories on Egyptian leadership.

I'm not going to sit here and vent about how bigoted, arrogant, self-righteous, and delusional the guy is. Because I think everybody can already agree with me on that.

What I do want to address, however, is the manner with which he discussed the Caliphate.

Never in my life, in anything I've ever read, or anything I've ever watched have I witnessed someone describe a holy religious social structure as a flesh eating plague.

Glenn Beck turned the Caliphate, created under the Prophet (pbuh), into a metaphor of degenerative social function.

This is a message to the entire American nation:

Islam is not your enemy. Islam is not going to take over your pathetic neurotic capitalist "free market world economy" obsession. Islam is not going to undermine your stubborn irrational racist excuse of foreign policy. Islam is not your 21st century USSR. ISLAM IS NOT DISSIDENCE TO THE WEST.

It's a shame a country as great as the USA would stoop so low as to bash an ancient much revered world religion.

Leave our apparently "spreading Caliphate" alone and focus on your endless democratic shortcomings.

Rewind?

After a week of the most impressive uprising of the people that I've ever seen/heard of/read about, Egyptians have given up.

I lost count of how many people have passionately tried to convince me that our time is up and that we should settle back down. What's ironic is that those very people were participants in the January 25th protests. So what exactly happened those past couple of days? Let's recap:

Mubarak gave a couple of speeches addressing the need for "constitutional change" and "political reform". Not much later, thugs on camels and horses were storming Tahrir square beating protesters with sticks. Much to their convenience, the internet happened to be turned back on. The world ended up being presented with civil feud between those that claimed they are pro-regime against protesters that have been literally fighting for a new system for the past week.

This is where the interesting part comes in. Subsequent to these arbitrary attacks on protesters, many Egyptians started getting certain epiphanies and they go something like this:

"If Mubarak has come out publicly and promised the world he would not take part of this year's elections, then why are we still downtown going hungry, sleepy, and tired? If this is all orchestrated by 'external forces' then why are we bothering? Let's just all go home, get some sleep, start going back to our jobs and re-instill the stability we once had."

Upon reading that, you belong to one of two camps: those who believe that this has been a big mistake and only caused disruption to our country and thus agree with the statement, or those who believe that every single detail of that statement is pregnant with fallacy. You can probably guess which one I belong to.

Let's take a step back for a second and dissect every contention being made in Mubarak's favor, let's try to be impartial so we can actually come to a reasonable rational conclusion:

After much expressed hatred and condemnation from almost every reputable developed nation in the world, it's no wonder he felt compelled to "appear" to appease the protesters. We all watched him make that speech in utter anticipation. We thought maybe, just maybe, we have done it. But no, we found out that all we're getting is a PROMISE. One that is declaring to the world that Mubarak will NOT run for reelection this year. He was CONCERNED about the stability of the country and believed the status quo needs to be maintained in order for it to be resumed.

The tragedy in all this is not the fact that he's not giving us what we want, it's in the fact that HUNDREDS are falling for it.

They are basically saying that a dictatorial tyrant that has ruled with a heavy hand for over thirty years is suddenly having a change of heart, thus not feeling like reelecting himself for another term in order to give the people what they want. At the young age of 84. What a sacrifice.

Let's look at everything that this revolution has been representing, that has NOT even been addressed so far in Mubarak's speeches:

• Ending the Emergency Law that has been in effect since Sadat's regime. A legislation that was put in place to handle violent Islamist political outbursts in the 1970s. But now, Mubarak has transformed it into an extensive torturous instrument to keep his public (especially dissidents) in check.
• Madda 88, which addresses judiciary duties toward monitoring elections to ensure fairness and prevent ballot manipulation, has not been enforced throughout Mubarak's regime.
• Parliamentary elections have been conducted in a certain way to ensure victory of the NDP ever since God knows when. Further more, lower class citizens get bribed to say that they voted for them (20 pounds to be exact - Who knew selling your soul would cost little more than a Ta3meya sandwich).
• Opposition parties (yes including the Brotherhood) have been demonized for a very long time, giving the international community the impression that Egypt is a harbinger of terrorism and chaos waiting to unravel (very ironic, in my opinion, look what the NDP themselves have sparked up).
• Egypt has been dubbed a "police state" (a shameless euphemism in my opinion) for good reason. Police brutality against citizens has become absolutely ludicrous. In what world should a human being be absentmindedly subservient to ruthless authority figures? That doesn't sound like something America would be supporting, does it.

I've listed only a few basic flaws in the Egyptian regime. Only a few. Once you start immersing yourself into the hellish calculus that is the structure of the Egyptian society, you begin to notice the amount of suffering that so many people have to experience on a daily basis. Matters of food, health, shelter, security, things we don't give second thoughts to.

That situation is due to one very simple fact - Egypt does not have a government.

I'm thinking that would be sufficient to explain the cause of what we've seen so far this week. Now to all my fellow Egyptians that are NOT supportive of the uprising - are you really willing to settle after everything that we have put ourselves and our nation through?

300 dead and thousands injured, just so you can decide after a few days that you're too tired to protest?

Or have we just given up since he turned out to have a much thicker skin that Bin Ali?

What I'm trying to say is that a revolution doesn't happen over night. A revolution comes with a cost but for a very invaluable outcome. I'm not going to give you that spiel about democracy and its importance. But would you rather start working on picking up the economy right now still under the same authoritarian regime and under the same conditions? Or endure relative chaos for a some time in exchange for the system we've been lacking for an overly long time?

I'm vowing never to mention this debate again. Because to tell you the truth, it's infuriating.

Egypt will make the right decision.

Us and Them.

I've been awestruck by the world's audacity to still manage to attack Islam at times like these.

If you are a loyal viewer of Fox News or supporter of the likes of Robert Gibbs and Glenn Beck please skip this entry.

I'm speaking as a Muslim Egyptian living in the USA for almost two years now.

Americans have become absolutely terrified by my people. We have been stigmatized beyond belief. Simply due to our belief system and ethnicity.

I won't go into Islamophobia right now, that's not why I'm writing this.

Throughout the last couple of days, all I can hear on CNN and from the White House is the unbearable trepidation caused by the Muslim Brotherhood possibly taking Mubarak's place post-regime.

It's absolutely ludicrous the amount of panic the word MUSLIM produces.

I want to make one thing very clear - the world needs to understand.

What you are witnessing in Egypt right this very moment is pure Egyptian nationalism. Right now, there is no prominent political denomination. What you are seeing on the streets on the news are Egyptian men, women, children, and the elderly. No hidden agendas. No strategy. No religious divide.

Is it any wonder that Muslims and Christians are collaborating despite the Alexandria Church explosion just a couple of weeks back?

Maybe the West can't get over the possibility of the non-existence of partisan interest in this revolt. But that's exactly what is taking place.

They can't wrap their minds around the patriotism we have that they have started lacking.

Just because some don't know what being American really means, doesn't mean Egyptians suffer the same ailment.

The Muslim Brotherhood did NOT spark these protests. Egypt's political future has not been determined yet, but one thing is for sure -- it is the people themselves that will shape it according to principles of social justice, equality, and fairness.

We are united and adamant.

We have surpassed petty divisions and partisan ego-trips.

We are Egyptians and we don't emulate any other nation. Stop trying to take us under, we will not budge.

Tunisia has led the way, and we are closely following up. This is the people's time.

We know what nationalism is, we know who we are.

We are not you, America.

Mr. President ..

I received this email yesterday. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I find these to be very basic and very feasible demands. And we deserve each and every one of them.

مصر أولاً السيد الرئيس محمد حسنى مبارك – رئيس جمهورية مصر العربية سمعناكم منتصف ليلة أمس فى بيانكم للأمة التى تشهد أحداثاً غير مسبوقة فى خطورتها؛ نشكركم لتوجيهكم باستقالة الحكومة ومحاولتكم تهدئة الأوضاع فى أنحاء البلاد؛ نناشدكم، حفاظاً على بلادنا، وأرواح أبنائنا، ولاستعادة سلطة القانون.. نناشدكم الاعلان عن الخطوات التالية بصورة فورية: 1- بصفتكم رئيس الجمهورية، اعتزامكم عدم الترشح لفترة أخرى. 2- بصفتكم رئيس الحزب الوطني الديمقراطي، الاستقالة من الحزب. 3- بصفتكم الحاكم العسكري، توجيه الجيش وقوات الأمن – بقيادة وزير الداخلية الجديد - باتخاذ جميع السبل اللازمة لتأمين البلاد ومواطنيها والأملاك العامة والخاصة. 4- توجيه الجهات القضائية بفتح التحقيقات فى الأحداث الأخيرة وفى وفاة أبنائنا من المواطنين وقوات الأمن، وفى عمليات النهب والترويع، والبت فى قانونية الانتخابات التشريعية الأخيرة وايجاد السبل القانونية لمعالجة الخلل القائم من جراء التجاوزات التى شابت العملية الانتخابية الأخيرة. 5- توجيه الحكومة الجديدة بفتح حوار فعلي مع قيادات المجتمع المدني بهدف تعديل الدستور لاتاحة مجال أكبر من الحريات وضمان نزاهة العملية الانتخابية وتمثيل الشعب فى المجالس النيابية المختلفة. واذ نشكركم على اعلاء مصر فوق الجميع، وفوق كل شيء، جبهة "مصر أولاً"

Egypt Demonstrations Yesterday in Washington DC

Egyptians all over the world are showing solidarity and echoing the chants of Egyptians in all languages. We're not with you in body, but we're with you in spirit.

January 30th, 2011

Two years ago, my family and I were sitting around the dining table, discussing the fate of Egypt. That's what people in Egypt do, they talk about everything and nothing. You would speak about politics as if you have years of expertise in the field. You predict events that are very unlikely to happen. You judge. You gossip. But that's what we have learned to do. We have learned to talk and talk and talk. Sometimes with no basis to our judgment. Sometimes with first hand knowledge.

Most of the people I'm associated with back in Egypt are, what you can say, members of the high-middle to high class. In other words -- sheltered.

We have grown up in a small modern community. Embedded in a much larger yet awfully disenfranchised population. We constitute a very small percentage of the population, yet we have all the influence. I don't need to tell you about how the world is run, because I won't pretend to know. But all I know is that money buys everything. Money buys your status, money buys your friends, money buys your influence, money buys your politics.

Our families have always sheltered us from the "savage" part of Egypt. They protected us from the uglies of Egypt. Little did we know that that has become the essence of Egypt. Our home isn't the flowery, pampered, modern environment we were seeing before us. Egypt was hungry, stepped upon, taken advantage of, and so unbearably oblivious to it all.

But I digress. Back to my story.

That day while speaking to my family, I felt confident saying that our country will undergo a revolution. And one that is coming very soon. We were too deep in to rely on electoral reform alone. Things were going to get ugly because our own government has officially pushed it that far. It wasn't much longer for the people to erupt demanding social justice. One that they have been denied ever since the death of Anwar Sadat.

Two years later, subsequent to the Tunisian revolt, we have finally followed suit. We're not a sitting duck anymore. The people of Egypt have woken up.

I need to point something out, however, something that I found the most disturbing in the midst of all that's happening.

There is a huge number of "Egyptians" right this very moment calling this a "Poor People's Revolution". In other words, excluding themselves from the events by dubbing it inconsequential to their social stance and/or political future in the Egyptian society.

I was absolutely infuriated. This is not about patriotism or even nationalism at this point. It's about being a cog in a system where exploitation and nepotism is paramount to justice. I'm sad to say that the fact is, in Egypt you're either being stepped on or you're the one doing the stepping. There's no in between anymore. We are purely a population of haves and have-nots.

This is not about mere dissatisfaction with lifestyles. This is about Egyptian dignity in citizenship. I said it before and I will say it again, the Egyptian citizen is currently nullified in terms of political practice.

Our political system is monopolized, terrorized, and capitalized. Pluralism has become an extinct concept since 50 years ago. We're not a democracy and never really were. At this point, I'm doubting there has ever been a democracy anywhere. We are conquered by dirty capitalism and hidden agendas. Giving people power is a glorified concept. Something politicians feel compelled to advocate to win ballots. But it is simply not existent.

People are tired, disenfranchised, taken advantage of.

Right now Egypt is at a crossroads. It's either we do get what we want, which directly translates into Palestine's benefit. Or the system prevails, securing relations with Israel and the US. What they don't understand is the people's resilience. They have nothing to lose anymore. They want their country back. A country with the richest history on earth. They will stop at nothing.

Yesterday at the protests in Washington DC in front of the White House, we kept chanting one statement over and over: The Egyptian nation is not a coward.

Egypt will not back down. We will reclaim what's ours. Our children and grandchildren will look back at this in pride. And the world will give no credit to a once proclaimed "world's policeman" United States of America.