Juan Cole: Saad’s Revolution

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Saad’s Revolution

Posted on Feb 1, 2011
By Juan Cole


A largely unheralded hero of the Egyptian revolution is a mild-mannered academic who endured imprisonment and then exile for daring to criticize the Mubarak family’s increasingly dynastic ambitions.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim has spoken out forcefully on human rights and democracy for decades, and he is finally being vindicated. But his message that the United States needs to support democracy in the Arab world and put aside its paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements may be unpalatable to Washington’s elites.

As an academic at the American University of Cairo, Ibrahim pioneered the study of Muslim dissidents and radicals, receiving permission to interview them in the dreaded Tura prison in the early 1980s, in the wake of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by a joint council of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Grouping.

By a great irony of history, Ibrahim was destined to join his former interview subjects in prison himself. Having become a democracy activist in the 1990s, Ibrahim helped make films instructing peasants how to vote. In Egypt’s class-ridden, hierarchical society, the elite around President Hosni Mubarak viewed these activities as seditious. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/saads_revolution_20110131/

[xchrom]

1. right in the beginning of the article:

'But his message that the United States needs to support democracy in the Arab world and put aside its paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements may be unpalatable to Washington’s elites.'


'may be unpalatable to Washington’s elites.'


this is incredibly important -- both the dc beltway and institutions like the financials constantly beat that drum -- drowning out any other view.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. + 1