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The aspiration of the Media Review Network is to dispel the myths and stereotypes about Islam and Muslims and to foster bridges of understanding among the diverse people of our country. The Media Review Network believes that Muslim perspectives on issues impacting on South Africans are a prerequisite to a better appreciation of Islam.

Mubaraks last gasps

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From Counter-Attack to Departure Day

By Esam Al Amin

(source: Counterpunch.org)

There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” –V. I. Lenin (1870-1924)

 “Victory is accomplished through the perseverance of the last hour.” –Prophet Muhammad (570-632 AD)

According to the CIA’s declassified documents and records, senior CIA operative, Kermit Roosevelt, paid $100,000 to mobsters in Tehran, in early August 1953, to hire the most feared thugs to stage pro-Shah riots.

Other CIA-paid men were brought weeks later, on August 19, into Tehran in buses and trucks to take over the streets, topple the democratically elected Iranian government, and restore Shah Reza Pahlavi to his thrown. It took the people of Iran 26 years, enormous sacrifices, and a popular revolution to overthrow the imposed, corrupt and repressive rule of the Shah.

This lesson was not lost on the minds of a small clique of officials who were meeting in desperation in the afternoon of Monday, Jan. 31, 2011, in Cairo. According to several sources including former intelligence officer Col. Omar Afifi, one of these officials was the new Interior minister, Police Gen. Mahmoud Wagdy, who as the former head of the prison system, is also a torture expert. He asked Hosni Mubarak, the embattled president to give him a week to take care of the demonstrators who have been occupying major squares around the country for about a week.

Not only he had to rapidly reconstitute his security forces, which were dispersed and dejected in the aftermath of the massive demonstrations engulfing the country, but he also had to come up with a quick plan to prevent the total collapse of the regime.

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Egyptian aftershock felt most by Isarael

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By Naeem Jeenah

(source: Mail & Guardian, pg 37, Friday,11/02/2011)

As the Tunisian uprising gained momentum after four weeks of protests and former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was spirited out of the country, questions were being asked about “who next” would face the “Tunisia effect” and whether the North African country was the first of a set of dominoes to fall across the Arab world.

We now know that Egypt was next — even if that country’s president stubbornly refuses to go anywhere. But there is no set of dominoes that will result in despots fleeing their countries or being forced into early retirement.

While observers excitedly point to protests in Jordan, Algeria, Yemen and Syria, none of these represent the same phenomena as Tunisia or Egypt. The conditions in each country are sufficiently different that one cannot predict whether there will be a “next”.

This is not to say, however, that the two uprisings — especially that in Egypt — have had no impact on other regimes in the region. Jordan’s King Abdullah dissolved the cabinet and appointed a new prime minister; Algeria announced the lifting of the two-decades-old state of emergency; Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced he would not contest the next election in 2013; Syria announced it would ease restrictions on certain rights such as free expression.

And it hasn’t only been Arab dictators who felt pressured. Ethiopia’s government announced a cap on the price of basic foods within days of Ben Ali’s flight from Tunisia; the general strike in Bangladesh has been partly inspired by Egypt; and some commentators even point to the possibility of “the Egypt effect” in Russia and the former Soviet states.

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Jimmy carters gift of apartheid

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By John V. Walsh

(source: AntiWar.com)

Eclipsed by the36in Egypt, news from its little neighbor has not gleaned much notice save for media angst that Egyptian democracy might not be as genial as was the Mubarak dictatorship to the relentless, long-term ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Palestinians. But news there was as Israeli “human riSendghts” lawyers went public with a libel suit against Jimmy Carter for his precise little book, Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid. The stunner to the Israelis lies in a single word in Carter’s title, “apartheid.”

Names, names, names. What constitutes an accurate description of Israel? There are many appellations, none of them appealing. The partisans of Israel like to call it “the Jewish state.” But that name carries a disconcerting note. We do not like “Islamic states,” and “Christian state” calls forth40of fascism, bigotry, and Crusades. Does “Jewish state” sound any more tolerant?

Then there is the very old-fashioned label, “a people without a land and a land without a people.” Not even the European colonialists of the Americas had the chutzpah to deny the very existence of the indigenous peoples as they were exterminated or put into reservations, the Gazas of the New World. Though that racist little phrase continued up to Golda Meir, who denied the very existence of the Palestinians, at least by the time of the terrorist Yitzhak Shamir the Palestinians had transmogrified into “insects” or “cockroaches.” At least Shamir allowed for their pesky, subhuman existence.

Then there is “colonial, settler state,” an accurate name well understood by the developing world as it continues its struggle to throw off the hidden shackles of European domination – but not well understood as yet in the more or less post-colonial West. Of course there is the “Zionist entity,” again well understood by the oppressed of the Middle East, but a mystery to many in the West who have been trained to perceive it as anti-Semitic.

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