Egypt: The Hypocrisy of the Human Rights Industry

[shaayecanaan]

Imagine if, in 1973, with elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende being swept from power in a bloody military coup by the unelected General Augusto Pinochet, a group like Amnesty International chose to focus its attentions almost exclusively on the plight of a poet being banged up in, say, Belarus. Even if you believed the imprisonment of poets to be a very bad thing, you would think that was weird, right? A case of twisted priorities.

Well, the equivalent is happening right now. In Egypt, a military dictatorship has deposed and imprisoned an elected president, massacred hundreds of his supporters, and created government departments to oversee the interrogation and torture of ‘terrorists’ (otherwise known as Muslim Brotherhood voters). And yet the big issue on Amnesty’s online activism page is, as it has been for months, the continuing legal fights of imprisoned Russian punk band Pussy Riot. It seems if you want to win the attention of the West’s best-known human-rights outfit, it helps to be pretty white women with guitars rather than gruff brown men with beards.

There are many striking things about the political situation in Egypt. But perhaps the most striking thing is the silence of those who pose as human-rights cheerleaders, of the West’s head-shakers over tyranny in far-off lands, who have gone strangely mute, or at least uncharacteristically coy, in the face of the Egyptian military’s seizure of power and repression of dissent.

From all those high-minded newspaper columnists who normally bang the drum for Western warmaking against foreign countries that do authoritarian things, nada. From the leaders of Britain, America and France who usually get off on denouncing tyrannical militarism, zilch – or at best a half-assed plea to the Egyptian military to calm down. And from the human-rights industry, the self-styled moral conscience of the decent West, not much. Scour Amnesty International’s recent statements and you’ll discover that it has in fact put out an anaemic press release about Egypt, calling on the security forces to ‘protect protesters from violent attack’. What? It’s the security forces, primarily armed police units, that are violently attacking the protesters. No wonder Amnesty hasn’t said much about Egypt – it doesn’t seem to know what’s happening there.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/egpyt_latest/13869#.UfhSWdIwexo

[MrSlayer]

1. That's the thing, everyone hates the Islamic extremists.

Everyone. The Muslim Brotherhood does not evoke sympathy from anyone. If it was the Brotherhood that deposed a secular elected President, people would be going apeshit. As it is, no one sees a reason to do anything about it.

[shaayecanaan]

2. A bit like the red scare of decades past...

No one gave a shit when the CIA turfed Congolese President Patrice Lumamba out of office, because he was a pinko and he got what he deserved. Same with Salvador Allende, and to a certain extent Hugo Chavez. The fact that they were perceived as pro-Communist was justification for anything.

Similarly, anyone who was the faintest bit pink back then was treated as though they were Stalin or Pol Pot, whereas today any party that is perceived as "Islamic" is automatically presumed to be in league with al-Qaeda.

[MrSlayer]

3. Agreed.

It works. If they lined up all of the Taliban and shot them one by one, no one would bat an eye.

[Jefferson23]

4. AI has some information listed on Egypt. If the roles were reversed, would they likely be as

self-constrained? Probably not.

DEPOSED PRESIDENT AND AIDES INCOMMUNICADO
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE12/040/2013/en/3b3eb73a-a38d-420b-824f-76058afb1f2c/mde120402013en.pdf

For disclosure I was shocked by the number of Egyptians in the streets and completely sympathetic to their
cause. Unemployment went from 9% to 13 % since Morsi, and the human rights abuses continued
after Mubarak. Does that change the hypocrisy factor, absolutely, no. I do hope the Egyptians can realize their
goals, and I am not sure if they, the opposition, could have orchestrated such an event without an enormous
degree of frustration from within the people themselves.


Friday, July 12, 2013
Fashioning a Coup

http://baheyya.blogspot.com/2013/07/fashioning-coup.html

[Igel]

5. No, it doesn't strike me as weird.

AI, like all of those covering oppression, doesn't pick the most egregious examples unless it suits them.

They pick the examples that they think are most important. That usually means the "reporters" or activists see themselves in the victims and see their foes, typically domestic, in the oppressors.

Having a feminist rocker-protester oppressed by religious orthodoxy and a conservative authoritarian fits AI. They are feminist rockers oppressed by religious orthodoxy and consesrvative authoritarians, or at least that's their fear.

They don't fear having religious authoritarians oppressed by self-described technocratic liberals. That's sort of their goal. They failed to notice Zimbabwe. Mugabe was a freedom fighter. They missed a long-term genocide in the S. Sudan. They keyed in fairly quickly to the one in Darfur.

It was the same in the early '70s. Even after Khrushchov's Stalin speech there was still a lot of reluctance to be really hard on the USSR. The Prague Spring was a problem but it went away. A lot of journalists had a lot of good will towards the USSR. Moreover, there was the matter of Realpolitik and the dissenters were just annoying.

The Archipelago GULag made it very difficult. It had been circulating for years but only when it was published in English in '74 could it not be ignored. In academia Solzhenitsyn was an embarrassment--a lot of faculty "taught" him only by demand. But the time was right and Carter was important in dealing with dissidents. Charta 77 was set up in Helsinki. There were human rights accords and fairly large Jewish emigration from the territory, although their treatment wasn't an issue. (You were given perhaps 24 hours, allowed a suitcase, no valuables, no money, and when you got on the plane your passport stayed behind. And you knew that your relatives would suffer.) Of course, American wheat and the sclerotic nature of the Soviet economy was an important point here.

Reporters finally found somebody they could relate to. Sakharov. And his wive, Bonner. The dissident artists, those calling for all kinds of changes were too foreign. But a physicist, H-bomb "inventor" who had gone all anti-war .... The others? Nah.

Everybody was really relieved when Solzhenitsyn immigrated and immediately turned out to be really, really weird. (Tolstoy might have beaten a milkmaid to death in a fit of anger, but Solzhenitsyn's weirdness was detrimental to his work while Tolstoy ... poor fellow, killing the girl like that. And the agony he felt over his rapes.) People liked what Tolstoy said. Solzhenitsyn made them uncomfortable.

Still, in '83 when Reagan called for the Baltic countries to be free and determine their own destinies, there was derision in the press. Of course the Baltics were free--they were in the USSR and, as Moscow said, had the right to leave at any time. And always had, since their pre-WWII occupation. Reagan was oppressive. Andropov wasn't.

[shaayecanaan]

6. I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan whateverhisnamewas

in high school. They also had Animal Farm in year 11. Not Nineteen Eighty-Four, perhaps it wasn't generically anticommunist enough.

When I was in university, the political science lecturer expressed frustration at having to dedicate a lecture to Marxism in Week 12 or whatever it was, when the whole movement was clearly as dead as a shrivelled up dick. This comment didn't attract much controversy; by that time the New Left was ascendant and people were feminists/critical race theorists/queer theorists/genderqueer theorists/genderqueer-postmodern-poststructural-theorists with a side of Derrida. These people talked about "creating a space" and "deconstructing the text". Despite their entreaties to the contrary, these people remained stubbornly white and middle class, although the middle-class part didnt bother them.

About the only crack in the facade came from a macro-economist who lectured on political economy from time to time. He cast a figure a bit like a gloomy prophet, and would depart from the script to talk about Minsky, Marx and Joan Robinson. He said that Marx was right in some of the problems he foresaw in capitalism, the problem was that there appears to be not much that can be done about it. A social-democratic political structure can slow down the inevitable suction-pump effect of wealth from labour to capital, but cannot arrest it. Eventually, the money will all be with the wealthy, who, flush with cash and bereft of decent investment opportunities will either lend out money willy-nilly to people who have no ability to pay for it, or alternatively, sit on their purse strings and let the markets seize up for want of capital.

Someone asked him what a good investment strategy was. He said to make sure to have at least six hectares of good quality agricultural land for each member of their family, and access to water. The audience laughed. He said that he was serious.

[Catherina]

7. Lindsey Graham: I have a letter from AIPAC...They do not support cutting off all assistance to Egypt

"It would be a terrific mistake for the United States to send a message to Egypt: you're on your own," McCain said on the Senate floor. "I urge my colleagues to vote to table the Paul amendment."

...

"Yeah, it probably fits the definition of a coup," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) before noting that the U.S. could simply not afford to lose its leverage with the Egyptian military. "If it's not going to be (U.S.-supplied) F-16s, you're going to find yourselves with MiG-29s coming from Russia."

"Why are we selling weapons to Egypt?" added Graham. "If we don't, someone else will."

...

"I have a letter here from AIPAC. I asked them to comment," said Graham, before reading the statement aloud: "We do not support cutting off all assistance to Egypt at this time."

Paul rejected the notion that the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee speaks for the entirety of pro-Israel supporters. "There is no unified statement from the nation of Israel," he said. "If you talk to the people, the grassroots and not the so-called leadership you'll find a much different story."

...

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/31/republicans_stiff_arm_rand_side_with_dems_on_egypt_aid

So guess who's going to Egypt for us since Capital Hill is ALL out of Democrats or something

President Obama has asked Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain to travel to Egypt for talks with the interim government and opposition figures. The announcement follows Tuesday’s meeting between European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and the ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. It was Morsi’s first known outside contact since he was removed from office earlier this month. Later in the day, Ashton met with Egyptian Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/31/headlines#7319