Preliminary Egyptian election results - WAPO:
The High Election Commission said the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party garnered 36.6 percent of the 9.7 million valid ballots cast for party lists. The Nour Party, a more hard-line Islamist group, captured 24.4 percent.
61% of the vote in the election was won by two Islamist political parties: the “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and the fundamentalist Salafists. Imagine if Ayman al-Zawahiri had been as patient and skilled at politics as the Ayatollah Khomeini and not linked up with the Muslim Richard Girnt Butler, Osama bin Laden, he could be the current leading candidate to run Egypt. To scream night and day on TV, I am a Muslim!
Is this what those brave souls in the April 6th Movement and leaders such as Asmaa Mahfouz wanted? (I know, I know, these theocratic political parties promise to impose a very limited, almost secular, Islamist government.) Way back in 1978, I cheered for those in Iran rebelling against the venal and odious Shah – Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Later watched in horror as a fundamentalist theocracy was established. Had I been better informed at the time would I have recognized that this was what the Iranians wanted? Or was it?
As Azar Nafisi couldn't answer that question in Reading Lolita In Tehran, there's no hope that I can. Does anyone know what the election results in Tunisia, where al-Nahda, the Islamist party, captured 41%, of the vote will mean? Or where the pro-Sharia Law statements being made by leaders in Libya's NTC will lead?
Kings, dictators, leaders, etc. send the young off to fight and die in their wars. With their parents and grandparents cheering them on, tying yellow ribbons on trees for their safe return, etc. Yet, it's also left up to the young to object, protest, rebel when they see through the duplicity and rapaciousness of their governmental and economic institutions. Institutions that their elders did little to nothing to stop or change. Over forty years ago, the elders in the US turned on the young. Those young and the generation that followed them are today's elders and while more of them may support OWS than their elders supported ending the war in Vietnam, Civil Rights, equal rights and free speech, the majority also supported the hallowing out of the New Deal legislation/regulations and sending the young off to fight in Bush's insane wars. If given a choice among a fundamentalist Christian, a Christian neo-liberal, or secular socialist party, would the results differ much from that in Egypt?
I fear not. And must ask, What's the Matter with People?