I doubt it; I sure hope not, because I respect Chris Hedges. But he's not God, he can be wrong, and he's got it very wrong here.
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair.
The majority of Egyptians, Muslim and Christian, are devout. Religion has played a central role in Egyptian cultural and social life for thousands of years, and the rituals, strict moral code and spiritual comfort are all available within the traditional Muslim and Christian faiths, as they have always been. Chris Hedges should define here what he means by "radical Islam"; does he mean the Wahhabist ideology, which Saudi Arabia has spent tens of billions of dollars over the past 40 years to introduce to Egypt and other countries and to promote? Does he mean the Muslim Brotherhood cult, which has hardly ever attracted adults, but depends on the Muslim Brotherhood's access to children (through schools, mosques, clinics and other "charity work") so that they can be properly brainwashed into absolute, unquestioning obedience ("hear and obey"), taking the orders of whoever is above him in the Brotherhood hierarchy, who in turn slavishly obeys the one above him, going all the way to the guy who has, by some unknown process, been appointed "Supreme Guide" in the Muslim Brotherhood (and probably beyond him to some foreign intelligence handler)?
Because Hedges needs to distinguish between something that is a "refuge" and something that is a trap, specifically designed and set by predators who feed on the weak. In fact, studies have shown that poverty alone does not render people more receptive to the Muslim Brotherhood, but the combination of extreme poverty and extreme ignorance. Among people who are very poor but at least somewhat educated, the MB's recruitment efforts are more likely to fail than to succeed.
The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.
Um, Mr. Hedges conveniently overlooks the fact that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that set up armed terrorist camps in the middle of a residential Cairo intersection and in Giza, and that engaged in regular acts of armed violence against Egyptians and hateful incitement to terrorism for 45 full days before police went in to disperse it. He overlooks the fact that there WAS NO MASSACRE, except for the hundreds who have been brutally tortured and murdered by the Muslim Brotherhood after the camps' dispersal, which was filmed and aired live in its entirety. In fact, the very first person to die on August 14 was a policeman, shot by the Muslim Brotherhood, and that since then, at least 60 policemen have been killed, some tortured to death, in the Muslim Brotherhood's attacks against police stations, some with RPG's, in addition to the dozens of soldiers. These are all well-documented facts, while there is NO evidence whatsoever, of the police engaging in any 'massacre' of the Brotherhood.
The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot.
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Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.
In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”
Once again, Mr. Hedges conveniently forgets some facts: first, the Muslim Brotherhood was a close partner of the ruling SCAF, which took over after Mubarak was deposed, and under the approving eye of its US bosses, if not under the US' direct orders, the SCAF handed Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood on a golden platter. As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood had nearly total control over the machinery of state for over a year and a half. They rigged elections at will, dominated both houses of parliament, custom-designed their own self-serving constitution, controlled the presidency, the state media, the police, and took over much of the nation's economy, both public and private sector, so that within 18 months, they had vastly increased their holdings and pretty much constituted the nation's political, financial and business elite.
Once in power, they demonstrated a level of greed and selfishness that made Mubarak's regime seem humble. The president's personal budget, which had been wildly inflated in Mubarak's time, rose by 30% under Morsy. All the top-ranking Muslim Brotherhood officials were appointed to cushy government jobs at exorbitant salaries ($100,000 per month was not unusual), utterly unrelated to their qualifications or lack thereof. Under their extraordinarily incompetent rule, the ranks of the unemployed grew until they comprised close to 50% of the nation's work force. Peasants and workers were forced out of their lands and factories. Close to 4000 factories shut down, and hundreds of tourist resorts were forced into bankruptcy, many of them quickly snapped up at bargain-basement prices by cadres of the Muslim Brotherhood. The infrastructure was left to deteriorate without any maintenance whatsoever -- not even garbage collection (which, along with many other things, people had to organize themselves if they could, because the government was busy).
Meanwhile, government officials scolded the poor. The Muslim Brotherhood's Minister of Essential Goods told them that subsidized bread (which formed the bulk of the diet of increasing numbers of people) would henceforth be rationed to three flat loaves per day. The Muslim Brotherhood's Prime Minister, on International Women's Day, gave a speech in which he admonished peasant women to wash their nipples thoroughly so their babies would not get diarrhea.
By May 1st, our Labor Day, when the Egyptian president traditionally visits one of the large, public-sector factories, could not find a single factory to visit where the workers would not protest and possibly attack his entourage. He did go to the state-owned iron and steel factory, but the workers were kept away by police, and labor activists were arrested before his visit; instead, he spoke before an enthusiastic audience of Muslim Brotherhood members dressed up as workers.
By Wheat Harvest Day last May 15, when the Egyptian president traditionally visits a peasant village to give a speech, Morsy could not find a village to safely visit, without provoking a riot. Instead, he made his speech in the middle of a large wheat-field owned by a corporation, surrounded by bodyguards.
Mr. Hedges conveniently ignores the fact that, more than any other sector of society, it was the poor who suffered the most under Muslim Brotherhood rule, and it was the poor who made up the vast majority of those who organized the uprising and demanded that Morsy and the Brotherhood be removed from power. It is in the very poorest neighborhoods that members of the Muslim Brotherhood now fear for their lives. If Mr. Hedges could only have seen what happened at the Fateh Mosque on August 15, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood holed up there for 18 hours and shot at police and ordinary people from inside. When they were finally evacuated, it was the police who had to physically protect them at the risk of their own lives, from the thousands of poor people who wanted desperately to lynch them.
The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will not be lifted soon.
First, we do not have a military-led government, but a civilian president, prime minister and cabinet, which includes the minister of defense. It is the prime minister and his cabinet who are currently running Egypt until the parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled to take place within 6-8 months, depending on how long it takes to produce a new constitution and hold a referendum to approve it.
Second, since January 25, 2011, we have had several curfews declared, all of which were rather hilariously ignored by the Egyptian people, because they did not like those who imposed them. They held football matches, weddings, dance performances and parades that lasted all night, from the curfew hour until morning. We are a very strong-willed people, Mr. Hedges, and especially after all we've been through, we do not accept being pushed around. And there are so many of us, no army or police could ever hope of controlling us all. But in the case of this curfew and this month-long state of emergency, we are all staying off the streets so that OUR police and OUR army can find and capture the killers who hate us and are trying to destroy our country.
The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush. What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices.
Sorry to disappoint Mr. Hedges, but the exact opposite is in fact occurring. After the Brotherhood's violence reached its peak the day after the camps were dispersed, it has been steadily dwindling, as the police raid arms caches and arrest the Brotherhood's financiers (many caught with millions of dollars and Euros in cash, as well as Egyptian currency and credit cards; one 'preacher' was also caught with 17 credit cards in different names). This would have been much more difficult without the assistance of ordinary Egyptian citizens, who have helped the police to locate these caches and to capture the criminals by reporting suspicious activity.
The Brotherhood called for a "million-man march" yesterday, after Friday prayers. The largest such march consisted of an estimated 200 people. They avoided the main roads and kept to side streets in poor neighborhoods. Wherever they went, the marchers were greeted by pail-fulls of dirty water and rocks thrown at them from people's balconies. In Tanta, a relatively large town in the agricultural Delta, the residents attacked the marchers and beat them up, until police intervened to save them. In Helwan, the Muslim Brotherhood marchers kidnapped a camera crew sent to cover their pathetic demonstration, and threatened to kill them unless the tv station paid a ransom (the police released the camera crew and arrested the kidnappers by early evening).
Of course, the ability to plant a bomb or set fire to a building or stab or shoot someone dead, doesn't require popular support. Indeed, believe it or not, these acts can and are carried out by "enemies of the people", not their champions. If the aim of the Brotherhood is to terrorize and kill Egyptians, then some of their attempts may well succeed, although they will never again be able to do the kind of devastating damage they were doing to Egypt when they were in power. Now, they are simply a rapidly-dwindling gang of terrorists (many of them not even Egyptian, but imported by the Brotherhood to attack Egyptian society), and they will be dealt with accordingly.
The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.
Hah. One would never guess that it is those very same "global corporate elites", including the US government, its allies and the Western corporate media that have proven so determined to impose this so-called "radical Islam" upon Egyptians and other Arabs, against our will. One would think that these so-called radical Islamists have done anything to help or further the cause of Arab ordinary people, instead of serving the agenda of the very foreign imperialists that sponsor them.
Oh, Mr. Hedges, you should really stick to something you know. Clearly you don't understand at all what's happening in Egypt.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
