Egypt's 'Friday Of Departure' Rally: Massive, But Calm

Egyptian soldiers stand behind barbed wire at the entrance of Cairo's Tahrir Square as anti-government demonstrators gather Friday by NPR STAFF AND WIRES  February 4, 2011

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters massed again in central Cairo for what organizers billed as a "Friday of Departure." After two days of clashes with supporters of the regime, their goal remained the same: Force out President Hosni Mubarak.

The crowd that filled Tahrir Square for an 11th day of demonstrations was the biggest since Tuesday. One man sitting in a wheelchair was lifted — wheelchair and all — over the heads of the demonstrators, and he pumped his arms in the air. Thousands prostrated themselves in noon prayers. And immediately after uttering the prayer's concluding "God's peace and blessings be upon you," they began chanting their message to Mubarak: "Leave! Leave! Leave!"

 

The square was mostly calm Friday after 48 hours of violence between pro-and anti-Mubarak forces who battled with paving stones and shields fashioned out of sheet metal from a construction site. Doctors at the scene said at least 10 people were killed and more than 800 wounded in the fighting. Gangs backing Mubarak also attacked some journalists and human-rights activists across Cairo on Thursday; others were detained by soldiers.

 

A Largely Peaceful Day

Soldiers from the army, which has ringed the square with barbed wire and armored personnel carriers, helped check IDs and perform body searches Friday to make sure weapons were kept out of the area. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reported that people were required to pass through multiple checkpoints to enter the square.

"They are very, very thorough," said Garcia-Navarro, adding that the protesters are "very serious about wanting their protests to be peaceful and will only fight if they are attacked."

Many of the people who poured into Tahrir Square brought fresh bread, water, fruit and other supplies with them. Makeshift clinics had been set up in the entranceways of stores, including a KFC.

 

Protesters were hopeful that the "size and peaceful nature of the rally sends a clear signal to Mubarak and the rest of the world," NPR's Eric Westervelt reported from the square.

 

But after the violence of the past two days, anti-government demonstrators — some wearing hard hats — were taking no chances.

 

"In one area, there's a catapult. In another area, they're using it as an armory, stashing rocks and putting them into containers so that they'll have stuff ready in case clashes break out again," Garcia-Navarro said.

 

Ahmed Ibrahim, a 32-year-old engineer, told NPR that the preparations were for defense against Mubarak's "criminals." He dismissed rumors that the protesters planned to march to the presidential palace to demand the removal of Mubarak.

 

"They want us to move from the square, but we will not do that," he said.

In the afternoon, a group of Mubarak supporters gathered in a square several blocks away and tried to move on Tahrir, banging with sticks on metal fences to raise an intimidating clamor. But protesters throwing rocks pushed them back.

 

The Army's Key Role

Egyptian Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi and senior army officials visited the square Friday morning in what many anti-Mubarak protesters interpreted as a tacit endorsement of their movement.

 

"The army and people are united," many in the crowd chanted after an announcement over loudspeakers that the minister was in the square.

The army's sympathy — whether to the Mubarak regime or to the protesters — has been a wild card in protests, Garcia-Navarro said. Soldiers stood aside as pro-government gangs attacked the protesters, only to step between the rival factions later in an apparent effort to protect them.

 

The pro-Mubarak crowds that have attacked demonstrators and foreign journalists did not have a visible presence Friday.

 

Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate and member of a new committee formed to conduct negotiations on the protesters' behalf, said he hopes the demonstration "leads to Mubarak's departure."

 

Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with a heavy hand for three decades, insists he will serve out the remaining seven months of his presidential term. In an interview with ABC News on Thursday, Mubarak said he wants to step down but that doing so would spark chaos, and he vowed not to leave Egypt.

 

Ibrahim Kamel, general secretary of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party, told the BBC on Friday that "the silent majority" would soon rise up in support of the president. He blamed foreign media for what he called a conspiracy to destabilize his country.

"I am sorry to say that the Western media is conducting an ugly campaign against Egypt," he said. "And when the dust settles, I do hope that you will all be apologetic to the Egyptians."

 

Pressure From Afar


U.S. and European officials have stepped up pressure for Mubarak to step down immediately. The Obama administration said it was in talks with top Egyptian officials about the possibility of Mubarak resigning and an interim government forming before free and fair elections this year.

 

In a joint statement Friday, 27 European Union leaders called on all parties in Egypt to "show restraint and avoid further violence and begin an orderly transition to a broad-based government."

 

President Obama talked Friday about Egypt during a joint appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, again saying the transition process "should begin now" and should include opposition voices.

 

Obama said at this point the momentum for change in Egypt is unstoppable.

"In light of what's happened over the last two weeks, going back to the old ways is not going to work," he said. "Suppression is not going to work. Engaging in violence is not going to work. Attempting to shut down information flows is not going to work."

 

Prominent Egyptian reform advocate Mohamed ElBaradei has said Mubarak should step down now. The Nobel Peace laureate, who has become one of the leaders of Egypt's protest movement, said the Egyptian president "should hear the clear voice coming from the people and leave in dignity."

 

Speaking to journalists at a news conference on Friday, ElBaradei said there should be a yearlong transition to democracy under a temporary constitution with a presidential council of several people, including a military representative. During that year, a permanent constitution would be drawn up to guarantee freedom to form political parties — currently highly restricted — and other freedoms, and then elections could be held.

 

"The quicker [Mubarak] leaves in dignity the better it is for everybody," ElBaradei said.

 

Egypt After Mubarak

 

But the question of what would follow a Mubarak regime has worried many both inside and outside Egypt. Garcia-Navarro said one such group is Coptic Christians, who have flourished under Mubarak in an otherwise predominantly Muslim country.

 

In a possible effort to up the ante should the current regime edge toward a quick collapse, Vice President Omar Suleiman said Thursday that he had invited the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood into negotiations over Egypt's future. The Islamist organization is officially outlawed and has been ruthlessly suppressed by Mubarak.

 

After keeping a low profile for the first several days of protests, members of the brotherhood — distinguishable by their close-cropped beards — have begun to dominate the protesters' front lines, often lining up to pray for "victory or martyrdom" before throwing themselves into the fray, hurling stones, sticks and firebombs at the attackers while shouting, "God is great."

 

The editor of the Muslim Brotherhood's website told the AP that police stormed its office Friday morning and arrested 10 to 15 of its journalists. Abdel Galil el-Sharnoubi said the website was also being blocked.

 

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera news agency, whose coverage is widely viewed in the Arab world and elsewhere, said Friday that its office in Cairo also had been stormed by "gangs of thugs."

 

The news agency said in a statement that the attack on its operations "appears to be the latest attempt by the Egyptian regime or its supporters to hinder Al-Jazeera's coverage of events in the country." Al-Jazeera's Egyptian bureau has been forcibly closed and several of its reporters briefly detained.

 

President Obama called those actions and others against journalists "unacceptable." His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the U.S. continues to receive reports of a "very systematic targeting of journalists" and said the actions "speak volumes about the seriousness with which the government looks at an orderly transition."

 

NPR's Corey Flintoff, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and Eric Westervelt reported from Cairo for this story, which contains material from The Associated Press.

Write a comment

Comments: 0

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

Read More 1 Comments