Regarding the New Egypt, The New York Times, Like Other US Media, Gets It Wrong Most of the Time!!

Happy 2014 to our Readers.  Apologize for starting the New Year negatively about US media reporting on Egypt's transition to democracy.


The respectable CBS program "60 Minutes" of Sunday evenings led off last week with Reporter Leslie Stahl's interview with Obama's National Security Adviser.  Stahl described events in Egypt after June 30 as "a fiasco."  Fiasco, or-ignominious results, for whom?  Certainly not for the 35 million Egyptians who rose up that day and brought the brutalizing Islamist regime of Morsi down.
The New York Public Radio (NYPR), which draws its credibility largely from it being funded by its public, features its Cairo correspondent on December 22, 2013 at 9:00 AM.  The correspondent decries what she perceives to be the collapse of the Revolution of January 25, 2011.  Why?  She sees in the Egyptian public urging of General El-Sisi to run for President a hypothetical link to declaring the Muslim Brotherhood "a terrorist organization."

But the Cairo correspondents of the New York Times take the cake in their spinning off the impact of events in transitional Egypt into systematic negativity.  They are David Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim and Mayy El-Sheikh. Content analysis over only a 4-day period from December 26 to December 30, 2013 vouches for the accuracy of my criticism.

• All references to the present transitional presidency of Counsellor Adly Mansour are prefaced by the term "military-backed." 

• Objection: The army did not force 35 million Egyptians to go out screaming at Morsi on June 30 to leave the Presidential Palace.  It stood guard on the multitude, as they stood guard on the Islamic march of the Brotherhood through Morsi's move to that palace in June 2012.

• Since July 3, which signaled the end of Islamic colonialism of secular Egypt, the pet terms of these correspondents, one at a time, have been "a society already riven by violence and suspicion in the months since the military."

• Objection: You must be kidding me!!  You mean to characterize the reign of Morsi and the Brotherhood as one which was free of violence and suspicion?  Have you heard of the so-called "peaceful sit-ins" at Rabaa, Nahdha and Orman which were battle zones and trench warfare?  You must have heard of the Sinai war against the Egyptian army and police, fueled by out-of-control Hamas and their jihadist cohorts!!

Did you consider Morsi's incessant verbal attacks on the judiciary, Al-Azhar, the Coptic Church and Shiism?  Surely you must have known of the appointment by Morsi of 13 Provincial Governors (Egypt has 27 provinces) who were Ikhwanis (adherents of the Brotherhood)!!  How about the avalanche of amnesties granted by Morsi to persons already adjudged as terrorists?

• Your unfounded claims that the Brotherhood is "deeply rooted in Egyptian social and civic life."

• Objection: Prove it!!  Is the mere existence of the Brotherhood for nearly 8 decades a qualification of "deep rootedness?"  The Brotherhood itself has no statistics on its numerical strength.  There is hardly any social science surveys in Egypt.  That is not to mention the Brotherhood's commitment to secrecy in all matters, including its sources of funding.  And is it permissible for a group like the Brotherhood to be given a green light to use Islam as a cover for a power grab as a reward for its assistance to the poor?  The Egyptian Ministry of Waqfs (Charitable Trusts) has been, for the entire history of modern Egypt, the purveyor of goods and services for the needy in Egypt and beyond.

• Your attack on the Egyptian Government, following its listing of the Brotherhood as a "terrorist organization," for "seeking to deny the group foreign help or shelter," and for "urging other Arab governments to honor an anti terrorism agreement and shun the organization."

• Objection: How imbecile can you get?  The international conventions against terrorism adopted by the League of Arab States and the organization of Islamic Cooperation call for such collective action.  Actions in that regard by the Egyptian Government fall within the international law doctrine called "Acts of State."  The doctrine confines itself to acting internally within its sovereign domain, while advising other governments of such actions for their own consideration.  Unlike the Bush administration, Cairo has never tried to impose on the outside world the imperial doctrine of "You are either with us or with the terrorists."

• Your assertion that "State forces have killed hundreds of the group supporters during protests against Mr. Morsi's removal."

• Objection: How one-sided can you get?  This is a typical half-truth!!  All human casualties, be they pro-Morsi or anti-Morsi supporters, are to be regretted.  But you, through your biased reporting, deal with the consequences and ignore the root causes.  For six very long weeks (from July 3 to August 14, 2013), the Government appealed to the marauding hordes at Rabaa and elsewhere to disband peacefully.  But their commitment to victimhood as a means of internationalizing a purely internal Egyptian matter prevailed.

Those encampments had quickly turned into armed garrisons, with pre-arranged armament storage.  Declaring them peaceful sit-ins defies imagination.  They besieged the HQ of the Presidential Guards (a military outpost) and conducted massive security and civil disruptions in their bivouacs.  It finally came down to this: either the integrity of the State or the chaos perpetrated by the Brotherhood.  Many army and police officers, not to mention peaceful civilians, were gunned down.  In your casualties count, have you included those also?   Or is your definition of casualties confined only to the Muslim Brotherhood whose affiliate Hamas has been listed by the US as a terrorist organization?

• By December 25, Mr. Kareem Fahim, one of the three New York Times musketeers based in Cairo, has made yet another false discovery within the ranks of the Egyptian administration.  His report was headlined "Crackdown on Islamists stirs unrest across Egypt."  Then came his statistical attempt to explain "unrest across Egypt." These are his words "At least three people were killed in Cairo, Damietta and Minya on Friday as officers fired tear gas and birdshot at protesters who threw rocks, burned tires and set fire to police vehicles."

• Objection: Need I say more, except that violating the newly-promulgated law regulating demonstrations needs to be upheld by the Government.  That is a government which is faced with threats by the Brotherhood in its futile attempt to disrupt the mid-January plebiscite on the new Constitution.

• Spinmeisters, Fahim and El-Sheikh were at it again.  For their slanted report dated December 30, The New York Times, headlined: "Egypt Detains Journalists It Says Aired False News." That is in spite of the fact that those two New York Times reporters engaged in the same unethical support.  The peg on which Fahim and El-Sheikh hung their poisonous New Year gift was the announcement by interim President Adly Mansour that Egypt could hold a presidential election before electing a new Parliament.

Now comes the reporters' main spin: They raised "the possibility that the military-backed government was preparing to deviate from the transition plan it unveiled after the ouster of the former president -Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood leader -in early July.  The government has said it would follow that plan, citing it as evidence of its commitment to democracy."

Then more spin: "Analysts have said that switching the order of the elections could allow Egypt's leaders to maintain tighter control over their outcome, by allowing the newly elected president to influence the makeup of Parliament." 

• Objection: (1) Who are your "analysts," and what kind of strong weed are they smoking? (2) You cite Michael Wahid Hanna "a fellow at the Century Foundation in New York.  Having followed his "analyses" over a long time, your conclusions, Mr. Hanna have proved to be "fiction confirmers."  You, supporters, have gone to him repeatedly to vouch for the authenticity of your fictions; (3) The announcement by Counsellor Mansour has no conspiracy behind it.  It has behind it the provisions of the newly-drafted Constitution which left the sequencing of the elections to the President; (4) That Constitution shall replace the Islamic Constitution of 2012 which was heavily manipulated by your darlings -the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt keeps its nose largely in its own business.  I don't see its officials offering unwanted advice to American policy-makers regarding America's pitfalls in the practice of democracy.  No Egyptian attacks on State measures to make it harder for Blacks and Latinos to vote.  No Egyptian formal declarations addressed to America about Republican defiance of science or the stigmatization of aliens.  No Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs has ever issued condemnations of the rise of racism or of State legislation against the use of Islamic law in the courts of 18 States.  No Egyptian human rights group has ever attacked the Republicans in Pennsylvania, thanks to gerrymandering, winning only 47 percent of the votes but walking away with 72 percent of the seats.

Nor have the Egyptian sneered at the Republican Party shutting down the federal government for 16 days last year.  So why doesn't America mind its own business and stay away from being the Big Brother who is voluble with uninvited course corrections?

Yet America, as policy-makers, media outlets, or even civic groups based in Egypt and allied with either the democrats or the republicans find it fair game to attack the course of Egyptian transitioning to democracy.  Describing the situation in Egypt as "a mess" has become daily media-speak.  

I found not one official world coming out of Cairo in condemnation of the US policy of detention, fully expounded in 2013 in the 560 page report issued by the Constitution Project's Task Force covering Guantanamo, rendition, black sites and the efficacy of torture and brutal interrogations.  No Egyptian official voice was raised calling on Washington, D.C. to go easy on its citizens and allies by reigning in its National Security Agency's global infringement of privacy through mass surveillance.

As a lawyer and academic belonging, through nationality, to both the U.S. and Egypt, and loyal to whatever is good in either culture, I find in the negative characterization of the teething pains of the present Egyptian transition to democracy, the fowl air of cultural and political arrogance.  And by the way, I get no financial benefit from any government.  I am self-employed and not a mouth-piece for any government.

Your biased reporting does not help the US maintain workable relationships with the new Egypt.  More importantly, your drum beat of misstatements shall not stop the new Egypt from seeking broader alliances away from the U.S.  As of January 25, the period of Egypt being a client State has ended.

The rational of the basic doctrine of freedom of expression embodied in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does not protect a person in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.  Its object is a citizenry of intelligent decision-makers seeking and empowered to govern a free society. (see Barron and Dienes, Constitutional Law in a Nutshell).

If you were capable of putting matters in Egypt in their global perspective, how would you rate the security in Egypt in comparison with the internal security in Putin's Russia (the Volgograd explosions) or the rebellions in China?

In order to be a credible spokesman or a reliable reporter, you must stick to professional ethics, and take to heart this advice from Sherlock Homes.  Nearly 130 years ago, he said: "Do not theorize before you have the facts!!"  He truly was the purveyor of deductive reasoning which is based upon using the evidence to reach reasonable conclusions.  

The New York Times reporters based in Cairo, David Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim and Mayy El-Sheikh keep on crowing doom and gloom.  Just try for even once to describe the Egyptian Government as "people-backed."  In this connection, an Arab proverb is on point: "The caravan moves forward, as the dogs keep on barking."