The Skeptic الشكاك

471 ‘Brother Leader’ Speaks

A few quick items:

• I am thrilled to find Col. Muammar al-Qaddhafi’s Web site. I will be a frequent visitor in future. I’m still browsing, but this seemed too important not to pass along immediately:

First, beware the deadly diseases caused by The World Cup. Medical research has proven, and will prove further in the future, that those who have football (soccer) mania, and those addicted to the game are most at risk of psychological and nervous disorders. Those disorders in turn are the leading causes of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, hyper-tension and premature ageing. Human physical activity has diminished due to the over-use of technology. People have become more lethargic, lazy and obese. At the same time, sport which should be an individual activity that cannot be delegated to others just like prayers, or a collective one exercised by the all the masses ( Mass Sports* ), has been transformed into an exploitative activity monopolized by the rich dominant elite like the World Cup. The masses are reduced to playing the role of the idiotic spectator.

• A Coptic Christian woman has been jailed for listing her religion as “Christian” on her government ID card here in Egypt. She was unaware her father briefly converted to Islam 45 years ago, which, according to the bureaucrats, makes her a Muslim. Last week Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights released a very good report on exactly this sort of problem.
• “Between Fear and Loathing.” Andrew Sullivan’s response to Rudy (fear him) and Hillary (loathe her) hits the nail on the head. He winds up holding his nose and endorsing Hillary because Rudy’s so dangerous, leaving me wondering why he has not endorsed Obama?

470 Jazz-Age Cairo

I sometimes think I was born in the wrong time:

468 Martian Sunset

This photograph was taken May 19, 2005, by Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, at around six o’clock (local time). The rock outcrop “Jibsheet” is in the foreground. The Gusev Crater is in the distance. Note how small the sun is (1/3 smaller than it would appear at sunset on Earth). Photo: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

467 Working Late? Let’s See Your Permit

It’s Friday evening, and once again, I find myself thinking about women. Specifically, this post from Purple Rose of Cairo, which cites a recent episode of the popular talkshow al-Qahira il-Youm on Labor Minister Aisha Abd al-Hadi’s decree that women must apply for a special permit to work after 8:00 p.m. (Purple Rose feels betrayed that a female minister should have issued such a decree and that the presenters discussed the decree in neutral terms. She notes that the minister and the presenters themselves must often be in violation of its terms.)

I can’t find the episode on YouTube, and of course I can’t find the decree on the ministry’s Web site. If I didn’t know the blogger as a serious and credible person, I’d have thought, “Naw, that can’t be right. She must have misheard.”

But a little research shows the issue warrants a bit more nuanced a response than either my initial “What? That’s crazy,” or my second, glib, “No one should work after 8:00 p.m.”

The Constitution:
Article 40 holds that “All citizens are equal before the law. They have equal public rights and duties without discrimination due to sex, ethnic origin, language, religion or creed.”

Likewise, article 13: “Work is a right, a duty and an honour ensured by the State.”

Lovely. But article 11 is a bit thorny: “The State shall guarantee coordination between woman’s duties towards her family and her work in the society, considering her equal to man in the political, social, cultural and economic spheres without detriment to the rules of Islamic jurisprudence (Sharia).”

“Without detriment to the rules of Sharia,” eh? So depending on which Islamic scholar you ask, women are either equal to men in the way they are in, say, Iceland, or in the way they are in Saudi Arabia. On the one hand, it’s a nice impulse to enshrine the rights of working mothers in the constitution. On the other, it strikes me that articles 13 and 40 together would have done the trick.

Article 12: “Society shall be committed to safeguarding and protecting morals, promoting the genuine Egyptian traditions and abiding by the high standards of religious education, moral and national values, and the historical heritage of the people…” It might not seem immediately obvious how this relates to women in the workplace, but read on…

Egypt’s Labor Law (No. 12/2003):

• Article 35: Prohibits discrimination in salaries based on sex, origin, language, religion, or creed.
• Article 91: Guarantees female workers 90 days of fully paid maternity leave twice, provided they have been with the business for at least 10 months before taking leave.
• Article 93: Requires employers with more than 50 employees to grant new mothers two years of unpaid maternity leave twice. Entitles working mothers to two fully paid, 30-minute breaks a day to breastfeed within the 24 months following their maternity leave.
• Article 96: Requires employers with more than 100 women on staff to maintain a nursery, or to “participate in one” if they employ fewer than 100 women.

So far so good. But the law also takes a few paternalistic turns:

• Article 89: Forbids women from working between the hours of 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., unless the nature of the work requires it. So women working, for example, at a hotel, restaurant, hospital, theater, or an airport are exempt from the restriction, as are women who work as senior executives. In all these cases, employers must arrange for their female employees’ safety and transportation.¹

Here’s the apparent root of the ministerial decree, and at first blush it doesn’t seem so bad. A woman can take a night job, but she has the law on her side if, for example, she works in a textile mill to support her family and her boss wants her to work a night shift instead of getting back to feed the kids. Restaurant owners must provide a ride home and adequate security for waitresses on the night shift (though when was the last time you saw a woman working in a restaurant at night?).

Perhaps the decree forbidding women from working past 8 p.m. without a special permit was merely an attempt to enforce these protections and rights by registering working women with the ministry so the bureaucrats could make sure they’re informed of their rights and their employers’ responsibilities? Maybe the ministry just wants a list of businesses employing women after dark so they can go around and check to make sure women are getting rides home.

But I doubt it. And if so, why put the onus on the employee? Who gets in trouble if a waitress is found at work without a special permit at 9 p.m., the waitress or her boss?

Read in conjunction with article 90 of the law, the ban on women working past 7 p.m. seems simply paternalistic. Article 90 prohibits women from working at jobs that could be detrimental to their morals or their health. So bakeries are out (but baking at home isn’t). Mines are out. Demolition is out. Too dangerous. And bars and casinos might be corrupt women. Men, on the other hand, are presumed to be either past moral redemption, or (snort) made of such strong fiber that they can work in casinos and bars without being corrupted.

These prohibitions, even if they were penned in the nicest, most fatherly spirit possible, contradict the constitution’s guarantees of the right to work and to equal rights, irrespective of sex.

Women don’t need special laws to keep them on the moral high ground. They are as (un)able to make moral decisions as men are.

I’d venture to say no woman would work at night in Cairo if she could help it. One sees very few women working at night not because it’s illegal, but because it’s creepy. And it’s frowned on. If the concern is for a woman’s safety working at night, the state would do better to prevent men dizzy with pent-up testosterone, sugar, and cheap speed from harassing women than to forbid working-class women from making a living.

Even the NDP admits that the benefits of Egypt’s impressive economic growth are not trickling down to the people. More married women find themselves the primary breadwinners in the family. Divorce rates are climbing (one every six minutes, according to the most recent statistics), leaving more women at the head of their households. These women aren’t clamoring to leave their children to work the graveyard shift. If they do, it’s because they must.

This is an unnecessary, discriminatory prohibition that penalizes poor women. It runs contrary to constitutional guarantees of equality between the sexes and the right to work. It has no place in legislation designed to protect the rights of working mothers.

466 ‘Three Decades of Peace Notwithstanding’

“Three decades of peace notwithstanding, the Egyptian-Israeli front remains a tinderbox, one in which a cold peace may just become a cold war,” Jeffrey Arzava wrote last March in an article for the Israeli Middle East Journal of International Affairs. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen this kind of paranoia with regard to Egypt from an Israeli source. But it was the first in a string of Israeli articles suggesting escalating tensions with Egypt.

Over the summer and into the fall, Egyptian and Israeli military brass traded accusations over who was responsible for holes in border security. In mid-October, Egyptian military officials accused Israeli soldiers of aiding weapons smugglers. Ten days later, Haaretz journalist Zvi Bar’el wrote, under the explosive headline “War Against Egypt in the Winter,” that Israeli intelligence officials routinely tell journalists there that “Egypt wants to see Israel bleeding.” Bar’el then spent around 1,000 words explaining why Israel shouldn’t go to war with Egypt… as if there was some doubt.

A lot of the fuss has focused on the border. In June, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee approved an amendment that would make $200 million of the United States’ $1.79 billion/year aid package to Egypt conditional on steps to curb police abuse, bolster the independence of the judiciary, and to end weapons smuggling across the Gaza border (US lawmakers, take note: The conflation of human rights concerns with Israeli security concerns may help legislation get passed in Washington, but it does not help the human-rights movement in Egypt). Periodic Bedouin unrest in Sinai and Sudanese migrants trying to sneak into The Entity put a finer point on the tensions.

Over the past few days, perhaps inspired by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s visit to Egypt yesterday, the coming talks at Annapolis, and the 30th anniversary of the peace treaty, there’s been another flurry of strange items on Egypt in the Israeli press. A few days ago, the Jerusalem Post ran an item direct from IDF Radio (the Post‘s specialty) claiming that Sudanese refugees had “infiltrated” a top-secret IDF position along the border, though it wasn’t at all clear what that meant (Did they fool the guards by strolling up dressed like Hassids, saying, “Shalom, shalom”?). The story ran alongside another item on Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter’s fresh accusations that Egypt was “allowing Hamas to rearm.”

Amid all this, Yediot Ahranoth‘s Eitan Haber felt compelled to say, “Thank you Egypt, for this flawed peace agreement. Thank you.”

What the hell is going on? On this side of Sinai, I don’t get the impression that the peace agreement is in any danger. People have become so accustomed to complaining about Israel (and, by extension, America) that the complaints are now rote, perfunctory, tired, and entirely predictable. And since al-Ahly’s loss to Tunisian club Etoile Sahel a few weeks ago, I’ve heard more people grumbling about Tunisians than Israelis.

I haven’t heard anyone agitating for war since the Israelis were bombing Lebanon. I’ve even heard ordinary people praise Mubarak (something that normally is done only sarcastically) for loving peace. So whence this insecurity in the Israeli press? Mubarak’s not about to tear up the treaty, and the Muslim Brotherhood or the Nasserists are not about to take power. So why do liberal Israeli journalists suddenly feel the need to justify peace with Egypt?

It’s a sincere question. I get the feeling there’s a conversation that’s not making it into the English-language Israeli sources that show up on my Google News tracker for Egypt, that I’m seeing only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone out there care to explain?

465 MoBros in Space

A terrible article from The Age tackles a timely, important, and little-noticed topic, fails to provide any insight (save into the author’s foot fetish), and insults the reader’s intelligence.

Marc Lynch’s piece in the new issue of MERIP, “Young Brothers in Cyberspace,” is much better. Strongly recommended.

463 Israel ‘Urges Disney to Sue Hamas’

From Iran’s Press TV:

Israel urges Disney to sue Hamas
Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:06:24
The Israeli Consulate in LA has asked Walt Disney Pictures to examine the use of a Mickey Mouse-like character by a Hamas TV channel.

The Consulate General of the Zionist Regime has recently pushed Disney to look into whether Hamas infringed on copyright laws by using the character.

Tomorrow’s Pioneers is a weekly children’s program, shown since April 13, 2007 on the Palestinian Hamas television station, Al-Aqsa TV. The program used a mouse, named Farfur (butterfly in Arabic) but it has been replaced by a bumblebee.

Israeli officials complained that Farfur employed what they called ‘radical and racist’ language targeting the regime, urging viewers to join the resistance against Israel and the United States.

Funny to note Press TV trying to decide whether it’s “Israel” or the “Zionist Regime.” And to think that the company created by flash-frozen, reputed antisemite Walt Disney might sue overheated, antisemites Hamas.

462 ??? ???? ??? ???

Via `Abd al-Monem, polemic and political theater:

For more on this sort of thing, Dan Williams’ article on the Sanna Sharq Theater is an accessible introduction.

461 Grouse-Worthy

What would I do without the following people to make me feel clever and superior?

• 9/11 carpetbaggers.
• Tangentially related: Lindsay Lohan, who told British GQ, “I find myself pretty darn intelligent.”
• Ali Gomaa, head of Dar al-Ifta’a, Egypt’s quasi-governmental body responsible for issuing fatwas. Rankled by more and more critical headlines in the press (most recently about the mufti’s refusal to call Egyptians drowned at sea trying to get to Europe “martyrs” and a fatwa saying police who ran over a woman trying to stop their car did not commit manslaughter) he yesterday held a press conference to deny that he is a government stooge. I slept late and missed it.
• Brad Pitt, who told NBC Today, “I’m so tired of thinking about myself.”

460 iPods and Egyptian Prisons

That Ibrahim Eissa. He sure can give a quote. Just stumbled across this, late, via Fustat. Here’s Eissa on the prospect of spending a year in jail:

¨I’ve found out that I’m allowed to take my iPod,” he said cheerfully. “This is progress in the Mubarak era. Yes, they do torture you in your cell, but they allow you to listen to your iPod!”

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