The Skeptic الشكاك

550 Dawn Visitors

Security forces arrested at least 70 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in predawn raids around the country this morning, bringing the total number of members arrested in the past week to at least 150. Lawyers for the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group, say roughly 500 members are now in prison as part of an escalating crackdown ahead of the April 8 Local Council elections. Supreme Guide Mohammed Mahdi Akef will hold a rare press conference tomorrow morning.

The verdict in the secret military trial of 40 leading members of the organization is expected next week.

549 Best Blog… Ever

Thanks to the SP News Service for alerting me to The Best Blog Ever: Stuff White People Like.

Oh, and yeah, way to go Fidel! May all the other presidents-for-life hearken to your example.

548 Stray Palestinian Rocket Hits Egypt

Taher al-Nunu, a deposed Gazan official, has told Egypt’s paper of record that a Palestinian rocket fell on a checkpoint in Egyptian Rafah, destroying a wall but injuring no one. He said the missile went astray in a fight between Palestinians (he did not specifically name Hamas) and Israelis around Gaza Airport, that the Palestinians had immediately called the Egyptians to explain, and that the matter is now settled… for now. This is not the last problem the troubles in Gaza will bring Egypt or the rest of the region.

547 Clashes Erupt Ahead of Local Council Elections

Al-Misry al-Youm reports that clashes erupted yesterday between supporters of rival ruling-party candidates in the local council elections in governorates around the country. The newspaper said supporters drew knives and threw furniture at each other in Port Said when it became clear that some candidates’ names would not appear on the ballot. President Hosni Mubarak has fixed April 8 as the date of the local council elections.

The traditional pre-election crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood continues. Just before dawn yesterday, security forces detained 51 members of the Brotherhood from Dakhlia, Ismailiyya, Beni Suef, and Wadi al-Gadid. Brotherhood spokesmen said those detained included mid-level leaders and prominent citizens who had previously stood as candidates in the Shura Council and the People’s Assembly elections.

Reuters reported today that roughly 450 members of the Brotherhood are currently imprisoned, and that police detained most of them in the past few weeks.

Thousands of workers and opposition activists protested rising prices of basic goods at the Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in Mahalla, the epicenter of last year’s widespread labor unrest.

546 Error Gave FBI Access to Private Emails

Kudos to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has made public a document it received through a FOIA request showing that “an apparent miscommunication” gave the FBI access to all email on a domain, rather than the account it had permission to monitor.

I really like the EFF. They’re a smart, effective operation. Press release here. More about their work here. And despite its acknowledged weaknesses, I still recommend TOR, which they sponsor, to people trying to access censored Web sites or browse anonymously.

(Note: Egyptian readers using Link.net may find the TOR project page doesn’t load. I’ve never been able to test whether Link blocks the page, but I’ve often had problems trying to go there directly when browsing from Egypt. The page does work when I use TOR or a simple proxy.)

545 Egypt: ‘Spreading Crackdown’ on HIV-Positive Men

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in cooperation with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, yesterday reported another arrest of men suspected of being HIV-positive, “signaling a wider crackdown that endangers public health.” The full joint statement is here. And in Arabic here.

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AFP photo

542 Unintentional Irony and Arrogance

Unintentional Irony: Mustafa al-Fiqi, commenting on renewed speculation over the life and death of Nasser’s defenestrated son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan: “If Ashraf Marwan had told Israel about the time of the war, we would have lost.”

Arrogance: A few days ago Finance Minister Yusef Boutros-Ghali turned his back on opposition and independent MPs questioning him about the government’s plans to reduce the budget deficit and its national debt and took a call on his mobile. The minister has every reason to hold the People’s Assembly in contempt. It’s an expensive rubber stamp with a few futile trappings of democracy. The MPs’ no-confidence motion in the minister and the government (over the substance of the proposals, not the minister’s contempt) was doomed from the start.

Usually, though, ruling-party types like to maintain the fiction that the Parliament is important. Or at least important enough to warrant good mobile-phone etiquette. In any case, I’ll take casual arrogance over the erratic thuggery the government can display when it’s really challenged, as it was in the Judges’ Revolt two years ago, or in the Rafah border crisis a few weeks ago, when Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit threatened to break the legs of any Palestinian trying to cross into Sinai.

The world’s diplomatic set has been snickering or stunned by Aboul Gheit’s bizarre rants about gays for years, leaving those who work under him banging their heads on their desks as they watch years of hard work representing Egypt with dignity evaporate with each vituperative word.

Lately Aboul Gheit has been in a particularly bad mood. Some weeks ago, he told the world that “Egypt totally rejects attempts by anyone who takes it upon himself to be an investigator of human rights in Egypt.” This was in response to a motion before the EU Parliament censuring Egypt for its human-rights record. Of course the EU doesn’t want to get rid of the Association Agreement, so obviously not a big deal. Or at least not so big a deal as to warrant the exaggerated response.

Aboul Gheit seems incapable of being diplomatic for very long. Perhaps that’s the key to his success. Diplomats who try to bring up human rights and democracy with the Egyptians do complain of bullying, and they confess that it usually works. Perhaps he’s kept his job in the same way former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton kept his for as long as he did: He’s a good man to deliver a big fuck-you.

Also on the subject of thuggery and casual contempt, this one a week old: Ayman Nour has accused Speaker of the People’s Assembly Fathi Sorour and prison authorities of falsifying a report he submitted to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva. Nour said those cited in the report had never examined him, and asked that the report be amended to reflect his medical records on file at the Qasr al-Aini hospital downtown. He said he feared he’d die in prison from a failure of his heart or kidneys.

541 Syrian Blogger Still in Detention

Syrian blogger Tariq Biassi, 22, is still detained, apparently without charge or trial, in Damascus’ notorious Palestine Branch detention center. Syrian Military Intelligence officers arrested him from Tartous on June 30 after he insulted the security services in a blog post.

Tariq’s blog is here. More information, including banners, petitions, and other campaign materials, is at the Free Tariq Web site (English and Arabic). There’s even a Facebook group.

540 Security Fallout from the Rafah Border

Update: Check blogger and Washington Post journalist Nora Younis‘ text-message updates from the border on Twitter. Friends were concerned about her when she, and thousands of other Egyptians caught on the Gaza side of the border when it closed, wound up in a makeshift Central Security camp amid rumors that the state would file mahdars against them for illegally crossing into Gaza. She’s safely back in Cairo now, last seen driving along the Nile Corniche, thinking about the Palestinians.

Update: The BBC is reporting a gunfight between Egyptian soldiers and Palestinians on the Rafah border, with casualties on both sides and at least one Palestinian killed.

Egyptian military and Hamas armed men yesterday sealed the Gaza-Egypt border for the first time January 23. Egyptians and Palestinians caught on the wrong side of the border waited to be allowed to cross en masse.

Members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Al-Aqsa Brigades today held a press conference in Gaza to say that two suicide bombers who killed one person in an attack on the Israeli town of Dimona had crossed out of Gaza into Sinai, then across the border into Israel. This corresponds with the Israeli military’s version of events.

Egyptian police today detained a Palestinian man carrying explosives in Rafah. On Thursday, Egyptian police detained 15 Palestinians in Sinai on the road to Cairo. The hunt for four Palestinians suspected of planning terrorist attacks in Sinai (Al-Masry al-Youm‘s top story yesterday) is apparently still on.

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