Friday, February 04, 2011

Torture is never simple.

Why do we believe the claims of torture and oppression on the part of Mubarak's regime? The same people claim Israel, America and even Australia tortures Moslem. We know that's not true in our case, Australia, so why believe it in the other cases. Mosab Hassan Yousef in his book Son of Hamas showed that half of the torture in Israeli prisons is from scared Jewish conscripts and half is Palestinian on Palestinian abuse in search of Israeli informants or because some prisoner is not in the right faction. Is it the same in Egypt? In the Palestinian case the prisoners tortured by other prisoners invariable protect themselves and their families by blaming the Israeli government for the scars and missing fingernails.

In vietnam the vietcong infiltrated the south vietnamese police, military and interlegence services. Some of the most fanatical and ruthless members of the south vietnamese forces turned out to be north vietnamese deep cover agents. To be ruthless in the name of the state you've infiltrated is a powerful propaganda tool. It allows you to expand attacks onto neutral targets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Th%E1%BB%8B_Kim_Ph%C3%BAc
 The wikipedia give the official cover story of the time. Blaming the pilots.
      You know that this image did more to win the war for the North Vietnamese than any other. What you did not know in the 1970's that it was a strike with napalm by South Vietnamese air crews on a civilian villagers and south Vietnamese troops well inside South Vietnamese lines and that it was caused by a North Vietnamese double agent who is believed to have switched the target coordinates and confined the target when the pilots were doubtful. The officer is now retired on a North Vietnamese army pension.

How much of this sort of thing is going on in Egypt. How many of the Egyptian police and military are Moslem Brotherhood deep cover agents.

Mubarak may be a despot but if he was as ruthless as they claim I would have expected Tahrir square to be knee deep in bodies by now; thousands dead in minutes. We don't see this! We see Mubarak moderating his actions at least in front of the camera. He is doing what many governments in the west would do, have done, in such emergencies. Muddled and botched attempts at law and order in the face of chaos. Not much different from Katrina or the French response to Moslem riots in the outer suburbs of Paris. We have only 6 officially dead and 900 wounded. We don't know what proportion of those are Mubarak supporters. We see the left wing anti-mubarak media under attack from Mubarak supporters. However would these western reporters be able to tell if they are being attacked by Mubarak supporters or moslem brotherhood fanatics playing both sides. Its only the translators words they understand.

Remember the tea party marches in Washington, the few left wing reporters that bothered to show up made similar claims of pushing and shoving. Some of that was true.

I think Mubarak should, and will, go soon. I don't think democracy will result. The world, particularly the western media are overdosing on naivety. The so called secular moderates that started this battle are no longer in control. Their hit and run protests of the first few days replaced with a very old fashion massive last stand in a public square. A very Islamic last stand at that starting with prayers. 
An islamist dictator will arise, perhaps with a sham democracy as cover for a while. Remember Hitler was elected in a democracy.