Statement by Pro-Democracy Pro-Morsi Protestors in Response to al-Sisi Speech

[Pro-Morsi protest on 12 July 2013. Image by Jon Worth from Flickr] [Pro-Morsi protest on 12 July 2013. Image by Jon Worth from Flickr]

Statement by Pro-Democracy Pro-Morsi Protestors in Response to al-Sisi Speech

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by pro-Morsi demonstrators on 15 July 2013 and published on ikhwanweb. com.]

 

Coup commander Abdel Fattah al-Sisi betrayed the oath he took before the head of state–the supreme commander of the armed forces. He spilled the blood of innocent Egyptians, killing more than a hundred citizens and injuring more than a thousand, including women and children, supporters of democratic legitimacy, opponents of the bloody military coup. He then threatened peaceful protestors and restricted their freedoms. Then again faked justifications to defend his coup against electoral legitimacy.


These fake justifications included a claim that the President fought battles with the judiciary, the police, the media, public opinion and the army. This is an utter lie, because in fact, it was corrupt members of the judiciary, the media and the police, which the January 25 Revolution demanded be purged, were the ones who waged war against the President since the first moments.


It is absurd that al-Sisi included the army in this list, although it was President Morsi who appointed him Minister of Defense and provided him with all resources needed for the development of the armed forces.


Shamefully, al-Sisi pitted the armed forces against two-thirds of the people, in support of the remaining third – the leftist, liberals and Copts. Even more shamefully, al-Sisi murdered worshipers at dawn prayers in cold blood in front of the Republican Guard Officers’ Club.


Al-Sisi never offered condolences to the families of the martyrs and the injured. Instead, he arrogantly sought flimsy excuses to justify his heinous crime, seeking other commanders and officers’ support to escape the deserved isolation he increasingly feels.


Earlier, al-Sisi did reveal a distinct bias for some Egyptians against others. He criticized what he described as the siege of the Constitutional Court and Cairo’s Media Production City, but did not utter a single word about the repeated sieges of Itehadia Presidential Palace, Tahrir’s major government office buildings and Maspero TV Center building. He never said anything about the burning of the Courts of Cairo and Alexandria, the torching and total destruction of headquarters of political parties and even the home of President Morsi. al-Sisi also criticized what he saw as ‘forcing religion into politics’, a language used by liberals and leftists’ camp.

We ask commander al-Sisi:


  • Why did you not talk to the army commanders and officers about the massacre of worshipers outside the Republican Guard compound? And why did you not apologize for that?

  • Why did you not talk about the closings of satellite TV channels and the censoring of newspapers and other TV channels to force them to follow the ‘official’ line?

  • Why did your speech make no mention of the great January 2011 Revolution – as if you wish to bury it completely?

  • Why do you falsely claim that the army sided with the people on June 30, ignoring the masses of people who turned out in millions in support of the elected President and constitutional legitimacy?

  • How can you pretend to call for containment of opponents, while your men persistently hunt and arrest Islamists and political symbols representing all currents and orientations?

  • How can you pounce on all the January 25 benefits and gains January 25 awarded to the Egyptian people, just as those began to bear fruit both domestically and internationally? You pushed these brave and patient people to square one yet again, wasting two years of their hard work and struggle with which they wrote a new history for Egypt and the region!

  • How could you and your cronies and collaborators turn a blind eye to the great changes in the region around us and the duties imposed on the brave Egyptian army accordingly? You pushed this country’s army a million miles back, directing its military machine towards unarmed Egyptians, tearing up the national fabric of the homeland for the benefit of enemies of the homeland who are plotting to involve the Egyptian army in this treasonous quagmire.


The consequences of injustice are severe, and lies are invariably exposed, shamefully.


"Those who do wrong will soon come to know where they will end up." (Quran 26:227)

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412