American flip flop, from Cairo to Kiev

Source:
Al Arabiya News
Date of source:
22 Feb 2014
Reference:
It doesn’t figure. Or does it? In the last months of former President Mursi and the Muslim
Brotherhood’s rule, the U.S. government expressed little sympathy or even interest in the
massive demonstration of June 30th in which millions more took to the streets demanding
that Mursi step down than had demonstrated against Mubarak even at the height of the
25th of January uprising.
But in the days and weeks that followed the June 30th demonstrations and the July 3
military intervention that deposed Mursi, White House spokesmen as well as the New York
Times and other prominent media sources in the United States carried stories about how
Mursi had been elected in a free and fair election.
And as punishment, the administration partially suspended its annual aid in equipment and
funding to the Egyptian armed forces, withdrew from joint military exercises, carried on
contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood and continued publically to do so even after it was
designated as an illegal terrorist organization by the Egyptian government.
Whether that designation is justified or not, is not the point—for American diplomats in Cairo to insist on carrying on such
contacts must be conceived by the transitional government as another provocation.
That these provocations have been forthcoming from a country –the United States -- with whom Egypt has been so closely
allied to for more than three decades, contributes to anxiety as well as anger within Egypt’s transitional government and in
the Egyptian media – state media and privately owned as well.
Kiev parallels
But then how can it be that the U.S. administration and most of the American media has supported the demonstrations in
Kiev intent on bringing down Ukrainian President Yanukovitch even though he was elected president in a free and fair
election and his party secured a majority in the Ukrainian parliament in a free and fair election?
This fact is rarely mentioned in the background portion of the reporting that has been coming out of Kiev over the past few
months.
How curious – for if there is one difference between the elections in the Ukraine and the elections in Egypt, it is that while
serious functioning political parties have existed and competed in the Ukraine for more than two decades, the only serious
political party functioning on a nation-wide grass roots basis when parliamentary elections were held in Egypt after the fall of
Mubarak, was the Muslim Brotherhood running for office under the name of the Freedom and Justice party.
And President Yanukovitch did not owe the presidential elections (as was the case of Mursi) to anti- Yanukovitch Ukrainians
voting for him because they disliked his opponent even more.
But that was the case here in Cairo; where Mursi’s narrow margin of victory over his opponent—Ahmed Shafik, who was closely associated with former President Mubarak -- was provided by many voters not at all sympathetic to the Muslim
Brotherhood but unwilling to vote in 2012 for a representative of the very regime they had risen against in 2011.
Framing the issue
American media coverage of Egypt failed to seriously report on the wide-spread attacks by pro-Mursi supporters upon
churches, priests, nuns and businesses owned by Christians across Egypt in the days immediately after Mursi was deposed
, and then again immediately after Egyptian security forces dispersed the pro-Mursi sit-ins last August.
Similarly, there has been marginal reporting on how violence invariably has been initiated by Ukrainian ultra-nationalist
paramilitary –like groups that have taken the lead in attacking police lines with clubs, Molotov cocktails and rifle fire,
occupying government buildings and setting the ruling party’s headquarters on fire. Some of these ultra-nationalist groups
are openly Neo-Nazi.
But there are different operational premises at work in the U.S. attitude to events in Cairo and events in Kiev. In both cases
false analogies were at work
As for the Middle East, there was a growing school of thought in Washington after September 11th that only the Muslim
Brotherhood -- as moderate Islamists-- had the popular support to effectively oppose al Qaeda and similar radical Islamist
movements throughout the region.
The analogy here was similar to the opposition during the Cold War of European socialist parties – particularly in Germany
and France-- to the Communist parties, despite their common Marxist origin.
But the analogy was faulty – there has always been a certain ambivalence within the Brotherhood towards radical Islamism.
President, Mursi called upon the U.S. to release Sheikh Omar who had issued the fatwa that Islamic jihad deployed when it
assassinated former president Anwar Sadat, and who would later, as a foreign resident in America, be involved the first
bomb attack on the World Trade Center.
As for Ukraine, the U.S. government has been acting as if Russia was still the Soviet Union. It appears the Americans
meddling in the Ukraine could ignite a new Cold War.