EGYPT, TUNISIA AND MANY MORE--How the world powers manipulate the public opinion?

[SekrutYakhni]

YOU HAVE TAKEN OUR BLOOD FOR MANY DECADES.
YOU HAVE GIVEN US NOTHING IN RETURN.
YOU STOLE OUR IDENTITY!

NOW IT IS THE RIGHT TIME FOR US TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD AND YOUR IDENTITY!

 

[ajtr]

The Arab World's Youth Army​

Meet the chronically unemployed twenty-somethings fueling social and political upheaval across the Middle East.

SIDI BOUZID, Tunisia — On the gray winter mornings at this out-of-the-way farm town on the scrubby brown steppes between the Mediterranean coast and the Sahara desert, you still see a few old farmers in hooded brown cloaks rolling to market on donkey carts. The occasional old woman, hunched against the cold, comes down the main road through town, tugging a camel.

The oldest of three children, the son of an ambulance driver and a mother who makes spare cash selling olives from the family's groves, Dhouibi spent one-third of his family's monthly income of $210 each month for four years to earn a university degree. When the degree failed to land him a job, his parents doubled down and sent him to school for another two years, for a master's in computer technology.

Now two years on the job market with no job, Dhouibi -- polite, earnest, thoughtful, and fluent in three languages -- spends his morning with other unemployed high school and college graduates at the stand-up tables in Sidi Bouzid's Café Charlotte. He nurses a coffee, thanks to the change his mother gives him from her olive sales. He goes home for lunch, visits an Internet cafe in the afternoon, returns home for dinner, sleeps in a room with his brother, and wakes, hopeless, in the morning to do it all again.

"Imagine your life going on like this," he said at the Café Charlotte, standing over the coffee that was the treat of his day. "Every day the same."

When Bouazizi, a hard-working fruit-seller sent into a blind rage by a bribe-seeking policewoman who confiscated his wares and slapped him, immolated himself on Dec. 17, Dhouibi was there for the first of the demonstrations that followed.

His best friend, a newly graduated mechanical engineer with better family connections and better job prospects, hung back. But Dhouibi threw himself into the swelling protest movement. On the second day of the demonstrations, he pushed to the front of the crowd and helped push a police car out into the street. He helped set it ablaze.

"I felt frightened of the government," Dhouibi told me. "But I felt happy. Very happy."

"No to youth unemployment," graffiti newly painted on a statue in the town's square says. "No to poverty."

Dhouibi has gone back to protest every day since then. He turns up outside the gates of the local union hall, talking to other young men until the day's march takes shape. Even after protests built around the country, reached Tunis, and forced Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's president of 23 years, to flee the country, Tunisians have kept up the demonstrations to demand the resignations of the last ministers of a ruling party that brought economic wealth and political power for the elite, but few jobs or rights for the middle class and poor.

Of the 1,400 classmates who went to school with Bouazizi, perhaps 4 or 5 percent have found jobs in the years since, estimated Tarek Hajlaoui, an economics teacher who taught Bouazizi in his last year in school.

"Of course, officially, I encourage my students about the advantages of education, encourage them to go on to university for the sake of their futures," Hajlaoui said, when I spoke with him at a gas station's coffee counter. "But in reality…" Hajlaoui shrugged, trailing off.

Some political scientists warn of the dark side of the "youth bulge." A study by Population Action International asserted that 80 percent of the world's conflicts between 1970 and 1999 started in countries where 60 percent of the population was under 30. (Of course, other factors -- such as the Cold War -- also played a role.)

Political scientists and development economists like Tarik Yousef, founding dean of the Dubai School of Government, saw the Middle East and North African youth bulge coming for years. They urged Arab leaders to harness the skilled, eager, and educated labor force flooding on to the market.

The youth bulge could have been "a precondition for problems, or a precondition for prosperity," Yousef said by phone on Jan. 27, from Dubai.

Even if Middle East and North African governments tried to ready for the surge in workers, the high unemployment rates show that they failed -- in the case of Tunisia, with explosive results.

"This decade of underachievement by educated Tunisians, especially, created a humiliated" generation -- now no longer in their first youth, but in their disillusioned late 20s and early 30s, Yousef pointed out.

The grievances of the Middle East's and North Africa's young -- and now not-so-young -- have been building for years. In the Libyan capital, Tripoli, I met a 31-year-old man, Abdel Basat al-Asady, who daydreamed about marriage with the eagerness of a teenage consumer of Brides magazine. It was a pipe dream for Asady, though. With jobs and housing as short in Libya as elsewhere, he had no prospect of launching his adult life.

He took me to his parents' house, where he and his five grown brothers and sisters, all unemployed or underemployed, pulled from their closets the plastic-and-cardboard wrapped wedding clothes they had already bought in hope of the day each could begin a family. Wedding expenses in the Middle East, with their feasts, gifts, and mandated dowries, run about two and a half times a family's annual income. Absent some boon outside the family's control, no one in Asady's family would be wearing their wedding clothes for years.

In Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen -- everywhere in the Middle East and North Africa where I went the subject came up -- people complained of the corruption that crushes even their last hopes. Getting a job takes wasta -- connections -- to a country's ruling party, tribal leader, or a powerful businessman.

In all those countries, frustrated job-seekers I've talked to say, it takes money, too.

"I would bribe, but I don't know anyone high up enough to bribe," Dhouibi said.

"I don't have money, but if we just got the chance, I would get the money, to get him a job," Dhouibi's kerchiefed mother said, serving me fruit juice in her home of stucco-covered concrete blocks, with a weathered red geranium pushing out of the packed-dirt courtyard outside.

Bouazizi himself, the oldest of six children, never complained of his lot in life, Bouazizi's mother, Manoubia told me.

Bouazizi was 3 when neighbors carried into the house the body of his father, dead of heart troubles on the job as a low-paid laborer in neighboring Libya. Mohamed Bouazizi was 12 when he started working part time, studying by school at day and working for fruit vendors by night. He was 17 when he quit school to work full time so that his younger brothers and sisters could stay in school and his sister, Leila, could go to college.

But he snapped one morning when a policewoman who tormented him for bribes confiscated his fruit -- depriving him of the 5 dinar, or $3, he hoped to make for his family that day. The policewoman slapped him when he tried to take them back. Bouazizi fell to the ground then, crying, his mother recounted.

"Should I become a thief? Should I die?" Bouazizi shouted at the policewoman, according to a friend who watched it all and told Bouazizi's mother. Bouazizi pushed his empty fruit cart to the front gates of the provincial governorate and doused himself with one and a half liters of gasoline. Then he pulled out a match and struck it -- igniting not only himself, but the frustrations of Arab youth everywhere.

 

[ajtr]

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How Tehran Sees Tunis​

From Iran, it's more about 1979 than 2009.

As Tunisian President-for-Life Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled into ignominious exile two weeks ago, democrats around the world found hope in the notion that Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution would spread to Iran. The images of demonstrations from Sidi Bouzid to Tunis reminded Americans of the massive 2009 protests that gave rise to Iran's opposition Green Movement, and as pro-democracy movements inspired by Tunisia emerged in Egypt and Yemen, many observers saw a chance for Iran to be next. But looking closer, it's clear that Iranians -- from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down to the Green Movement opposition -- view the Tunisia situation as vastly different from their own, and not one that's likely to spill over into a renewed push for democratic reform in their own country.

Despite the examples of Ben Ali and Egypt's beleaguered President Hosni Mubarak, Iran's leaders are far from running scared. In fact, Tehran is taking a distinctly more triumphalist understanding of the roots and effects of the Tunisian protests than American commentators would expect from another authoritarian Middle Eastern government -- particularly from one facing its own challenges from opposition forces.

In the week following Ben Ali's frantic flight to Saudi Arabia, reactions from Iranian officials and state-supported media were, as always, bold and self-assured. But this is no skin-deep grandstanding designed to force a positive spin on an unsettling example of political upheaval. Where Washington sees an anti-authoritarian uprising, Tehran describes a 1979-style rejection of a U.S.-supported secularist: Ahmadinejad referred to the Tunisian uprising as an expression of the people's will for an Islamic order, and the Iranian Majlis voted overwhelmingly to support the "revolution."

The conservative press thoroughly rejects any suggestion that the uprising in Tunisia is at all comparable to the Green Movement. A hard-line paper associated with the Revolutionary Guard Corps ridiculed comparisons in opposition media outlets between the economic conditions that helped spark the Tunisian riots and Iran's economic struggles, arguing that Tehran's recent success in implementing risky economic reforms was a testament to the regime's durable popular mandate.

Hossein Shariatmadari -- one of the Islamic Republic's most influential conservatives -- used the Tunisian events to underscore the hard-liners' far-fetched claims that Iran's 2009 post-election violence represented a purely Western-oriented conspiracy. Writing in the hard-line Kayhan newspaper a few days after Ben Ali left the country, he likened the masses of Iranians who poured into the streets demanding a recount of the last presidential election to the despotic Ben Ali regime. By his logic, Tehran's repression of the protests and the Green Movement -- a Western plot -- was actually what emboldened Tunisians to seize their own independence from American-endorsed autocracy.

Shariatmadari explained, "When the Muslim nations of the region see clearly that not just one arrogant power but all arrogant powers with all their powers and capabilities have been bitterly defeated against the Islamic faith and national perseverance of the Muslim people of Iran, do you not think that they would rise up for the liberation of themselves and their homeland from under the dominance of dictators and foreign colonialism?" While this idea may sound preposterous to American ears, the resonance it holds in the upper echelons of the Iranian leadership only points to a more assertive Tehran.

In their triumphal postmortems of the Tunisian upheaval, Iran's conservatives have also excitedly forecasted similar revolutions in other pro-Western Arab regimes such as Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia -- a rare case where they and many American neoconservatives see eye to eye. These hard-liners are reveling in the notion that their Arab neighbors, particularly those governments that have aligned themselves closely with Washington, have become nervous about protesters emulating their Tunisian counterparts.

As for Ahmadinejad's critics, their point of view is not too different. The most important political fault line in Iran currently lies between hard-liners and more moderate conservatives within the Islamic Republic's establishment -- not between the government and the opposition. Optimistic Western observers might hope to see moderate conservatives take a different view from that of their archconservative rivals. But on the issue of Tunisia, the conservatives seem to be marching in lock step. While they have been more likely to read the events in Tunisia as a revolt against authoritarianism as such, even some of Ahmadinejad's main conservative critics see the uprising as evidence of the reach of the Islamic Revolution. A commentator in the often critical Mardom-Salari daily wrote that it was clear that Iran had shown Tunisia that "Islamism is superior to non-Islamic and secular governments in Islamic countries."

Perhaps the most important sign of Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's staying power comes from the reaction of Iran''s dispirited and disorganized democratic opposition movement. Many in the Green Movement have embraced comparisons to the Tunisian protesters, but the opposition has largely struggled with how to interpret the Jasmine Revolution. Their reactions are bittersweet, ranging from a wistful sense of inspiration to soul-searching examinations of why Tunisians have succeeded where the Greens failed. Some have made excuses for the Green Movement's failure to remove Ahmadinejad, citing differences in the histories, demographics, and governments of Iran and Tunisia; others have tried hopefully to suggest that the Green Movement's lack of immediate and volatile results is actually a long-term strategic advantage.

One piece written by Jamileh Kadivar, the now-exiled reformist intellectual and parliamentarian, and posted on the opposition Rah-e Sabz website just hours after Ben Ali's departure from power may be the best indicator of the Green Movement's current mood. Marveling at the Tunisian people's amazing feat, she called their actions a model for all oppressed populations worldwide. Without explicitly referencing Iran, she wrote, "This is a dawn that can be very close at hand for many of the peoples who are under the oppression of tyranny, if they only have pride and trust in their own strength."

If American policymakers are looking for what the Green Movement is learning from the events in Tunisia, they may have to settle for Kadivar's vague optimism. What they will not find is an Iranian leadership conveying any sense of fear, disappointment, or insecurity as a result of the Tunisian uprising, or a reinvigorated, inspired reform movement like the one in Egypt. With no major divergence of views among the factions of the conservative establishment, it is impossible to conceive of cracks forming in the oft-uneasy alliance that maintains the Islamic Republic's stability; and the Green Movement is, at this point, simply too battered after a year and a half of severe repression to take advantage of cracks, if they were to open.

It would be easy -- especially in light of the spread of protests to Egypt and other countries -- for Washington to embrace the idea that now is the time to openly and actively support the Iranian opposition. But this would be a grave miscalculation based on a false impression of Iranian weakness, one destined to backfire and brand the Green Movement as American puppets. Barack Obama's administration would be wisest to concede that no domino is likely to fall eastward onto Tehran.

 

[ajtr]

The New Arab World Order​

Don't mistake the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt for 1978 Iran. But that doesn't mean that U.S. diplomacy in the Arab world is going to be any less complicated going forward.

The most telling aspect of the anti-regime demonstrations that have rocked the Arab world is what they are not about: They are not about the existential plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation; nor are they at least overtly anti-Western or even anti-American. The demonstrators have directed their ire against unemployment, tyranny, and the general lack of dignity and justice in their own societies. This constitutes a sea change in modern Middle Eastern history.

Of course, such was the course of demonstrations against the Shah of Iran in 1978 and 1979, before that revolution was hijacked by Islamists. But in none of these Arab countries is there a charismatic Islamic radical who is the oppositional focal point, like Ayatollah Khomeini was; nor are the various Islamist organizations in the Arab world as theoretical and ideological in their anti-Americanism as was the Shiite clergy. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt functions to a significant extent as a community self-help organization and may not necessarily try to hijack the uprising to the extent as happened in Iran. And even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is not quite so identified with American interests as was the shah. The differences between 2011 in Egypt and 1978 in Iran are more profound than the similarities.

Furthermore, whatever the outcome of these uprisings, it seems clear that Arabs and their new leaders will be focused for years to come on the imperfections within their own societies -- perhaps to a greater degree than on injustices committed by Israel and the West abroad. Indeed, in Tunisia the demonstrations were partially spurred by the WikiLeaks cables that showed Washington deeply ambivalent about the regime and not likely to stand with it in a crisis. Politics may thus become normalized in the Arab world, rather than radicalized. Remember: A signal goal of al Qaeda was the toppling of such regimes as Mubarak's, which oppressed their own people and were seen as toadies to American and Israeli interests. If Mubarak goes, al Qaeda will lose a recruiting argument.

But the dangers to U.S. interests of what comes next in the Arab world are hard to exaggerate. Were demonstrations to spread in a big way to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, a catastrophe could be looming. A more enlightened, pro-American regime than the one now in Jordan is hard to imagine. As for the Saudi royal family, it is probably the worst possible form of government for that country except for any other that might credibly replace it. Imagine all that weaponry the United States has sold the Saudis over the decades falling into the hands of Wahhabi radicals. Imagine Yemen were it divided once again into northern and southern parts, or with even weaker central control issuing from the capital city of Sanaa. The United States would be virtually on its own battling al Qaeda there.

Right now all these uprisings look somewhat the same, as they did in Eastern Europe in 1989. But like in Eastern Europe, each country will end up a bit differently, with politics reflecting its particular constituency and state of institutional and educational development. Poland and Hungary had relatively easy paths to capitalism and democracy; Romania and Bulgaria were sunk in abject poverty for years; Albania suffered occasional bouts of anarchy; and Yugoslavia descended into civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Arab world is in some ways more diverse than Eastern Europe, and we should therefore heed the uniqueness of each country's political and historical situation in calibrating U.S. policy.

President Barack Obama's administration should stand up for first principles of civil society, nonviolence, and human rights everywhere; and where an autocrat appears on the way out, as happened in Tunisia and might happen in Egypt, the United States can play a constructive role in easing his removal, even as it reaches out to the new political forces at play. American diplomacy in the Arab world is about to become even more intricate. No longer will it be a matter of having one telephone number to call in each country. Henceforth, Washington will have to deal with dozens of political personalities to get the same things done as it used to with just one leader. Democracy equals complexity.

 

[integra]

Hundreds detained in Saudi Arabia over protests


Saudi authorities detained hundreds of demonstrators on Friday in Jeddah who gathered to protest against poor infrastructure after deadly floods swept through Saudi Arabia's second biggest city, police and witnesses said.

Some Jeddah streets remained submerged on Friday, and electricity was still out in low-lying parts of the city two days after torrential rains caused flooding that killed at least four people and swept away cars.

The protest came after mass messages sent over BlackBerry smart phones called for popular action in response to the flood, an unusual move in the Arab state at a time of spreading anti-government unrest across the Arab world.

Protesters gathered for about 15 minutes after Friday prayers on a main Jeddah shopping street and shouted 'God is Greatest' before authorities broke up the protest and detained participants, a witness who works in a nearby shop told Reuters.

One police officer said around 30 protesters were detained and police were pursuing others who fled to a nearby building. Another officer put the number held at around 50.

About 12 police cars surrounded the building where protesters were hiding, and 30 more blocked off the street near where the protest happened.

A mass message sent via BlackBerry Messenger on Thursday urged Jeddah residents to join a demonstration on Saturday over the floods, while another urged all government and private sector employees to hold a general strike next week. But Friday's protest had been unexpected.

The call for action in the top oil exporter, where public protest is not tolerated, comes as open defiance of authoritarian rulers spreads, with protests in Egypt and Yemen inspired by unrest which toppled Tunisia's president this month.

 

[monitor]

 

[Durrak]

CAIRO: Egypt's cabinet officially resigned during a meeting on Saturday following President Hosni Mubarak's demand early in the day, state TV reported.

In a speech early on Saturday, Mubarak said he had asked the government to step down and the new cabinet would bring more democracy to the country, in response to nationwide protests.

But Mubarak, who has been in office as president for 30 years, refused to step down.

Also on Saturday, hundreds of protestors resumed their gathering in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, where anti-government demonstrations started peacefully on Tuesday afternoon before turning violent in the following days.

Witnesses said several tanks were parked near the square, but no intervention in the protest was seen so far.

 

[monitor]

 

[Durrak]

Sir nice pictures

 

[SekrutYakhni]

THE EVIL SAUDI KING---LOOK WHAT HE HAS TO SAY!

 

[SekrutYakhni]

Egypt protests draw mixed reaction in region

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Saudi Arabia slammed protesters in Egypt as "infiltrators" who seek to destabilize their country Saturday while an Iranian official called on Egypt to "abide by the rightful demands of the nation" and avoid violent reactions.
Saudi King Abdullah called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and "was reassured" about the situation in Egypt, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported.
"During the call, the king said, 'Egypt is a country of Arabism and Islam. No Arab and Muslim human being can bear that some infiltrators, in the name of freedom of expression, have infiltrated into the brotherly people of Egypt, to destabilize its security and stability and they have been exploited to spew out their hatred in destruction, intimidation, burning, looting and inciting a malicious sedition,'" the news agency said.
Saudi Arabia "strongly condemns" the protest, it said.
Mubarak assured the Saudi king "that the situation is stable" and that the protests "are merely attempts of groups who do not want stability and security for the people of Egypt, but rather they seek to achieve strange and suspicious objectives."
Mubarak added that Egypt will "deter anyone who tries to exploit the freedom of (the) Egyptian people and will not allow anyone to lure those groups or use them to achieve suspicious and strange agendas," the news agency said.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Mubarak and "affirmed his solidarity with Egypt and and his commitment to is its security and stability," according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa.
In the wake of protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen, analysts say other Arab governments in the region are wary of demonstrations spreading to their countries.
In Iran, meanwhile, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Egyptian authorities should respect the demonstrators.
"Iran expects Egyptian officials to listen to the voice of their Muslim people, respond to their rightful demands and refrain from exerting violence by security forces and police against an Islamic wave of awareness that has spread through the country in form of a popular movement,"the state-run Press TV quoted Mehmanparast as saying.
On the streets of Abu Dhabi, CNN spoke with people to gauge their views of the demonstrations.
"It's great that everyone is coming together," said Ayat el-Dwary, an Egyptian. "These are not just one group of people or one faction... It's a revolution, absolutely."
"Tunis opened the door, but it was bound to happen -- it was inevitable," el-Dwary added. "Change is coming to Egypt."
Samar Barakeh, who is Lebanese, said, "It's time for them to change their government and they have the right to say whatever they want."
Fellow Lebanese Antoinet Ghanem said, "It's about the whole regime structuring themselves to create more opportunities for these people to realize their ambitions and dreams... It's about the people trying to express what they need."

Egypt protests draw mixed reaction in region - CNN.com

 

[SekrutYakhni]

"During the call, the king said, 'Egypt is a country of Arabism and Islam. [B]No Arab and Muslim human being can bear that some infiltrators, in the name of freedom of expression, have infiltrated into the brotherly people of Egypt, to destabilize its security and stability and they have been exploited to spew out their hatred in destruction, intimidation, burning, looting and inciting a malicious sedition,'" the news agency said."


LOOK, HOW THIS EVIL KING brought religion into politics. Look how he is playing with the emotions of the people.

Pakistani leaders and establishment also brings religion to protect their seats.

 

[fida jan]

revolution in iran for what, dieing to become americn slaves again?????

tht green movement was nothing more than bunch of american paid workers, desparate to find their authoritative regine again, iran did well to eliminate these scums for ever

 

[SekrutYakhni]

CORRUPT KING OF ARABIA, had pissed couple of times in his bed due to the situation.

His royal highness is in trouble.


What about gold plated cars; Bentley, Aston Martin, Maybach, BMWs, Mercedes etc

And the royal kingdom---house?

 

[fida jan]

CORRUPT KING OF ARABIA, had pissed couple of times in his bed due to the situation.

His royal highness is in trouble.

not al all, as long as these saudi arabians enjoy wealth and oil!!, they are fat and in bed every time..