By Jeremy R. Hammond*
IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis
TAIPEI (IDN | Foreign Policy Journal <
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/>)
- The U.S. media is, unsurprisingly, making their best effort to paint
Egypt’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in a negative light, the
general accusation being that he is attempting to usurp power and crack
down on dissent and criticism of his rule. While there are certainly
rightful concerns about government abuses in Egypt, an examination of how
the media has furthered this narrative and the standard it has employed is
instructive.
Prior to the presidential election, the
military<
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/1137-us-media-and-the-untruth-about-egypts-morsi#>establishment
in Egypt, which annually receives $1.3 billion from
Washington courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers, dissolved the Parliament, which
was to make a new constitution. Then, just hours before the results of the
election were announced, the military decreed its own constitution granting
itself broad powers over the government-to-be, "all but eliminating the
president's authority in an apparent effort to guard against" a Morsi
victory, as the New York Times informed readers at the time, under the
accurate headline, "Egypt’s Military Cements Its Powers as Voting
Ends<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/world/middleeast/egyptian-presidential-vote-enters-second-day.html?pagewanted=all>
".
The accurate narrative of a military establishment seeking to keep its
tight grip on power by usurping authority, since the election, has been
replaced with a narrative of Morsi attempting to do the same. Thus, when
Morsi sacked the defence minister and chief of staff of the armed
forces<
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/1137-us-media-and-the-untruth-about-egypts-morsi#>and
cancelled the military's constitutional decree, since it stood to
reason that this action "might in part represent a shift in Egyptian
foreign policy away from the United States", it was described by the
establishment journal Foreign Affairs as part of a "power grab" by Morsi,
an effort at "consolidating power".
While acknowledging that Morsi's move to reverse "the power grab by the
council of generals" "could prove a
step<
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/1137-us-media-and-the-untruth-about-egypts-morsi#>toward
a truly democratic Egypt", the Washington
Post in an editorial<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/egypts-morsi-must-moderate-his-power-grab/2012/08/13/dc223460-e580-11e1-8741-940e3f6dbf48_story.html>nevertheless
criticized the president's action as "extralegal" – never mind
that the military's actions had been "extralegal" in the first place. The
editorial also lectured the "Mr. Morsi also must learn to live with a
certain amount of criticism" and criticized that "authorities announced
prosecutions of journalists, some of them close to the military and not
particularly sympathetic to Mr. Morsi." This was all reported under the
headline, "Egypt’s Morsi must moderate his power grab".
The Post included a link to a BBC report on the announced prosecutions, but
didn't inform readers that the charge against one of the two journalists
was "incitement to murder" President Morsi. The charge against the other,
according to the report, was publishing "'false information' deemed
insulting" to the president. Of course, incitement and libel both happen to
be crimes in the U.S. for which people can be prosecuted.
Just doing a quick Google search, an example can be found where a blogger
in New Jersey was arrested for "encouraging violence against Connecticut
legislators" and another of a Colorado
student<
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/global-issues/1137-us-media-and-the-untruth-about-egypts-morsi#>"arrested
for criminal libel" for altering a photo of his professor to look
like Gene Simmons, the lead singer of KISS, and posting it to his website.
Such incidents in the U.S. are not typically accompanied by blaring
headlines of government usurpation of power and crackdown on dissent. Nor
is this example from Egypt in any way comparable to, say, the Obama
administration's war on whistleblowers.
As it turned out, the sacked generals "accepted medals of commendation from
Mr. Morsi and will serve as his advisers", the New York Times informed
readers in an editorial<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/opinion/president-morsis-rebalancing-act-in-egypt.html>that
criticized his "disturbing tendency to use heavy-handed tactics to
restrict the media". On August 24, 2012, the editors of the Times wrote
that a street demonstration in Cairo was a sign that Egypt's newly elected
president, Mohamed Morsi, is "having a hard time hearing those voices" of
the public.
*Contradictions*
The editorial<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/president-morsi-and-his-critics.html>continued:
"Many Egyptians worry that Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood are
seeking to monopolize power, including imposing serious restraints on
freedom of the press. The government recently brought charges against one
of Mr. Morsi's harshest critics, Islam Afifi, the editor of a newspaper, Al
Dustour, for insulting the president and disturbing the public order in
articles and editorials."
The editors linked to another article pointing out that Morsi had in fact
"outlawed the pretrial detention of people accused of press crimes,
effectively freeing one of his toughest critics, a newspaper editor who was
detained just hours before the law was passed." And, of course, the abusive
Egyptian law under which anyone who "affronts the president of the
republic" may be arrested dates back to 1996 and the rule of Washington’s
favored strongman, Hosni Mubarak, of whom Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton in 2009 said, "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be
friends of my family".
The Times continued: "Prosecutors also brought charges against a television
host, Tawfik Okasha, who has denigrated the Brotherhood and the uprising
that ousted Mr. Mubarak and on one show seemed to threaten both Mr. Morsi
and the Brotherhood with violence. Violent threats or acts can never be
condoned, but criticism of political leaders should not be a crime,
especially in a country aspiring to be a democracy."
Thus, while rightly pointing out that mere criticism should not be a crime,
the editors acknowledged the possibility that there might actually be some
truth to the charge of incitement. The editors acknowledged further into
the piece that Morsi had "effectively freed Mr. Afifi" and that the charges
that still stood were "brutal Mubarak-era press laws", but these facts
naturally didn't stop them from suggesting in the first paragraph that
Morsi was deaf to the voices of the people.
The central theme is clear. Consistent with the goal of manufacturing
consent for U.S. policy, Americans must be made to think that the new
government under the elected former Muslim Brotherhood member (Morsi
resigned from the group upon taking office) is a threat to the social order
and to freedom in Egypt, the corollary of which is that the power of the
civilian government must be "balanced" or "moderated" by the power of the
military establishment long supported by Washington.
Thus, when Senator Joseph Lieberman bragged last year that the U.S. "should
feel very good about the assistance we have given the Egyptian military
over the years since the Camp David peace with Israel, because the Egyptian
military really allowed this revolution in Egypt to be peaceful and let the
people carry out their desires for political freedom and economic
opportunity", Americans can understand that to mean that they should pat
themselves on the back since the response of the U.S.-backed military
establishment to the popular revolution in Egypt was mostly limited to
using tear gas canisters marked "Made in U.S.A." against peaceful
protesters, while the number of people they injured was kept down at around
6,400, and the number killed to a mere 846 – just another example of how
the U.S. helps to promotes democracy around the world.
*Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst and a recipient of
the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. He is
the founding editor of Foreign Policy
Journal<
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/>and can also be found on
the web at
JeremyRHammond.com <
http://jeremyrhammond.com/>. His new book, "Ron Paul
vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian economics in the financial
crisis", is now available at Amazon.com.
Read original article on
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/08/26/the-media-narrative-on-morsi-and-how-the-u-s-promotes-democracy-in-egypt/and
other articles by the writer on
http://www.jeremyrhammond.com [IDN-InDepthNews – September 5, 2012]
2012 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That
Matters<
http://www.indepthnews.info/index.php/>
Portrait image: Mohamed Morsi | Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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