Egypt

How the Westminster hawk became an endangered species

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_19_June_2014.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the death of Westminster hawks” startat=726] Listen [/audioplayer]There is a slight whiff of the summer of 1914 to Westminster at the moment. The garden party season is in full swing and the chatter is all about who is up and who is down. In the Commons chamber itself, domestic political argument dominates. You would not know that a vicious sectarian war is raging in the Middle East. At the first Prime Minister’s Questions after the fall of Mosul to the terrorist group ISIS, no one asked David Cameron to explain the government’s policy on Iraq. The situation in Iraq is dire on

Portrait of the week | 29 May 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, responded to the triumph of the UK Independence Party in the European elections (which left the Conservatives in third place for the first time ever in a national poll) by having dinner with other European leaders in Brussels, which he said had ‘got too big, too bossy, too interfering’. Ukip secured 4,352,051 votes, increasing the number of its seats by 11 to 24; Labour took 20, an increase of seven; the Conservatives 19, a reduction of seven. The Liberal Democrats plummeted, narrowly capturing one seat (down from 11). Even the Greens did better, increasing their seats from two to three. Nigel Farage, the leader

If we have to let generals run Egypt, must we pay for them, too?

The polls have closed, and the result was never in doubt. With a whopping majority, Egyptians have chosen Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to be their next president. Much like his several predecessors going back to 1952 when army officers overthrew King Farouk, the new president brings to office ambitious plans to whip his countrymen into shape. What Egyptians need, Sisi believes, is discipline. He has volunteered for the role of drill sergeant-in-chief. ‘Will you bear it if I make you walk on your own feet? When I wake you up at five in the morning every day? Will you bear cutting back on food, cutting back on air-conditioners?’ We

Investment special: Boom time in Africa

It’s easy to see why until recently Africa has been a hard sell. It is still regarded as a place for charity rather than investment. But that view is out of date: much of the continent is booming now and investors are wising up. The economy of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow by 6 per cent this year. Compare this with the eurozone’s paltry 1 per cent, and you start to see why smart money is moving from the old continent to the dark one. ‘Economists have had to rip up their numbers for how rich African households are — they were too low,’ says Charles Robertson, author of

Will David Cameron stand up for persecuted Christians?

Last week, David Cameron surprised a number of people when, during a pre-Easter gathering at Downing Street, he spoke about religion. Not religion in general, the all-faiths-and-none diversity-speak of the political class, but his own Christian faith. James Forsyth writes about the implications in this week’s magazine. But what was most surprising was that the prime minister went further by saying that ‘our religion’ is the most persecuted in the world and that ‘I hope we can do more to raise the profile of the persecution of Christians’. He added: ‘We should stand up against the persecution of Christians and other religious groups wherever and whenever we can, and should

Portrait of the week | 27 March 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved and who bought a family house’ and that this would be addressed in the Conservative manifesto. Two opinion polls after the Budget, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday and by YouGov for the Sunday Times, had put Labour one percentage point ahead of the Conservatives. Nineteen Labour movement figures wrote to the Guardian warning the party not to hope to win the election on the basis of Tory unpopularity. The rate of inflation fell from 1.9 to 1.7 per cent, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, or from

Is Hamas finally losing its grip on Gaza?

 Gaza City Tattered green Hamas flags still flap above the streets in central Gaza and posters of its martyrs hang in public spaces. But these are tough times for the Hamas government, and not just due to the recent flare-up in tensions with Israel. In December last year, they cancelled rallies planned for the 26th anniversary of their founding, an occasion celebrated ever since they seized power here in 2007, and though usually secretive about their financial affairs, they revealed a 2014 budget of $589 million, with a gigantic 75 per cent deficit. So, what’s gone wrong for Hamas? Just a year ago, it seemed to be enjoying a honeymoon

If Ukraine’s protests were a revolution, why wasn’t the Stop the War march?

It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs. I should get out more, there’s a lot of fun to be had, throwing stuff at the police and shouting things in a self-righteous manner. I think the last one I attended was in the very early 1980s, in Cardiff. Sinn Fein was marching through the centre of the city in support of its right to maim and murder people, and the National Front decided to march against them. As a consequence, the Socialist Workers Party’s most successful front organisation, the Anti-Nazi League, insisted that it had a right to

Portrait of the week | 30 January 2014

Home Britain’s gross domestic product grew by 1.9 per cent last year, the most since 2007, according to the Office for National Statistics. The last quarter’s growth was 0.7 per cent, a little less than the 0.8 per cent of the previous quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2013, construction actually declined by 0.3 per cent, and economic output was still 1.3 per cent less than in the first quarter of 2008. Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, promised in a speech that Labour would restore the 50 per cent rate of tax on higher earnings. Daniel Evans, a former Sunday Mirror journalist, told the Old Bailey that he had intercepted voicemails

From Nasser to Mubarak — Egypt’s modern pharaohs and their phoney myths

Reporting Egypt’s revolution three years ago, I had a sense of history not so much repeating itself as discharging sparks which seemed eerily familiar. Smoke was billowing into my hotel bedroom from the building next door, the headquarters of the Mubarak dictatorship which protestors had set alight; yet also visible from my balcony in Cairo that night were the flickering lights of Zamalek, the island of privilege in the River Nile where my father grew up before fleeing the flames of the Nasser regime on a flying boat in 1956. At last comes a book which links the coups and revolutions witnessed by father and son. The Cambridge sociologist Hazem

Portrait of the week | 16 January 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that English local authorities would be allowed to receive all the business rates collected from shale gas schemes, not just the 50 per cent they’d expect. Total, a French company, said it would invest about £30 million in drilling two exploratory wells in Lincolnshire. To head off higher borrowing rates, the government announced that ‘in the event of Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, the continuing UK government would in all circumstances honour the contractual terms of the debt issued by the UK government’. The annual rate of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, met the target set by the government for

The only people thriving in post-revolution Egypt — tomb raiders

 Cairo Hook nose, blue chin, Arab headdress: the tomb robber resembled a villain from a Tintin comic. His friend was packing a big pistol and behind them it was sunset over the pyramids at Dahshur, south of Cairo. Looting’s been rife in Egypt since antiquity — but there has been an alarming acceleration since the 2011 revolution, and Hook Nose and Big Pistol are in up to their respective necks. I met them as they were about to set off for a night’s work: excavating holes in tombs right up to the foot of the famous Black Pyramid outside Cairo, built around 2,000 bc by a Pharaoh called Amenemhat III.

The silence of our friends – the extinction of Christianity in the Middle East

The last month and a half has seen perhaps the worst anti-Christian violence in Egypt in seven centuries, with dozens of churches torched. Yet the western media has mainly focussed on army assaults on the Muslim Brotherhood, and no major political figure has said anything about the sectarian attacks. Last week at the National Liberal Club there was a discussion asking why the American and British press have ignored or under-reported this persecution, and (in some people’s minds) given a distorted narrative of what is happening. Among the four speakers was the frighteningly impressive Betsy Hiel of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, who has spent years in Egypt and covered Iraq and Afghanistan.

Aidan Hartley: I have been shot at and bombed so why do I fear a pyramid?

It was towards dusk by the time we had given the tourist police the slip and started climbing the pyramid of Mycerinus at Giza. It was Sebastian Barry-Taylor and I and we wore white linen suits. The 4ft blocks were easy enough to scale because erosion of the limestone had in the 4,500 years since construction weathered cavities or broken off corners so that there were plenty of hand- and footholds. We climbed quickly, looking down at the fat policemen in the desert shaking their fists up at us — but we did not rush it. To slip or stumble would be very dangerous because I could see that once

Ancient and modern: Modern Egypt vs ancient Athens

Whatever problems Greeks and Romans faced, a politicised priesthood was not one of them. They might have made three observations on Egypt’s current plight. First, though Roman emperors were autocrats, the plebs regularly expressed their displeasure at them, sometimes in street riots, over matters like food shortages. But they did so fully expecting the emperor to respond. Only very rarely did he fail to do so. He was not that stupid: for all his power, he knew he had to keep the plebs onside. This basic insight seems to have escaped the fanatic ex-president Morsi. Second, the most important consequence of the Athenian invention of democracy was to generate a

William Hague: Egypt turbulence could last for years

William Hague’s interview on the Today programme this morning included the gloomy warning the the turmoil in Egypt is unlikely to end soon. He said that ‘there may be years of turbulence in Egypt and other countries going through this profound debate about the nature of democracy and the role of religion in their society, but we have to do our best to promote democratic institutions, to promote political dialogue and to keep faith with the majority of Egyptians who just want a free and stable and prosperous country’. The turmoil means he has to choose his words carefully on the coup: it is difficult to condemn the actions of

How the Egyptian army handed the Muslim Brotherhood a victory

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s clerical fashion to recoil at the draconian treatment of its members yesterday. Indeed, some reports now suggest that more than 500 people were killed with thousands more injured. By conspiring against it the army has inadvertently handed the Muslim Brotherhood a remarkable victory. Before he was forced from office, Mohammed Muris’s administration was failing in almost every respect. That is why ordinary Egyptians railed against it with the slogan ‘bread not beards.’ Even when those protests intensified there was value in letting Mursi’s administration run a little longer, if only to illuminate the full extent of its shortcomings. Then,

The Muslim Brotherhood’s fight for existence

Speak to members of the Muslim Brotherhood and you get a sense of just how imperilled they feel. Ever since Mohammed Mursi was overthrown, members of the group have come to believe they’re engaged in a fight for the Muslim Brotherhood’s existence. Indeed, there is a popular perception among Brotherhood members that the entire movement’s trajectory will be determined by what transpires in Egypt now. Western governments have traditionally indulged themselves with the fantasy of a stratified Brotherhood consisting of ‘extreme’ and ‘moderate’ elements. This view confuses strategic pragmatism with ideology. Focus on the group’s core beliefs and what you’re left with is a unified movement striving for the same

A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell – review

Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me Edith.’ I experienced similar misgivings on the occasion, some years ago, that Lady Violet Powell suggested that I might like to call her ‘Violet’. It was not that Lady Violet — Violet — made the least fuss about her title (‘as unswanky a Lady as could be imagined’, Kingsley Amis once declared); merely that she was the relict of a man whose eye for the social niceties made Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a bumbling amateur. It was as if George Orwell, knocked into at some Fitzrovian party, had

Who is optimistic about the Middle East now?

This weekend’s closing of US embassies in the Muslim world and the British embassy in Yemen combined with the warning to Americans about overseas travel is another reminder that the Islamist terrorist threat has not gone away. But the relative calmness with which this news is being treated is a reminder that the politics of the situation is very different now than it was ten years ago. One of the things that has changed is that it is hard to find anyone who is optimistic about the Middle East anymore. The Iraq War was borne out of optimism, the neo-cons were convinced that the Middle East could be democratised. But