RUTHFULLY YOURS

Zvi Mazel, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, reports that Egypt is in trouble.

On the one hand, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is pursuing ambitious economic reforms. He’s doubled the size of the Suez Canal, bringing a major spike in revenue. He’s building a new capital south of Cairo, aimed at relieving congestion and pollution in Cairo and making it a commercial and tourist hub.

Sisi has also launched processes of building about two thousand miles of new highways, cleaning and rehabilitating wheat silos where wheat—the main Egyptian staple—rots because of negligence, and developing oil and natural gas resources.

That oil and gas development, Mazel notes, “could be greatly accelerated if the West decided at long last to help Egypt. It has not happened so far.”

Indeed it’s well known that since Sisi—then the defense minister—overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Obama administration and other Western governments have turned Egypt a cold shoulder.

They have done so even though that overthrow was backed by the most massive popular protests in history, with 14 million Egyptians taking to the streets.

They were protesting a regime that was radical, incompetent, and—in office for a year—already taking steps to abrogate Egypt’s constitution and strangle the country in sharia legislation.

Yet “Western countries led by US President Barack Obama,” Mazel notes,

still see in president Sisi a military dictator who grabbed power from a “democratically elected president.” They do not want to admit that Morsi was toppled by a popular uprising—admittedly with the help of the army—just in time to prevent him from creating an Islamic dictatorship.

Jilted by the West, Sisi has had to turn elsewhere. China is underwriting his building of a new capital. More problematically, Egypt has already signed major arms deals with Russia, and Russia has pledged $25 billion toward the building of a nuclear power plant in northern Egypt.

It might all be less troubling if Egypt were mainly suffering from economic problems.

But, in addition, it remains under assault by radical anti-Western terrorist forces.

“The Muslim Brotherhood,” Mazel reports, “is still carrying out low-grade warfare against local infrastructure in the country.” And a branch of Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula has kept up a string of deadly attacks. The most devastating was its downing one year ago of a Russian plane, which, says Mazel, “has brought tourism to a near standstill.”

And as the economy keeps struggling and Sisi institutes reforms—some of them, like a VAT increase, widely resented—the potential for popular insurrection, driven by or at least exploited by the Islamist forces, remains.

Or as Mazel puts it, “It is now show time for [Sisi]. The next few months will be critical.”

Israel, for its part, is helping Egypt both in the security and economic spheres, but the assistance it can give is limited by ongoing popular hostility to Israel and Jews in Egypt.

Another development in the next few months, however, offers the best hope of keeping Sisi’s government on its moderate, constructive course and keeping the jihadists at bay.

An AP analysis notes that U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has already praised the “good chemistry” between him and Sisi when they met at the UN in September, suggesting a possibility of “closer ties after the chill between al-Sissi and Obama.”

Indeed Egypt’s media cheered Trump’s victory, reflecting widespread resentment at Obama’s support for the short-lived but hated Morsi regime.

It is not that Egypt is an exemplary country or a Western democracy. As mentioned, hatred in the Israeli and Jewish direction is still pervasive decades after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Vigilante attacks on Christians continue. Sisi’s crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood and other radical forces hardly meets Western judicial standards.

But in the real world, the Sisi government—which wants to align with the West, is nonbelligerent toward Israel, and at least aspires to curb Islamic extremism—is vastly preferable to the alternatives.

Supporting Sisi would mean a shift to a sane policy.

Ahead of spiked’s conference in central London next Wednesday – ‘Enemies of the State: Religious Freedom and the New Repression’ – Paul Coleman asks if Britain outside of the EU will be any more respectful of freedom of thought and speech.

It has been argued that Brexit will make us freer. Not just in an economic or political sense, but also in terms of individual civil liberties. spiked’s Mick Hume wrote that ‘the referendum result is a triumph for free speech and a smack in the eye for the culture of You Can’t Say That’. And it is.

Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500million citizens and ban ‘illegal online hate speech’. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of ‘insult’. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed ‘discrimination’.

We can distinguish ourselves from our European neighbours that are intent on pursuing more and more censorship. Just over the summer it was reported that prosecutors in Spain initiated criminal proceedings against the Archbishop of Valencia for preaching a homily alleged to have been ‘sexist’ and ‘homophobic’. In the Netherlands, a man was sentenced to 30 days in prison for ‘intentionally insulting’ the king on Facebook. And in Germany a prosecution was launched against a comedian who made jokes against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

These kinds of cases have become normal on the continent. So much so that they barely generate news. And they are often willingly cheered on by the EU and other European institutions. Britain can tread a different path.

There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesn’t need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else.

Take the issue of free speech. In Britain there are countless attacks on this fundamental freedom that have little or no connection to EU law. Evangelical street preachers are routinely arrested for public preaching; peaceful campaigners have been prosecuted for holding allegedly insulting signs; and the police have started labelling wolf-whistling a ‘hate crime’. None of this was EU-mandated. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is astonishing how little news Britain gets from the Continent. Lest this be thought to be a post-Brexit thing, it is worth noting that this has been the case for years. In a spirit of reconciliation, could all of us agree — leavers and remainers alike — that a positive result of Brexit would be an upsurge in serious media coverage from the Continent?

***During visits to Paris, Berlin and Stockholm in the last month the way in which our media has let us down has struck me more than ever. The British print and broadcast media are happy to lead on news about celebrities and even their relatives. But regular news even from a capital city such as Berlin is almost wholly absent. Consider a single day’s news while I was there.

On the front pages was news of the fire-bombing of a mosque in Dresden — a fairly common event, though no one was injured, and the building was not badly damaged. The inside pages included the sort of stories that now wash across every day in Germany though fail to make news elsewhere. A story of a violent clash in a small village between a gang of German bikers and a gang of refugees. And another story relaying events at an asylum centre the day before. A migrant phoned the police because he had seen a young girl being assaulted in a bush by another migrant. Three policemen arrived and caught a Pakistani man in his late twenties raping a six-year-old girl from Iraq. One of the policemen took the girl away while the other two handcuffed the Pakistani migrant.

As they were putting him into the back of the police car the father of the girl, who had obviously heard about what had happened to his daughter, came running out of the centre wielding a knife, clearly intent on attacking the perpetrator. At which point the two policemen shot him dead. Just one of a thousand stories every day in Merkel’s Germany.

First, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) last month won Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town in the local elections, a huge blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Second, the country is waiting on tenterhooks for the credit rating agencies to re-rate the country’s creditworthiness in November: most fear relegation to junk status. Third, President Jacob Zuma, a crony capitalist par excellence, is trying to hand as many favours as possible to his allies, the Gupta family. This is being resisted by his finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and a showdown between Zuma and Gordhan cannot be long averted. Finally, there is the question of the presidential succession, to be decided by an ANC conference in 2017. Rumours fly that Zuma has already accepted $200 million from Vladimir Putin to commission a string of Russian nuclear power stations; that fearing jail, he is planning to retire offshore; and that he will push his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, into the presidency to succeed him. And so on.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.

As the local elections approached, propaganda from the ANC and the South African Communist Party (the parties are allies and all but indistinguishable) became increasingly frenzied. Opinion polls showing the ANC behind were denounced as having “a regime change agenda” and the SACP demanded that their publication be stopped. There were furious demands to “defend the capital”, and posters went up widely enjoining us all to “defend the revolution”. Zuma, for his part, threatened his audiences that if the opposition won cities like Port Elizabeth “the ancestors will never forgive you”. This led to considerable doubts as to whether the ANC would actually accept an adverse result. In Port Elizabeth the (theoretically) Independent Electoral Commission displayed great reluctance to declare an opposition victory but in the end the verdict of the polls was respected.

However, this was quickly followed by the ANC threatening to make the cities they had lost “ungovernable” and by initial council meetings where the ANC caucus tried to prevent the new administration from being sworn in. In Pretoria this was followed by a series of ANC-led illegal land invasions in which squatters grabbed public land and put up shacks, forcing the municipality to evict them and thus incur the ignominy of being portrayed as apartheid lookalikes. But this is all part of the rather muscular style of South African politics. The really important thing is that the ANC seems habituated to the rules of electoral democracy and this gives one some — not complete, but some — confidence that it may one day accept the loss of national power in good part.

The second issue — the possible downrating of South Africa to junk bond status — is still moot though most market sentiment is that it will happen, causing a stockmarket and currency downgrade of some severity. The result will, of course, be higher interest rates on all forms of government debt, increasingly tight constraints on government spending and, ultimately, an increased possibility that the country will be forced towards an IMF bail-out. All this is some way off and the ANC still lives in a dreamworld where the Brics banks will lend them lots of money at no interest and without conditions. Reality is likely to be a lot less comfortable and the crunch will be felt first in South Africa’s host of loss-making state-owned industries. South African Airways, for example, is run by one of Zuma’s girlfriends, Dudu Myeni, who is therefore unsackable despite her complete lack of business or aviation experience and the huge losses SAA has incurred under her care. It is doubtful if any commercial airline would employ Ms Myeni even as a receptionist.