Mubarak quits!

AMAZING scenes of jubilation in Egypt as Mubarak finally quits. The revolution is victorious!

This seems a good moment to quote our own profile statement written a year and half ago.

"How could we foresee a near future in which the hypnotic spell is broken, the scales fall from a billion eyes and those who say 'Enough!' are revealed, all of a sudden, to be a gale force wind of revolt, a tidal wave of insurgent delight sweeping all before it, a minority so vast it will change everything?"

Egypt: Rise to Freedom

Full quality video here.

Dirty tricks backfire in Egypt

THE MUBARAK regime’s dirty tricks will result in its own destruction, says an in-depth analysis on a blog dedicated to the Egyptian uprising.

Abdel-Rahman Hussein examines all the ways in which the state has so far tried to halt the revolutionary tide - brutality, shutting down the internet, withdrawing police, deploying state thugs, spreading lies on state TV etc etc.

He writes: "What arose from that State TV propaganda – masterminded by Information Minister Anas El-Fiqi – can only be described as a disgusting witch-hunt of journalists and foreigners in Egypt that led to the stabbing of Greek and Swedish photographers, and neighborhood watches suspecting even Egyptians of being foreigners and therefore in need of detainment.

"A girl who claimed that she was an activist who was trained by Israelis and Americans in Qatar to create chaos in Egypt aired on Mehwar TV in pixilated glory turned out to be a reporter for the newspaper '24 Hours' who had fabricated the story and has now been suspended.

State TV presenter Hala Fahmy resigned her post and headed to Tahrir Square, not before telling Al-Jazeera that El-Fiqi was personally involved with the thugs who attacked Tahrir Square on Wednesday Feb 2."

Says the author: "Not that it was ever the most benign of regimes at the best of times, with a brutal human rights record and a curtailing of personal and civil liberties the norm.

"However, the scandalously dirty tricks put into play since Jan 25th would spell the end of any government in any country in the world. The fact that it hasn’t so far in Egypt is an indictment of the spineless attitude of the international community towards their strongman Mubarak."

Tahrir revolutionaries will not give up

THE inspirational protesters occupying Cairo's Tahrir Square are refusing to leave until the hated Mubarak regime has fallen.

An up-beat video from Press TV shows people from various backgrounds and parts of Egypt united in their determination that the revolution will succeed.

Meanwhile, former Arab League Chief Clovis Maksoud told Press TV the Egyptian revolution against President Hosni Mubarak's regime is also an uprising against Israel.

"The Egypt revolution is against Israel too,” Maksoud said on Tuesday.

He further pointed out that this rebellion is also against Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.

“Part of this revolution is going to project a new foreign policy whereby Egypt will freeze its historical role and be a deterrent function against (the) Israelis' expansions, aggressions and racism,” he went on to say.

“That is why the foreign policy of the United States on the strategic power in the region is attacked by the revolution,” he noted.

According to Maksoud, what Washington wants is that “this revolution will not reverse many of the factors that have served the strategic influence of the United States and Israel.”

Commenting on some recent leaks revealing that Israel prefers Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman as Mubarak's successor, Maksoud said, “Israel cannot decide who should come after Mubarak.”

Egyptian state's blueprint for repression

SHOCKING documents exposing the Egyptian state's plans for dealing with opposition protests have been revealed.

This document includes terrible measures intended to intentionally spread chaos and terror in the ranks of the people and start a campaign to mislead the media.

The full details can be found on the Angry News From Around the World website.

The plans include:

- Enroll many thugs, pay them well, meet with them in their homes or in public meeting places, (...) the information on the mobilization plan (...) with the aim of sowing chaos gradually.

- Control all members of parties and organizations, coordinate with publishers and communications services, impose complete control over the messages transmitted and received.

- Means of communication (Mobile Internet) will be cut from Friday, 28-01-2011 at six o'clock in the morning, while keeping mobile phone communication, therefore, all officers and members must use this means of communication and make sure they are encoded.

- Ensure that security staff are in civilian clothes armed with sticks to stop members most responsible for the events without showing violence. (..)

- Simulate a partial failure of the police from Friday at 16:00 local to pretend that the protesters have the upper hand and then allow the infiltration of thugs to spread chaos (...).

- Disseminate information through the media about looting, order women of the security services contact the media and claim they are horrified.

- Spread false rumours through the international media, and give the local media the task of correcting them in order to restore public confidence in them.

- Spread rumors about the spread of chaos and the flight of large numbers of prisoners and claim they are directed to residential neighbourhoods. (...)

- Monitor the situation on the ground and charge members of security to count the demonstrations and know their addresses, in order to send groups of thugs to their neighbourhoods and to remove them and thereafter empty the streets of demonstrators.

Protests and strike hit Bangladesh

RIOT police patrolled the streets of Bangladesh's capital Dhaka on Monday as angry opposition to the regime grows.

Rising food prices and a stock exchange crisis have fuelled popular discontent.

Passions have also been raised by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's plans for a new airport to be named after her father.

The original scheme has now been abandoned following passionate protests and the death of a policeman.

Al Jazeera reports: "Bangladesh police said that at least eight buses were set on fire on Sunday night, just hours before the strike was enforced.

"A homemade bomb reportedly exploded on the campus of a Dhaka university, injuring two people.

"Earlier on Sunday, hundreds of angry investors had also gathered to protest outside the Dhaka Stock Exchange, following the latest in a series of stock exchange collapses."

Mubarak sends thugs to attack protests

THE EGYPTIAN revolution remains on a knife edge as the Mubarak regime sends its thugs in to attack protesters.

Although corporate media have tried to classify the violence as clashes between 'rival groups of protesters', this is clearly untrue.

Eye-witness reports on Al Ajzeera describe how thugs captured by revolutionaries in Tahrir Square have been found to have police ID.

A useful new blog on the Egyptian uprising explains the role of the notorious Baltagayyah.

It says: "Loosely translated to 'thugs', Blatagayyah are more than just your run of the mill voyous.

"The word has a special relevance for just about everyone in Egypt: that of the paid paramilitaries of the Egyptian state.

"There are a lot of these fuckers, and they are the prime agents provocateurs of the Egyptian state. Conspiratorial stories of security services actually perpetrating looting, attacking peaceful protestors, or destroying property, too often turn out to be true.

"Many have been apprehended by ordinary citizens who have discovered state security IDs on them (they appear to have been ordered to carry such IDs in case they are stopped by the army).

"Let’s get this straight, this is not the worry about a few bad seeds on the murky fringes of the para-state. The Mubarak regime has maintained a concerted policy of introducing plainclothes thugs into protest situations, sometimes armed with weapons, but always with the impunity to violently quash even the slightest dissent (and the presence of these baltagayyah is inevitably in addition to the obscene amount of uniformed security officers the government will usually deploy to any demonstration, no matter how small).

"It’s not always certain whether these thugs are full time employees of the regime or simply bored individuals with a penchant for violence and a hankering for a few extra bucks and a chicken sandwich in exchange for a day’s work of beating the hell out of some demonstrators.

"What is certain is that rarely does any political protest or demonstration go down in Cairo without a healthy dose of baltagayyah violence.

"As far as the current protests in Egypt are concerned, we’ve seen them setting fire to cars, destroying small businesses, terrorizing protestors and ordinary citizens alike and looting neighborhoods.

"All this while disguised as 'ordinary Egyptians'. This has been enough to confuse and distort much of the international reporting of protest events.

"What must be understood is that the baltagayyah are sowing fear and violence to deliberately frighten and terrorize ordinary people.

"They work by making Egyptians and the outside world question who is perpetrating this violence, but this gruesome charade must be known and publicized because the only result of such fear and doubt is further violence against demonstrators."