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May 23rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
While this all made sense, it was also depressing. They kept referring to what
everyone nowadays calls the Hizb al-Kanaba – not some new radical sect but
the “Party of the Sofa”, the silent majority who have only ever had the
chance to watch politics unfold at a distance, including during the Tahrir
Square revolution. The assumption of these elders was that they had to seize
hold of the Sofa Party, or the Brotherhood would. They said that they
themselves all intended to vote for Ahmed Shafiq, the fallen Mubarak
regime’s last prime minister and a retired general – and that once they had
made that decision clear they expected 75 per cent of the town to vote the
same way.
The depressing thing is that the Brotherhood probably agrees that this is a
vote to be captured by machine politics, rather than won over by argument,
and given what we have learnt so far from opinion polls, they may be right.
There is little consistency in the Sofa Party’s ideology. In one survey, 67
per cent of the population thought democracy was “preferable to any other
form of government”, but when asked about the role of religion in politics,
61 per cent thought Saudi Arabia – nobody’s democracy – was a better model
than Turkey.
This is a battle for tribal loyalties, with huge consequences for Egypt and
beyond. Both the army and the mosque still attract popular support, even if
the former acts with unashamed brutality and the latter seems to think that
the modern world is a Western conspiracy. This week, one of them will win
and impose their vision on society – neither as much of a disaster as the
other side fears, probably, but the one lacking the will to institute proper
controls over police and military power and corruption, the other clearly
more restrictive of personal freedoms. It is not a pretty thought,
particularly for the articulate young liberals who filled our television
screens a year ago.
Then again, should we Britons be so sniffy? Many of us are nostalgic for the
time when elections mattered, when politics was tribal, when the great
forces of class and ideology swung into action every five years. And one
thing we do know: Egyptians have shown they will no longer put up with the
lies that have been forced on them for the past half century, and they have
at least a chance of holding their leaders’ promises to account. No one said
that democracy didn’t produce bad governments – but, as a great man once put
it, it’s rarely as bad as the alternatives.
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