Read on. Al Arabiya News, by Abdallah Schleifer
The Muslim Brotherhood will be launching a television channel called Rabaa TV - named after the location in Cairo of the massive sit in by pro-Mursi supporters eventually dispersed with serious loss of life by security forces. It is also the home of the four finger symbol of a 1930s sort of Islamist Popular Front consisting of, and directed by, the Muslim Brotherhood along with its sympathizers. The channel is to be headquartered in and transmitted from Istanbul. But true to Popular Front form, the announcement did not come officially from the Brotherhood but from its front organization, the Alliance for Legitimacy Coalition. It should be noted that If the transmissions coming from Istanbul are as hostile to the Egyptian government and armed forces as one would expect, that could conceivably result in Egypt breaking diplomatic relations with Turkey.
That, and the new channel’s slogan “The Pulse of Freedom,” indicates that the Brotherhood will continue the strategy that evolved in the days immediately after the military intervention that deposed Mursi and the Brotherhood from power. The strategy is based on the idea that the Brotherhood is the vanguard of democracy for which its martyrs now sacrifice themselves. Paradise, at this strategically imperative moment, is at least publically on a back burner.
Considering the Brotherhood’s track record, this hardly seems to be a viable strategy if the hope is to rally those in Egypt who seem most concerned about democracy - the Liberal and the Left and generally secular intellectuals disturbed by some of the state’s post-Mursi repressive measures but no less fearful now than before of the Brotherhood’s authoritarian instincts. The same holds true for that segment of the middle classes not aligned with the Brotherhood and influenced by anti-Brotherhood state and private Egyptian media.
Putting food on the table
As for the masses, this is a matter of relative indifference - the driving issue for Cairo’s urban working class and lower middle class, when they turned out for June’s massive demonstration against Mursi and the Brotherhood, was and still remains the difficulty for so many Egyptians to put food on the table, or find benefit in the continued scandalous erosion of public medical care and other state institutions.
That issue, and only that issue, theoretically might in time mobilize some cautious mass support for the Brotherhood if the ambitious transitional government’s present plans to generate jobs do not materialize. But given the business interests that dominate the Brotherhood and the failure during Mursi’s one year in office to generate jobs for the unemployed, social justice is hardly the issue that the neo-liberal Muslim Brotherhood can hold aloft as its banner.
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