Dear Egyptian friends,
Congratulations on your victory and success. You deserve your liberation and freedom. Your courage and perseverance have paid off. For Eighteen days you have been protesting peacefully, enduring weather conditions, standing thugs’ provocations, and bearing the regime’s hopeless prevarications. Now that you have pulled the regime out like a cat across the rug,enjoy your well-deserved victory.
There is a joke making the rounds here in Morocco that Husni Mubarak came out on the balcony one morning and saw the crowds shouting and screaming. He asked one of his advisers, “Who are these people? What do they want?” The guy responded, “They’ve come to say good bye, your Excellency.” “Why? Where are they going?” said Mubarak.
It is a joke reminiscent of France’s Marie Antoinette joke: “let them eat the cake”. A good joke does more than make you laugh. A good joke like this one tells a lot about the mentality of those tyrannical rulers in their ivory towers, wearing blinkers, and clinging on to their beloved chairs of leadership to the last shred of imaginary hope.
They never look back, they never make any self-criticism, and they never listen to the voice of the people. All they are interested in is how much filthy lucre they and their cohorts make. They listen only to those beating the drums for them in their tacky, hypocritical speeches, and in the media. They do the possible and the impossible to dig their heels in and their heads in the sand so as not to see the truth: poverty, sufferings, injustice, corruption, despotism and the list is dozens of problems long.
As I always say, the rulers at the top are not the only ones to blame. They are just the tip of the iceberg. There are other hands on the steering wheel who benefit (more) from the situation that you feel these rulers are helpless and dependent on those vultures feeding on their fellow citizens. These vultures are powerful individuals and families, companies, and corrupt army generals who take and never give anything to the nation.
Congratulations once again to all the Egyptians and May God help and guide you along the path to true democracy. Special congrats to my Egyptian friends: those I made in Boston, Washington, Kent State (Mohammed, Ashraf, Wael, and Ahmed); those I met in Spain; and those I know in Italy.
2 comments:
I simply and sincerely hope that people in Egypt who have courageously stood up for their legitimate rights agaisnt an age-long suffocating regime won't jump out of the frying pan into the fire.
Oh, dear! I don't hope that either.
Post a Comment