by Kevin Barrett
I just interviewed author and Egypt expert Eric Walberg about the Orwellian un-coup in Cairo…which also happens to be the topic of my new Press TV op-ed “Egypt’s deniable coup: Another anti-Islam psy-op.”
Eric says VT editor “Duffy” has it wrong. (I wouldn’t call him that to his face, Eric!)
Eric recommends that you read Willy Loman’s Egyptian Military Coup Ordered by Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice – New York Times. Loman suggests that Morsi was ousted not because he was too compliant with Zionism and empire, but because he wasn’t compliant enough.
Loman concludes:
What doomed his presidency was that anti-neoliberal constitution he helped create. That was the final straw for President Morsi. Washington had to do away with that on behalf of their global banking bosses and Morsi in the end wouldn’t play ball, so now he’s gone… more than likely dead with all those Egyptians in the streets fighting to bring him back to power. Like Gadhafi before him, the Obama state department knows the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen, is kill him.
Morsi was too “idealistic” according to the New York Times. He wasn’t “pragmatic” like our president of “CHANGE” who does everything he can for the big bankers and big business.
This ends the debate about what this “revolution” was.
Below is a transcript of the opening section of my interview with Eric Walberg – including the “Duffy” thing.
If you want to hear the whole interview today, you’ll have to become a TruthJihad member – just go to TruthJihad.com, sign up for membership, and go to the members-only “wall” section of the website.
INTERVIEW WITH ERIC WALBERG
KEVIN BARRETT
Welcome to No Lies Radio. I’m Kevin Barrett doing the Kevin Barrett show here – sporadically during the summer, and every Tuesday 11 to noon Central throughout the year…I’m going to try to keep that up (during the summer) since events don’t seem to go on vacation just because I do.
And that sure is true for Egypt. Oh my goodness! When is a coup d’état not a coup d’état? When Obama says it isn’t, so we can keep handing those generals over in Egypt billions of dollars a year to do our bidding, and to be obsequious with the Israelis, and to accept IMF loans, and all that other fun stuff. It’s a mess over there. And one of our most clear-eyed commentators on that mess is Eric Walberg.
Eric is the author of Postmodern Imperialism. And he has a brand-new book just coming out. It’s called From Postmodernism to Post-Secularism: Re-Emerging Islamic Civilization. It’s great stuff!
And Eric has also just put out an article entitled Egypt’s Revolution Betrayed: Fuel for al-Qaeda Fires. It’s a very good article.
I think, Eric, that I actually tend to agree with you a lot more than with Abdullah Champeon, my previous guest on this topic. So let’s go ahead and take it from the top. What’s your view of what’s happening in Egypt?
ERIC WALBERG
Hi again Kevin, it’s nice to be back with you. Although it’s a very sad occasion, this coup in Egypt is a very negative development. As I see it, it was planned from the start – from last June. If you recall, the Supreme Court disbanded the democratically-elected people assembly. And at the last minute, hours before the nominations for the presidency closed, they disqualified the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading candidate, Khairat al-Shater. They were hoping they would catch the Muslim Brotherhood off guard, so that there would be no Muslim Brotherhood candidate in the presidential elections. But the Brotherhood was savvy enough to put forward two candidates. And they had no reason at all to disqualify Morsi.
So Morsi came in as the dark horse candidate. But unfortunately he was not the right candidate. Although I’m not saying he should be deposed, he was a weaker candidate than the preferred candidate. He didn’t have much experience as well. And he wasn’t given any help after his election. Right from the start, secularists, the old guard, the military, seemed to do everything to undermine him. And the Egyptian media is…disgusting is the only word for it. It’s all a holdover from the Mubarak era. If you look at Egyptian television, the women are even more gaudily made up than Western women on TV, with lots of mascara, lots of lipstick, wild hair-dos, low cleavage. This is an affront to the Islamic and Egyptian sensibility of modesty. And this is just an indication of where Egypt was at the time of the elections last year, and the difficulty of the Brotherhood trying to make any change in this very Western-style culture. And of course the secularists have fought tooth-and-nail to prevent any kind of change in the Egyptian culture. So on one level it was a cultural sabotage by the old guard and by the secularists. But also we have the Empire hovering in the background, trying to keep control of the politics. So the US put intense pressure on the Brotherhood to maintain the peace pact with Israel, to prevent the Palestinians from making any kind of headway. So Morsi was between a rock and a hard place for the whole time. And even though there were people trying to help, they had no power. And if you look at the media commentary over the past year, it has been very anti-Brotherhood, both in the West and in Egypt. This is a reflection of Islamophobia of the 20th century, which continues. And even though the Egyptian people are immune to this, since they are generally devout Muslims, and they don’t let the brainwashing affect them. So they elected the Brotherhood, and quietly have been supporting and trying to make the new system work. But the forces that be were able to undermine the Brotherhood. So this is my analysis. I think it’s pretty black and white in a way. And it’s very different than – there are some other people, Mike Duffy – I read his commentary today, and I was appalled at the misunderstanding of the whole situation.
KEVIN BARRETT
Mike Duffy? I’m not familiar with him…
ERIC WALBERG
The editor at VT?
KEVIN BARRETT
Oh, you’re thinking of Gordon Duff!
ERIC WALBERG
Sorry, Gordon Duff.
KEVIN BARRETT
Yeah, let’s talk about Gordon. Gordon seems to blame Morsi for some of the misguided policies that Egypt has continued to pursue, including: maintaining the Camp David accords, taking IMF loans, supporting the so-called Syrian rebels, and partnering with Turkey and Israel to blockade Gaza, secure Sinai, and give Israel the opportunity to move its forces away from the Egyptian border over to the Syrian border. And finally, Gordon blames Morsi for controlling and censoring the press. In my view, some of these policies may not really be Morsi’s policies, but rather policies that he was forced to accept, in the same way that Obama might want to close Guantanamo, but is unable to for political reasons.
ERIC WALBERG
Precisely. That’s a more level-headed analysis. I think this hot-headed version of seeing a conspiracy between US imperialism and the Brotherhood, that’s a complete misreading of the situation. It’s painting a scene that is very false and misleading.
KEVIN BARRETT
But regarding one of those issues…don’t you think the Brotherhood has made a terrible mistake by buying into the sectarian incitement that’s coming out of the House of Saud, and behind them, the House of Rothschild?
ERIC WALBERG
That’s a thorny issue that goes back a thousand years in Islam. It has also been manipulated and transformed by imperialism, this Sunni-Shi’a friction. And I don’t see that the Brotherhood is particularly guilty of this. There are statements by people like Qaradawi that are very disdainful of Shi’a. And I know that Sunni Muslims generally are very suspicious of Shi’a. That is something that is not a policy that’s formulated by the Brotherhood. It’s a kind of tradition within the religion. This is something that I address, that I looked at very carefully, in my new book (From Post-Modernism to Post-Secularism)…
The discussion continues to cover the strategies of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood; the West’s attempts to contain the Islamic awakening; the fiat currency based imperial house of cards and its coming collapse; the historical Jewish struggle for power vis-a-vis Western Christian populations; and more!
You can listen today by becoming a member of TruthJihad.com and going to the “Wall.”
Or you can wait and listen to Tuesday’s broadcast.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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