Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Is Morsi torturing his political opponents?

Mike L. 
Al-Masry Al-Youm spent three hours Wednesday night in a Muslim Brotherhood torture chamber at the presidential palace. The central chamber was located at the gate of the palace in front of Omar bin Abdel Aziz Mosque on Merghany Street. The chamber was cordoned by iron barriers and Central Security Forces, who only allowed this reporter access after a colleague from Misr 25 satellite channel, owned by the Brotherhood, intervened...

Opposing protesters were brought to the chambers after being detained by Brotherhood members, who beat them and tore their clothes. The chambers were informal and it was unclear how many there were; when someone was detained, a chamber would be established anywhere near a building.

The kidnappers would take the detained person’s ID card, mobile phone and money before beginning “investigations,” which included intervals of beating to force the confession that he or she is a “thug.”
Torture chamber in presidential palace in Cairo?

Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but I certainly wouldn't put it past the Brotherhood to use torture or, as we are increasingly hearing, rape, as a tactic of political enforcement.

If this turns out to be true, one begins to wonder if American liberals will hold president Obama accountable for helping to bring the Brotherhood into power to begin with?  Obama's foreign policy is a deeply conservative foreign policy as it supports the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East.

Just as Republican foreign policy conservatives used to support military dictatorships throughout the world in their contest with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, so today Democratic and "progressive" foreign policy conservatives support genocidal theocratic dictatorships like the Brotherhood in Egypt.

In Egypt the liberals are standing up to the Islamists but, as in Iran, they get no support from the western left, nor, certainly, from the president of the United States.  This is because the left has jettisoned the very foundation of its political orientation, i.e., the traditional commitment to universal human rights.

My own theory is that in the unacknowledged contest between universal human rights and the multicultural ideal for control of the progressive-left soul, the multicultural ideal won.  Thus western progressives no longer stand for universal human rights because to do so would require criticizing other cultures which, with the sole exception of the Jewish State of Israel, is decidedly Politically Incorrect.

Who are we, after all, us white, western, imperialistic, colonialist, racists to dare criticize the subaltern "other"?


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