Most of Europe lately has been preoccupied with happenings in Spain and in Greece. In the meantime, however, there have been ominous developments in Egypt, where not only has the second round of the presidential election been concluded (official results have yet to be announced), but where the existing legislature has been dissolved by the High Constitutional Court – an action doubly strange due to Egypt not really having any constitution, other than that under which the deposed Hosni Mubarak ruled for all those decades.

What does it all mean? The French daily Libération tries to provide an answer:

Egypte : «Une bataille de tranchées entre l’armée et les Frères musulmans» http://t.co/F4jFUewU

June 19, 2012 2:20 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@liberation_info

Libération

This piece is essentially a brief interview, by writer Cordélia Bonal, of Egypt expert Tewfik Aclimandos of the Collège de France. Some highlights:

• The Egyptian military might have moved too soon. It can be presumed that they were behind the Constitutional Court’s ruling, with the motivation of preventing a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood would dominate the legislature and the presidency at the same time. Yet the presidency has not necessarily fallen within their grasp; the military/old regime candidate for the position, Ahmad Shafiq, seems to have done very well in the second round and might even have won (despite premature claims of victory by the Brotherhood – anyway, we will soon see).
  
• Thus the military might have overreached. In any case, it clearly is not willing to go off quietly into the night. In addition to engineering the dissolution of the legilature, it has explicitly given itself a veto over any future constitution, and it has set up a Council of National Defense, composed (naturally) overwhelmingly of military officials. This organ offers a potential base for future military rule, or at least continued dominance over national politics by officials who were largely in place under Mubarak.
  
• Whatever might happen, Egypt finds itself in a difficult situation, “between two profound authoritarianisms” (i.e. military on one side, Muslim Brotherhood on the other, which currently polls show enjoys only 25% support). That doesn’t mean the revolution is over, “it is still in people’s heads.” There just seems to be a long way still to go.

¡¡You’re the next contestant on Who Wants to be a Martyr?!!

Portrait du “docteur” Zawahiri, le successeur potentiel de Ben Laden http://lemde.fr/jWKbaC

May 5, 2011 8:56 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Anyway, Doctor, for as long as you are still around and in-line to head the Al-Qaeda organization – and keep in mind that two of your operatives have already been killed recently in Yemen by unmanned drones (link in Danish) – let’s take a look at this examination of your background, thoughtfully provided by Le Monde.

Firstly, for this visual age of ours it’s important to have a “grip & grin”-type photo together with the predecessor, as a token that he at least regarded the subject as a decent jihadi sort of fellow. Check! (True: there’s no “grip” in the picture provided here, and for that matter also very little “grin”; I think those things are probably un-Islamic.) In good newspaper-style, though, author Cécile Hennion cuts right to the essentials of why Zawahiri is the best bet to succeed Osama Bin Laden in her very first paragraph:

“Doctor” Zawahiri, with an Egyptian degree in surgery, is considered the ideologist of Al-Qaeda and the “brain” behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. He has for a long time been Osama Bin Laden’s principal lieutenant and personal doctor.

Curious, then, that he wasn’t present at that Abottabad compound during that deadly raid last Monday morning (local Punjabi time). Nonetheless, he suffers no shortage of terrorist bona fides. For instance, after Osama Bin Laden came back to his native Saudi Arabia a hero from fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, but then had to flee the country due to his anti-regime agitation, it was initially only the House of Saud that he swore to lead a jihad against. Zawahiri, who first met him in Afghanistan, convinced him to widen his target to all “apostate regimes of the Muslim world.” The Doctor was also behind the fatwa of the late 1990s which declared that it was the responsibility of all good Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. (more…)

Maybe you’ve heard by this point that the Egyptian pyramids were not built by slaves after all. If you did, it was probably on Leno on Tuesday night: according to Jay, it seems even way back then the authorities found a way to finance the workers’ wages through some pyramid scheme.

Hyuk-hyuk. If you’re still interested, though, all of that other than the “pyramid scheme” part is true. Rasmus Dam Nielsen* of the Danish newspaper Politiken gives us the details.

The Egyptian government has always had a problem with the workers who built the pyramids being characterized as slaves, since in their view that opinion gives short shrift to the considerable construction talents that such personnel must have possessed. Just look at the results: it’s apparently difficult even to slip a knife into the cracks between the building-blocks. It was actually an Egyptian research time which recently made the key discovery of graves situated alongside the pyramids, 4,500 years old and containing the remains of workers who died while in the service of their construction. This has to mean they were not slaves: slaves would never have been allowed to be buried so close to the pharaohs’ tomb, which of course were the pyramids themselves.

The Egyptian researchers further calculate that around 10,000 workers were involved in constructing the pyramids in all (i.e. not all at the same time); they were involved in the work in shifts of three months at a time; and they consumed daily 21 cattle and 23 sheep, provided by outside ranchers who thereby discharged their tax burden to the prehistoric Egyptian state.

And how about this, also from Politiken: El Dorado did exist, namely somewhere in the Amazon jungle, and contemporary researchers believe they have found the site using Google Earth! But I’m moving on from this stuff . . . if you really want to know more, either learn yourself some Danish or e-mail me a request.

* He reminds me of one of my main complaints about the Danish press: there are too many Dam Nielsens!

A recent headline-news story in the German press was the discovery that fugitive Nazi war-criminal Aribert Ferdinand Heim had been living under another name in Cairo, Egypt since shortly after fleeing Germany in 1962, and that he had died there back in the summer of 1992. Known as “Dr. Death” for the gruesome medical procedures and experiments he undertook while serving in the SS at a series of concentration camps, Heim had long been top-of-the-charts when it came to old Nazis that the German authorities – aided by among others the famous Simon Wiesenthal Center – believed to be still alive and were trying to locate to bring them back to Germany to face justice. In fact, the New York Times account reports that the current director of the Jerusalem branch of the Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, “had been about to raise the reward for information leading to his arrest to $1.3 million from $400,000,” adding that “Mr. Zuroff expressed surprise when informed of Dr. Heim’s apparent fate.”

“Surprise,” indeed; from a brief interview with Marie Simon of the French news-magazine L’Express, it seems that Zuroff is not ready to accept that Heim is dead yet. “I have serious doubts on this subject. . . . There is no body, no tomb, no DNA test possible.” He calls it a “curious thing” that Heim’s son has not tried to claim Heim’s inheritance, said to amount to some €2 million, and that, while he is now claiming his father died in Egypt in 1992, as of two months ago he also declared he had never seen him. (But, as the NYT reports, he now says he was with him when he died. Whether that is true – i.e. whether he ever was there, although travel and passport-control records could show that, and, more importantly, whether Heim actually died when claimed – is another matter.)

Zuroff indicates to his French interviewer his definite intention to travel to Cairo to examine the documents attesting to Heim’s death himself. But for now he believes (“according to our latest information”) that Heim may well still be alive, having absconded at some point to that more-traditional Nazi refuge, South America – although Zuroff also points out that Egypt actually was an even better place to hide after the war for Nazis on the run, one endorsed by Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who made that country his first stop on the run.

(Wikipedia note: Strangely, the Wikipedia entry on the Simon Wiesenthal Center records that “In November 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem Director, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, located Aribert Heim, who had been hiding in Spain for 20 years. Aribert Heim died in 1992 in Cairo, Egypt a free man.”)

UPDATE: An article in Le Monde now adds some further relevant details, mainly that German police now intend to travel to Egypt shortly to positively confirm Heim’s death by finding actual evidence, like the remains of a body.

It also recounts how the Austrian authorities submitted in 1950 a detailed request to arrest Heim to the (then West-) German Ministry of Justice, even listing his exact location of residence within Germany. Heim was originally Austrian, you see, plus the outrages for which he was most infamous occurred at the Mauthausen concentration camp located within Austria. But that request was ignored by the West German authorities.

You thought the failure of the WTO talks in Cancún in September was foreboding! Now the rising tide of world protectionism has reached a thousands-year-old cultural practice, reports the NRC Handelsblad (Belly-Dance Under Fire in Egypt, featuring an appealing photo of one sharply-sculpted practitioner in mid-shimmy. Yes, let’s drive traffic to the NRC’s site; first-time visitors will have to register though, in Dutch. E-mail me if you can’t figure it out.) Egypt is set to ban foreign belly-dancers from its territory. (more…)