Virtually the whole world stood up and applauded the Egyptian youth on their successful campaign to rid themselves of their tyrant president Hosni Mubarak except for the Christian Right in the U.S. and Fox News. But their rejection should give the Egyptians all the more reason to be more cautious especially when euphoria comes to an end and when they begin to tackle the diverse issues that confront them.
For sure the evil forces will not take even a day off to sabotage what the Egyptians have achieved. To them Mubarak and his cronies were a tower of strength as they went about enforcing their Plan for the New American Century (PNAC) and nothing matters more to the U.S. than to protect Israel, an apartheid state, which has suddenly found itself on the back foot after years of complete hegemony. The Israelis will view Iranian warships that passed through the Suez Canal as cocking a snook at them. They are not going to take this insult lightly and you can be sure their drawing boards will be a hive of activity with agents looking for any way to hit back at the Egyptians and the Iranians.
The Egyptians and all freedom loving people around the world must see the recent arson attack on a Coptic church as one such attempt to ignite sectarian violence like the bloodletting we see in Iraq and Pakistan.
This brings to mind the arrests of British SAS forces in Basra a couple of years ago. The British agents were disguised as Arabs and substantial quantities of bombs were found on them. But they were released on the orders of the higher ups and later British forces came around and destroyed the tiny police station so as to teach the 'inferior race' a lesson they won't forget.
The Raymond Davies affair in Pakistan is another case in point. He killed two Pakistanis and is now held in a Pakistani jail which hopefully is not as bad as Guantanamo Bay. It is now clear Davies is a CIA agent who had allegedly planned to set up a 'dirty bomb' somewhere in Pakistan and blame it on anyone the U.S. chose. The plan was to create hype and get Pakistan to surrender its nuclear arsenal to the 'international community' which is a pseudonym for the West.
Giving credence to such worries is the incident where a group of British SAS spies armed to the teeth landed in Libya in a helicopter loaded with 'sophisticated' weapons. Along with them was a 'British diplomat' according to William Hague.
A group of Libyan farm workers captured this elite gang after an exchange of gunfire. This goes to show how a people, never mind their status in society, can react in situations where they feel their new found freedom could be challenged or jeopardised.
If such a situation had occurred before the uprising you can be sure the farm hands would have looked the other way and gone about their day to day business like as if nothing had happened. That was the extent of the 'disconnect' between the Arabs and their pro-West tyrant leaders before the Arab uprising. Suddenly the Arabs have found hope and sincerely believe they can be free like many other people in the world.
Coming back to Egypt, a delegation of Palestinian Christians at a recent public gathering at the Anglican Church at Baudhaloka Mawatha said the bomb outside a church in Cairo on Christmas day was the work of the Mubarak regime much to the horror of Bishop Chickera who was in the chair.
The Lavon affair where the Israelis used Egyptian Jews to plant bombs at American centres in Cairo and put the blame on Egyptians should serve as a stark reminder to the Egyptians that the Israelis and the Americans will stoop to any level to avenge the 'loss' of Mubarak & Co.
It is now alleged that the knife and machete wielding thugs who attacked protestors at Tahrir Square just the other day turned out to be Mubarak's henchmen. Egyptians must bear in mind that it was Mubarak & Co. who constructed the underground wall on the Egyptian side of Gaza to prevent food and other necessities from reaching the over 1.5 million people trapped in the Israeli-U.S. imposed Nazi type concentration camp that is Gaza.
Bear also in mind that it was Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's 'successor' who told the Israelis not to starve the Palestinians in Gaza but only to keep them 'permanently hungry'. People Like him still breathe the same air as all of us and as long as they are around you can be sure they will do anything to regain their lost status. Egyptians must be on guard day and night to make certain their revolution is not scuttled or the 'future' they have fought for might be postponed or cancelled.
(The writer is the vice president of the Sri Lanka Palestinian Solidarity Movement)
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