This will not be of much consolation to the people and victims in Brussels, but it’s important to put the timeline of terrorism in Western Europe in perspective. As the chart by Satista shows, this, by far, is not the worst decade of terrorism in Western Europe. The 1970s and 1980s saw, primarily but not limited to, terrorist groups like ETA, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), West German Red Army Faction (RAF), the Italian Red Brigades, the French Action Directe (AD), and the Belgian Communist Combatant Cells, cause high amounts of deaths and carnage in European cities. Yet Europe managed to successfully subdue them to a great degree. There is no reason it will not succeed in overcoming the Islamist terrorist scourge.
The illustration should serve as a reminder that terrorism committed by citizens against fellow citizens is not something novel to European history. Also, the difference between today and past decades of one’s exposure to reports of terrorism is that social media makes us live vicariously through the violence unleashed and tears shed due to round-the-clock reporting, Facebook posts and tweets. Consequently, feeding into an exacerbation of our fears and stretching our human attentive capacity to its extreme limits. This is an astronomical leap from the old days of watching the six o’clock news to see a five-minute report and reading an article in the following day’s newspaper.
To emphasise, the diagram should not make one relax or underestimate the gravity of today’s terrorist acts – a grave threat that needs to be dealt with in all seriousness. Yet there is no reason not to take a leaf from history to inspire hope that at the end of it all, with concerted political will and collective human efforts, ISIS and its mutations will wither away and become another failed experiment. History is not on their side.
To those who cast doubt on the success of the Egyptian revolution. Step back, look around you, and reflect for a moment.
[From Alexandria’s Stanley neighborhood: “The People,” the eternal cry of the revolutionary voice that would follow it up with “Demand the fall of [insert your current oppressor here].”As a result of the revolution, your social relations have been dramatically reconfigured. You have made new friends of strangers. You speak a new political language never known before. Your relationship to the state and public has been redefined. You have been involved in an unprecedented archival culture that narrates everything that has been happening. For every document, photograph and video will aid the next generation in resuming where you have finished off. For you cannot move forward without defining your relationship to the past.
Your understanding of history has been permanently altered. The 2011 revolution ruptured the political and social timeline giving you a new source of historical legitimacy. It gave you a critical juncture that emits a wave of vivid memories of sacrifices, victories, and betrayals of your hopes.
The 2011 revolution gave you a new validity to hold onto, and to rival any previous validity. No longer do you live in vain waiting for a future democratic “paradise”, you now realise that such a paradise needs to be shifted from the future to the present, from a goal to a process, to be instigated in small doses to the best of your human capacity.
The revolution in effect destroyed the previous dominant situation and cannot consolidate the new dominant situation, which can easily be clouded by the smokescreen of arrests and crackdowns.
That is what the revolution achieved. It did not arrive to give you a choice of regimes. It arrived to initiate a new beginning, one that is already on its course. You, among many, have been given a shared fundamental worldview that you unconsciously implement every day, and will determine the course of events in the present and, more theatrically, when the climate is ripe in your favour.
In a marvellous transformation, you can no longer recognise your pre-2011 self.
“In Egypt, there is freedom of speech, but no freedom after speech” – went the running joke at a recent conference in Berlin that brought a number of prominent Egyptian media figures and scholars together. The aim was to discuss the deplorable state of the country’s lack of freedom of the press, amid a wide-scale assault on professional journalism. With minimal risk of security forces storming the event Cairo-style (or cancelling it), the space was wide open for a conversation on how journalists deal with the challenges of operating in a state of repression, and for crafting a way forward.
The event took place as journalists are being arrested and harassed in Egypt – a country which ranks 158 out in 180 countries in the 2015 World Press Freedom Index. Ismail Alexandrani is among the latest journalists to be detained (as a result of a tip-off from the Egyptian embassy in Berlin).
Figures and reports cannot, however, capture the human anxiety, courage and endurance that characterises the lives of Egyptian journalists when they decide to step out of line with the regime.
In her opening speech, Reem Maguid, a popular media anchor hounded by the regime, harkened back to an old Egyptian proverb, “Is there shame in [asking] a question?” This basic journalistic exercise of asking a question, Maguid added, often outrages authorities, which makes it clear that it is not the question that is the problem, but the mere act of asking and thinking.
The answer to Maguid’s question could perhaps be partly found in the ordeal of Hossam Bahgat’s incarceration. Bahgat, a journalist with Mada Masr, was taken into military detention for writing an article on the military. Bahgat was asked one question through the hours in detention by everyone, even those who were not involved in his prosecution case: “Why did you write about the military?” Incessantly repeated, it eventually dawned on Bahgat that the question was in fact genuine. The conflict between Egypt’s professional journalists and the regime, Bahgat noted, does not happen at the level of discourse or policies, but is more fundamental; it is a question of opposing worldviews; “Anything that deviates from the official line is seen as a weird phenomenon,” he explained.
Many independent-minded journalists are determined to hold onto the relative media freedoms they enjoyed in 2011–2012 following the uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, researcher Mostafa Shaat points out how freedoms in that period were simply “political bargains forced on the political regime by the waves of mass protests.” Now the state, Shaat emphasizes, has returned to rewarding its loyal journalists with legal immunity from prosecution, while deliberately targeting independent journalists.
There is an overall feeling of arbitrariness in how decisions are made in today’s peculiar form of despotism. Different security agencies were apparently unaware that Bahgat had been summoned. This state of arbitrariness and unpredictability makes the situation even more frightening. “Never underestimate the stupidity of dictators,” Bahgat added. “These are not rational people; you should not look for a reason.”
Hitting a similar note, maverick media anchor Yosri Fouda pleaded for common sense to come back into high politics. “It’s important we move in the right direction. Don’t tell me the train is going to Aswan when it’s heading to Alexandria!” Fouda exclaimed.
The question of courage was naturally a topic journalists often grappled with. Maguid gave a moving account: “Being brave is great, but being professional is greater [long silence]. But we are weak. The price paid is getting higher. At some point, I was ready to be jailed or killed. But I’m not ready for harm to come to my family. I’m not ready for them to pay the price for me.”
For those walking the line of investigative journalism, Bahgat gave this warning: “There is a difference between being a brave journalist and a reckless one. Martyrdom does not feel good when you are locked up. Don’t try to be a martyr without at least calculating the consequences.”
Yet what drives journalism is a quest for the truth. “I am incapable of telling half the truth,” said Maguid. Bahgat noted that there is a “crisis when security forces kill people in an apartment and say it was an exchange of fire – that there can be no other narrative to this.”
Regarding his controversial article, Bahgat addressed the need to break boundaries and set precedents. “I feel insulted at the silent imaginary gag order in which journalists are not allowed to report that a trial even happened. What is worse and more dangerous than censorship, physical danger, or losing your job – is failing to report the story. I wanted to show you can run the story, that it can be done.”
But he warns that “it took many weeks before I decided the story was ready. Have all the evidence, introduce editorial concessions, make the story possible to defend… minimise the damage that can be done.”
However, he conceded that Mada Masr had underestimated the military’s attention to online media. “What’s depressing is that even when you follow journalistic ethics, you are [still] not safe,” he said.
These word echoed those of Abeer Saady, from Egypt’s journalism syndicate, who underscored self-responsibility among journalists: “If you don’t regulate yourself as a journalist. Then someone else will.”
Fouda reminded the audience what their profession is supposed to entail: “Our job as journalists is not to facilitate an easy life for the authorities.”
While the question of how to advance Egypt’s journalism saw a difference of opinions, what was certainly easier to acknowledge was the inability to return to the pre-2011 status quo. Conference organiser and scholar, Hanan Badr, aptly repeated Fouda’s memorable words in 2011: “Freedom is like death. You cannot experience death and return, and you cannot experience freedom and return.”
Fouda, among the more optimistic of the speakers, stressed how we should not lose sight of the goal that unfolded during the revolution’s 18 days. He reminded the audience how state-owned television channels were broadcasting a vivid scene of the Nile River – pristine and calm – while a few blocks away, Tahrir Square was rising up in its revolutionary glory. The contrasting scenes signified to him that the events of 2011 marked the fall of what the authoritarian state media had inherited from the 1950s and 1960s.
Fouda finally paraphrased John F. Kennedy’s words, “If you make professional journalism impossible, then you [the regime] deserve all the rubbish that is happening to you.” Here is the paradox of the regime’s repression: they realise their own media is losing credibility, and thus undermining the official narrative.
The journalists’ tireless efforts, coupled with the emerging cracks in the regime’s unsustainable endeavour, enables them to continue with their hazardous work, testing the boundaries, and, at times, breaking them. The future of Egyptian media freedom and professional journalism looked quite bright by the end of the discussion – but hopefully not only in Germany.
Imagine, when Bashar al-Assad and his regime was
confronted with an uprising in early 2011, he could have
wisely stepped down, initiated a democratic transition or negotiated a power-sharing agreement. He instead declared war on his own people, caused one of the largest refugee exodus in modern history, laid the foundation for radicalisation, indirectly gave birth to ISIS, lost half his territory to ISIS, killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, lost the heritage of centuries, lost international legitimacy, opened up his government to interference from Russia and Iran (and the Gulf monarchies who exploited and supported his opponents).
Not to mention the latest terror attacks, nothing certainly original, but the blood splattered in Ankara, Sinai, Beirut and Paris has a trail that, in part, goes back to the chaos in Syria.
It could have all been so different, and all this heartache and agony for what? Because Assad could not bring himself to, at the very least, sit at the same table with protest leaders and citizens during the honeymoon days of the Arab uprisings. No, he just could not do it. It was beneath him. Alas, power and privilege is so intoxicating that it makes you believe the price of civilisational collapse is worth it.
“In Egypt, an anti-terror law has been approved that toughens sentences for crime and protects authorities in enforcing the law. Journalists can be heavily fined under the new law for publishing details of terrorism which differ to the government’s version. Amro Ali, an Egypt analyst from the University of Sydney, speaks on the increasingly ‘authoritarian’ direction taken up by the Egyptian regime.”
The late poet, writer and activist Shaimaa el-Sabbagh who was killed by security forces on 24 January 2015, as she was walking to lay flowers for those who have fallen in Tahrir, has, this month, been painted on the walls of her home and the surrounding vicinity in Moharem Bey, Alexandria. The moving words that accompany the images says it all:
“The one who fears the sun will have to imprison the day.”
“is there anyone guaranteed to walk in safety or not in safety – where can they walk?” – Sheikh Imam
In taking her life away, they inadvertently made her into a powerful living symbol. Rest in peace.
Left: “The one who fears the sun will have to imprison the day.” Right: “Freedom”left: “Is there anyone guaranteed to walk in safety or not in safety – where can they walk?” – Sheikh Imam
“Shaimaa in paradise”
“The flower of Shaimaa” [in the form of a clinched fist]Source: Shaimaa el-Sabbagh Facebook page.
It’s no easy feat to restore the seventh wonder of the ancient world, but then along came modern-day Egyptian exceptionalism with its mega projects to obscure political and economic ills. The Pharos of Alexandria is now slated for resurrection after its demise in a powerful earthquake more than 600 years ago.
Today, the lighthouse icon adorns everything from the Alexandria Governorate flag, to the crest of Alexandria University, to public service logos, to wall paintings on elementary schools. One might argue its symbolic force arises from its invisibility — Alexandria’s cultural strength lies in the imagination. Reconstructing it might skew that imaginary past. But that’s the least of its problems.
In fact, Alexandria is at risk of being subjected to a commercial and geographical disfigurement by a project with no public accountability — and the silence on the issue is deeply troubling.
The odyssey of an idea The story starts in 1978, when Alexandria resident and diplomat Omar al-Hadidi suggested rebuilding the lighthouse to then-Governor Fouad Helmy. The idea was not only welcomed, but pushed in the international media, capitalizing on then-President Anwar al-Sadat’s sky-rocking international stature as a result of the Camp David talks. However, a parallel development was underway, with one set of Alexandria’s cultural elites pushing for the resurrection of the ancient library. After 1981, the newly instated President Hosni Mubarak took on the latter with enthusiasm, elevating it to a global project, while work on the lighthouse dragged on in its shadow.
The lighthouse concept was a form of decentralization and a subset of a culture war with Cairo’s elites. The idea started innocuously enough. But the project was transitioning into the neoliberal age, with academics and cultural workers receding into the background and the rise of new money coming in its place.
When Mohamed Mahgoub took over as governor in 1997, he rightfully gawked at the 32 companies competing over the project, some of whom were suggesting to make it into a glass and steel building that would house a shopping mall, with laser beams instead of the traditional lantern at the top. Fortunately, Mahgoub cancelled the entire project for the then-foreseeable future.
But the idea was taken up again in 2005 by the Alexandria and Mediterranean Research Center (AlexMed) as part of a series of projects toward a vision to develop the East Harbor. The vision was proposed in the Alexandria City Development Strategy (CDS) process (2004-2008) “to assist to Alexandria Governorate to complete its City Development Strategic Framework for sustainable development and prepare for its implementation technically and institutionally.”
The East Harbor Development spent the duration of the lead-up to the 2011 revolution seeking funding opportunities. Post-2011 events saw an Alexandria that was in flux, and the project was restored again, now described as “a new definition for the relationship with the waterfront in coastal cities … rebuilding the old lighthouse in the area facing the library of Alexandria, located in Chatby, as well as building a residency hotel for tourists.” Alexandria’s cultural activists were too busy trying to save historic villas from being destroyed by the real estate mafia to worry about a theoretical project that was proposed before they were born.
But a surprise came in May, when Supreme Council of Antiquities Secretary General Mostafa Amin told the privately owned newspaper Youm7 that “members of the Permanent Committee of Egyptian Antiquities have approved an old project, submitted previously by the Alexandria Governorate, aiming to revive the lighthouse. The comprehensive studies and a final plan have been submitted to Alexandria’s governor for final approval.” The unexpected certitude of his statement set off alarm bells.
The project was unusually absent from the Egypt Economic Development Conference (EEDC) that was launched with great fanfare in early March 2015, even though the website of the General Authority for Investment and Free Zones (GAFI) — an affiliate of the Ministry of Investment, and the principal government body regulating and facilitating investment in Egypt — briefly describes the “revival of the old Lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos)” project as “establishing a science museum reflecting the heritage value of the old lighthouse and a hotel, conference center, restaurants, concert hall and a marine club.” To date, the lighthouse project is listed with no budget estimation.
Mohamed Nabeel, the executive manager of Save Alexandria, notes that “all information announced so far was just to propagandize the East Harbor Project under the name of reviving cosmopolitan Alexandria, and hence attract investments. However, no information has been made available for the public about what their government is doing, no public participation that promotes accountability. And, overall, no transparency.”
This raises the question of which company will take on the lighthouse project. The governorate is supposed to open a call for bids within a transparent framework that guarantees integrity and public participation. But Nabeel believes that a top-down approach will probably be taken, and allocation will be given to “one of the state’s institutions or business sectors, such as the Arab Contractors. If the property belongs to the military, then the Military Engineering Authority shall handle the project, or the allocation of subcontractors might be applied.” Western architectural firms, however, have been behind a series of outrageous proposals to mutilate the city.
Alexandria Lighthouse … Why?
Not only do the proposed designs show the lighthouse containing shopping malls and a hotel, but the lighthouse is also part of a larger project to revamp the entire area. The 2007 report exploits the city’s Achilles heel of nostalgia and recognition: “The renovation of the whole Eastern Harbor with special emphasis on conservation, bringing into perspective the unique feature of dialogue of cultures symbolized in Alexandria’s cosmopolitan architecture. Evoking the past is experienced in integrating past and present grids in the new development, the revival of the academia with a new research facility, reviving the ancient Soma axis round the development of Silselah (peninsula stretching out from the library location), recreating the Pharos while highlighting the importance of the underwater archaeology and developing the Fort Museum. The concept emphasizes creating pedestrian experiences and establishing a relationship with the water edge while promoting leisure activities such as bathing, yachting, fishing or visiting the royal yacht Al-Mahrousa.”
Figure 1: Conceptual imaginative design for the revival of the Lighthouse
It sounds beautiful on paper, and how could one say no to such a development, let alone not be charmed by the visual rending model? That is, until you realize this is about the venerable Alexandria. We have been down this path before — no flowery text and diagrams ever actually factor into the world of Alexandria’s power structures, complex social relations, economic inequity, informal economy, the fate of fishermen, unearthed archeological treasures and so forth. Nabeel raises the concern that the implementation of Phase I & II (2004-2009) of the CDS process has shown that no proper monitoring or evaluation has been carried out, no positive implications and, most crucially, no public participation.
Figure Two shows a 2009 design by the Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP that renders Alexandria in the year 2030. This is the same company that designed the Burj Khalifa, and it notes Egypt’s Culture Ministry as its client (they also report to be leading the planning of Egypt’s new capital city). There is not a single Alexandrian of any persuasion that I have shown these images to who hasn’t given me a look of horror in response.
Figure 2: Proposed design of Alexandria in 2030, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP Architect
Egyptian and foreign-based firms have an obsession with slick, futuristic, cutting-edge designs, forgetting that maintenance is not one of Alexandria’s assets. Alexandria could always veil its lack of maintenance and infrastructure behind its rustic, antiquated and historical image. But anything with a futuristic public planning streak would suffer from poor maintenance.
The politics are bigger than the lighthouse
Since the 1990s, Alexandria’s public spaces have been subjected to an ideology of revivalism. This involves resurrecting cosmopolitan-era fixtures like gas-light lamp posts, and placing statues like Alexander the Great and Cleopatra in public space. The crowning achievement of revivalism was the unveiling of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2002. While revivalism brought some benefits, it has more to do with political branding, in which the state imposes a narrative from above upon the public. Furthermore, these nostalgic motifs frequently act as a guise for neoliberalism. Historically, Alexandria is treated like the political laboratory for Egypt’s reckless economic experiments.
Had the governorate been sincere about revivalism and preserving the heritage of the city, it would have saved countless monarchical-era villas from destruction. Preserving what we already have counts far more than any lighthouse bells-and-whistles project. But the reality is not about amplifying Alexandria’s rich cultural history as much as it is about what aspects of its history can be vulgarly commercialized at the expense of the public good. There is not even a proposed lighthouse design that will stay faithful to its ancestor of antiquity, which was built out of limestone, granite and white marble. Rather, it will be something resembling a watered-down version of Burj Khalifa.
One investor proposed “relocating” the iconic Citadel of Qaitbay to build the lighthouse in its place. The thoughtless idea was quickly quashed. But it shows what the city is up against.
Figure 3: The Pharos “Hotel”| designed by the Alexandria Mediterranean Research Center and Studio Bertocchini & Ruggiero
“Capitalism talks here,” says Islam Asem, director of the Tourist Guide Syndicate. “If these investors could destroy the pyramids and build something profitable in its place, they would not hesitate for a moment.” It is largely faceless investors that are sitting on boards making decisions, Asem laments, not academics, cultural workers and UNESCO.
Asem states that the proposed lighthouse location would further weaken the grounds holding up the fragile citadel, and destroy the Greco-Roman ruins under the seabed. This is not to mention the aesthetic disruption of the Alexandria skyline by having a modern building next to the citadel. Asem says it’s better for the project to be constructed far away, in Montazah or Aboukir.
Nabeel also supports this view.
“A metropolitan city cannot be reduced to its city center,” he says, warning that under this kind of development plan, Alexandria “will see more urban segregation and, hence, urban rebellion.”
That urban rebellion was a familiar trait of the city through the sporadic, pre-revolution upheavals of the 2000s that were spurred on by the privatization drive. This can only worsen if the city’s soul is further compromised.
The inability to develop a strategic vision for the city is reflective of the city’s high politics. Any new governor is usually initially met by Alexandria’s civil society with hesitation by default, due to a lack of an electoral mandate. This was the case when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi appointed Hany al-Messiry governor in February 2015, especially because left-wing activists were concerned with his free-market economics philosophy. However, a number of them allowed him breathing room for a few reasons. He was from Alexandria, which fulfils the basic providential nationalism criteria. He was a civilian, and not from the military. He was perceived as refined, due to being educated abroad and international exposure. Most importantly, he took a favorable approach to working with civil society.
But such strengths were exploited by different groups and power factions. The media started attacking Messiry for bringing his wife with him to meetings. Then hyper-nationalists took issue with him because he was not from the military. Security entities were calling up civil society workers to “discourage” them from meeting with the governor.
This all came to a head when an anti-governor protest was held in late May to protest Messiry’s dual nationality (he holds American and Egyptian citizenship). Demonstrators chanted, “Go out Messiry, Alexandria is free” while burning the American flag. One source told me the protestors were hired by private contractors after the governor refused to issue new building contracts. It’s notable that the Protest Law was not implemented for this demonstration, and no one was arrested, raising questions of security complicity.
Marianne Sedhom, who co-runs Iskanderya mabatshee Mareya — an environmental initiative that roughly translates as “Alexandria is no longer pretty” — highlights the obstacles to governor faces. For example, when Messiry issues a decree to halt work on, or to destroy, an illegally constructed building, corrupt elements within a district board will issue building permits to allow more illegal buildings to go up, she claims.
Such is the toxic climate out of which the lighthouse, or any development for that matter, will emerge. This is not to write off the lighthouse as a bad idea. The lighthouse has the potential to be a powerful uniting public icon bridging the cultural imaginary between the past and the present, solidifying civic identity, attracting tourists, and more. But this is only if it is done appropriately, with transparency and broader public discussion on the matter. No lighthouse is better than a badly planned lighthouse that violates aesthetics and social, heritage, communal and environmental factors.
The historical magnitude of rebuilding the lighthouse requires it to be the result of a clear vision and coherent civic narrative. It should not be built to resolve or eclipse existing divisions. If modern Alexandrian history is any indicator, it will become not the symbol of a communal spirit, but the symbol of excess and a visible target of rage.
There is a lesson to be learned from the unveiling of the ancient lighthouse in 247 BC. After 12 years of construction, the architect Sostratus was under no illusion that he had to dedicate the new monument to Ptolemy and his wife — but he would not allow history to forget his hard work and the people it was intended to serve. So he engraved his words in the stone, then he placed a plaster plaque etched with a dedication to the Ptolemies over it. With time, wind and sea salt ate away at the plaster. Long after the monarch and the architect passed away, the plaster decayed and fell apart, revealing his words: “Sostratus, son of Dexiphanes the Cnidian, dedicated this to the Savior Gods, on behalf of all those who sail the seas.”
With time, the narrative that emerges out of this project might not be the one that the state had intended.
If there was one legacy, among many, of president Gamal Abdel Nasser that Egypt could have done without – it is the peculiar suspicion of foreigners, to the point of embarrassment, that rode the region’s pan-Arab nationalism wave in the 1950s and 1960s. A problem that still, in various manifestations, continues up until today through institutions, mass media and the public discourse.
Behind the iconic image of legendary jazz musician Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet at the Pyramids – stood an artist that, you would think, had no relation to Egypt’s politics and the Middle East conflict, and infact once stated “I don’t know nothin’ about politics”, was dragged into a mind-boggling controversy.
On his visit to Egypt in 1961, Armstrong was standing in a Cairo hotel lobby packed with over 20 news reporters who asked him if he supported Zionism. It must have been like asking Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez visiting Russia as to what he thought of the imperialist forces in the emerging Vietnamese conflict.
An incredulous Armstrong replied “What is that Daddy?” The reporters were surprised that an artist, immersed in his own world, was ignorant of their regional issues, the reporters said: “You helped the Jews a lot.” Armstrong, replied “Yeah, I help them. I help anybody. I help you. You need help? I help anybody’. He continued “I’m going to tell you this. I got a trumpet, and I got a young wife, and I ain’t got time to fool with none of the stuff you guys talking about”
Armstrong just walked off and left them all in the lobby.
It was, however, the incessant suspicions of Armstrong in the lead-up to his visit that raised his ire. In 1959, Egyptian newspapers were circulating rumours that Armstrong was the leader of an Israeli spy network. Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper went as far as to report that Lebanese security authorities uncovered a spy ring that was reportedly working undercover with various artistic troupes. The report stated “Among the leading members of the gang was the famous American Nergro musician Louis Armstrong, who had recently visited Beirut.”
When this was brought to Armstrong’s attention, he responded “I’ve been called many things in my life but this is the first time I’ve ever been called a spy.” When asked to sum up his feelings about the report, he replied “bunk.”
For a while, Armstrong ignored the rumours, but he drew the line when Nasser himself added his weight to the senseless reports. In 1960, the Egyptian president went further and believed that one of Armstrong’s “Scat singing” record was used by the artist to pass secrets during his first 1959 tour of the Middle East. An outraged Armstrong, in Boston at the time, mailed Nasser a copy of the suspect record, with a note rebutting the accusations:
“It’s all Greek to me. They claimed all that junk because I played in Israel. I don’t have to be a spy to earn a living. I have enough money blowing the horn and I have a very happy life doing it. Why don’t you tell these people who are spreading all this stuff to come around. I’ll tell them a few good traveling salesman jokes.”
It is not known how Nasser reacted. However, he did not stop the musician’s visit to Egypt the following year.
The achievement of Arab unity was so close, until the below Skat song and its encrypted subversive message destroyed it all.
The 1959 Middle East tour, that Nasser referred to, saw a prophetic Armstrong when, in Beirut, sitting around with colleagues and reporters, all smoking hashish, was asked “Say, how come you going playing for them damn Jews down in Israel?” Armstrong replied “Let me tell you something. When I go down there, the first thing they going to tell me, how come you play for them damn Arabs over there? Let me tell you something, man. That horn”, pointing to his prized instrument, “you see that horn? That horn ain’t prejudiced. A note’s a note in any language.”
True enough, when Armstrong landed in Israel, the first question he was asked as to why he plays in Arab countries, a furious Armstrong responded “I told them that you guys were going to say the same damn thing. So ain’t none of you no better than the other side. You’s as bad as they are, man”
Poor Armstrong, no wonder why he suffered a heart attack that same year in which his health would only deteriorate from this point onwards.
“If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it” – Louis Armstrong
Of course, this is not to overlook the fact the US State Department sent artists like Armstrong on public and cultural diplomacy initiatives around the world to counter the influence of the Soviet Union in the developing world. Yet this is not the same deal as a “leader of an Israeli spy network.” It was atrocious enough that he suffered from the scourge of racism back home, even at the height of his fame, that he stated to an American reporter in 1957: “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.” He also told Ebony magazine in a 1964 interview: “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert. These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro.”
Yet, he was not even spared, at least ideologically, on the international platform.
The impoverished thinking that unfairly and irresponsibly attacked Armstrong – raised a generation that rules Egypt today, if not the Arab world, and sets the tone for a destructive conspiratorial language that tarnishes, if not sentences, the innocent, disembowels the political public sphere and foments political and social tensions. Armstrong visited an Israel that has since become an increasingly racist, brutal and a militarised state that would make Apartheid South Africa look like a lightweight. Not helped by the same government that sponsored Armstrong’s visit.
Armstrong’s encounter with the Middle East was a microcosmic reflection of the wider cancerous socio-political tumour of denial and scapegoating in the region that just keeps on festering with time. More so, the “What is that Daddy?” responses of Armstrong were refreshingly simple, altruistic and empathetic, in a complex, murky and relentless region where the indiscriminate use of words and charges are prone to lose all meaning.
So a posthumous note to Armstrong, nothing has changed since you left the Middle East, just more of the same, and worse. Someday, the meaning of ‘What a wonderful world’ will be understood and sung. Someday.
Louis Armstrong entertaining hospitalised children at the Tahhseen Al-Sahha Medical Centre, Cairo (1961). But if regime logic was applied, he was the Pied Piper leading innocent Egyptian children to their doom and causing Syria’s break-up from the United Arab Republic.
References:
Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York City: Pantheon, 2011) pp.180-181.
“Egyptians call Satcmo Armstrong Israeli Spy,” Jet Magazine (26 Nov 1959) p. 60.
“Satch Mails Egypt’s Nasser ‘Spy’ Platter,” Jet Magazine (14 April 1960) p. 61.
The Sydney University Politics Society
have organised a debate titled: The Islamic State is a bigger threat to world order than Cold War communism.
Although I disagree with the premise of the debate, I agreed to take part in it. I will be in the negative and therefore my position will be, basically, that ISIS is a dangerous security threat, but they are no Soviet Union. The talk will be more nuanced than that :).
Time: 5pm
Date: 2 June 2015
Venue: The Refectory, Quadrangle, University of Sydney
![[From Alexandria’s Stanley neighborhood: “The People,” the eternal cry of the revolutionary voice that would follow it up with “Demand the fall of [insert your current oppressor here].”](https://amroali.com/aspire/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/the-people-300x225.jpg)
transition or negotiated a power-sharing agreement. He instead declared war on his own people, caused one of the largest refugee exodus in modern history, laid the foundation for radicalisation, indirectly gave birth to ISIS, lost half his territory to ISIS, killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians, lost the heritage of centuries, lost international legitimacy, opened up his government to interference from Russia and Iran (and the Gulf monarchies who exploited and supported his opponents).
!["The flower of Shaimaa" [in the form of a clinched fist]](https://amroali.com/aspire/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Shaimaa-el-Sabbagh-5.jpg)
eat to world order than Cold War communism.