(Photo from OneArabWorld.)
Karim Eslahy has posted a link to photos of Sunday's demonstration against terrorism organized by Egyptian bloggers. We're still trying to confirm how many people attended, but Karim reports: “Very small turnout and the cops made them leave but proportionally significant coverage nonetheless.”
Attendees included The Big Pharaoh, Sandmonkey, Highlander, and Mindbleed.
The protest was the maiden activity of a new organization, Pray 4 Peace, which Karim started because he says he is sick of the cycle of violence in which everybody takes sides and obsesses over who started what. He writes:
I no longer care who started what. I only care how it ends.
If enough of us can get together, shed our differences, and unite in the face of violence we can make a difference.
20 comments
OK, wait a minute. I missed the message in #2 stating that in Sharm alSheikh, scene of the bloodshed, 1,000 people marched against the violence. I hope it was indeed about the rejection of terrorism in the Muslim way of life that some of the quotes represent it to be. Because most of the other quotes emphasize the economic impact on these resort workers being a major reason for marching.
There seems to a murky borderline zone in this debate where Muslims can feel contaminated by the projections of the West (“terrorist” “jihad” “extremists”) and where non-Muslims feel contaminated by their lack of experience of Islam, of repressive forms of government, or by the (historically inspired) projections of non-Westerners (“colonialists” “Islamophobes” “Orientalists”). Murky is good…This comment has got rather long and rambling, so I have removed the rest of it to my own blog.
…in case that html didn’t work out, here is the URL for my blog again: http://www.thespiritmercurious.blogspot.com
…and here is an approach to the terrorism debate which I find daring, difficult, murky, but ultimately the best I have seen anywhere…
“…the terrorist has inadvertently become a mirror image of the thing she or he hates the most. She or he is a product of hopelessness, created in part by everybody else’s misunderstanding of who she or he is and what she or he stands for.”
http://www.aamindell.net/shortrecipe.htm
Rufus: You are asking some difficult questions which have just as much of a place in this debate as the questions the West needs to ask itself about its foreign policy and colonial history. I found the photo of the Egyptian bloggers enormously heartening. Numbers aren’t everything. And apathy is everywhere. Now I’m really going to do some (paid) work…
I see that SandMonkey has finally got official permission and is giving the demonstration another go today.
Instapundit is also giving it play.
http://egyptiansandmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/07/it-is-on.html
Yep we’re on top of it Rufus. Reported it in our roundups section today: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/07/28/egypt-vigil-this-friday/
Here is a completely demoralizing account of how many so-called moderate Muslims are still unwilling even to admit who their terrorist persecuters are.
http://www.nysun.com/article/17686
Another unfortunate postponement of the galvanized, heartfelt public outcry against terrrorism by the Muslim masses, we all know is just chomping at the bit to take to the streets.
http://onearabworld.blog.com/273793/
I wonder who terrorists view as terrorists.