Mubarack Regime Targets Family of Opposition Candidate

A sham democracy in the name of narcissism.

The Egyptian regime annually reinstates "Emergency Laws" first enacted after the assassination of president Anwar Sadat.

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Every year the regime cited this or that fallacious pretext in order to justify the renewal and every year the regime states that the "laws" will only be applied selectively and with great restraint.

But the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak - nearly 30 years in office - has never shown much restraint when it comes to undercutting opposition candidates.

Mubarak did not even allow for a presidential contest until his decade and the candidate who did the best against him - and even that was only 8% of the vote - was shortly after the election arrested, charged and convicted on dubious grounds and sentenced to years in prison (he was recently released after already serving much of his term). The regime can easily dismiss and harass this or that candidate if they come from a marginal left-wing party of the Muslim Brotherhood (in the case of the latter, since they are much cause for suspicion in the West, the dismissal has the approval of Western governments).

But the recent candidacy of Mohammed el-Baradi is not so easy. el-Baradi is a public figure in the West who for years was the president of the UN-body, the International Atomic Energy Association, maintains contact with senior officials in Western governments, and is a recent recipient of the Noble Peace Prize.

This is not a man, given his public standing, which the Egyptian regime can easily arrest and detain, or disqualify or brand as a dangerous Islamist in order to undermine him without causing serious harm to its image in the West. The sight of a Noble Peace Prize winner being attacked by the Egyptian secret police is an image the regime wants to avoid. But, at the same time, they fear his candidacy and worry that his campaign may derail the hopes of the president to install his son, Gamal Mubarak, as his successor.

So the regime is adopting a more subtle campaign against him:

“I am suffocated,” says Mr ElBaradei. “We can’t have a headquarters, can’t raise funds, can’t hold public meetings. All I can do is go and visit a few places, and then after I leave they arrest a few.” Kuwait, a country friendly to Egypt’s regime, summarily expelled a group of Egyptian workers who had innocently created a local support group for Mr ElBaradei. In advance of his scheduled visit to the rural province of Fayoum in May, companies that rent equipment for public events received warnings not to work with him or risk having their equipment seized. Private television stations have been “advised” to pay less attention to the upstart, well aware that their owners’ useful government links may be at stake.

And this now includes going after his family:

The level of dirty tricks by the Mubarak regime is getting lower and lower. As long as the Mubarak family has the endorsement of the Likud in Israel, Mubarak feels confident--up to a point. So one of the goons of the Mubarak regime snuck into the Facebook account of Muhammad Al-Baradi`i's daughter, Layla, and posted in the Egyptian state press pictures of her in a bikini and her characterization of her faith as "agnostic."

Notice that barely a word of protest has been heard by Western governments of media, because their protestation against abuse of dissidents and defense of human rights is not about principles but an opportunistic phony preach only against those authoritarian regimes which, for whatever reason, are not in league with American imperialism in the region (i.e. Iran and Syria.) If the Syrian regime was behaving like this toward a Noble Peace Prize winner, the New York Times would make it front page.

But the dictator Mubarak gets a pass, because he is an American client and bowing down to Israel and joining its collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza.