Andrew C. McCarthy:
Al-Ahram is reporting that Haze El-Beblawy has been appointed Egypt’s interim prime minister.
Beblawy is a lawyer and a progressive, Paris-educated economist. He was a prominent banker during the Mubarak regime, worked at the U.N., and, following Mubarak’s ouster, was deputy finance minister and, later, finance minister, under the government led by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. His Wikipediabio indicates that he resigned from office after an October 2011 incident in which Coptic Christians were killed by security forces (I recount that incident in Spring Fever). He helped found the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, and also writes a weekly column for Al-Ahram (which is state-controlled).
Between this appointment and the issuance of a new “constitutional declaration” yesterday, it is clear that the post-coup government is attempting to do what thedemocracy fetish — specifically, the elections equal democracy fallacy — prevented it from doing the first time around: Establish a functioning, competent government that first installs the fundamentals of minority rights and equal protection, then enshrines those principles in a constituiton, and only then — based on that foundation — conducts popular elections. There is a good chance that it won’t work. After all, this is Egypt and, given the opportunity, Egyptians have repeatedly shown that they will vote by lopsided margins for anti-democratic Islamic supremacists over pro-Western democrats and progressives. As Mark trenchantly observed yesteday, “Egypt is imprisoned less by its passing dictators than by its own psychoses.” Nevertheless, what’s done is done, and the present course is the best chance some semblance of democracy has to take root. We should be cautiously encouraging it.
I think the generals and their appointed president, Adly Mansour, are figuring Beblawy is Mohammed ElBaradei without the baggage. While ElBaradei (a Bush nemesis and Iran’s best friend when he ran the IAEA) is very popular among Western progressives, he is held in low regard in his native Egypt — where Islamic supremacism holds sway and where, as I noted here last week, he has had trouble trying to vote, let alone running for office.
3….2…1…
In other words, how long before the Muslim Brotherhood falsely charge that this man, too, is a ”secret Jew?”
Adly Mansour was already called that by the MB.
Yes, they quickly deleted these words from their web site.
But the words had gone all around Egypt first.