Egypt: Battle of the Narratives

Two conspiracy theories debunked

by Justin Raimondo, February 02, 2011

"The Egyptian events seem, on the face of it, fairly straightforward: a tyrant in office for 30 years, propped up by fulsome US support and a very efficient secret police apparatus, faces a full-scale revolution by his brutalized subjects, who are – finally! – enraged-beyond-endurance and just can’t take it anymore. A million people in the streets of Cairo are telling us this story, and one would think the wise thing to do would be to take their word for it.

But that’s hardly sufficient for some US commentators, who have their own agendas – and their own narratives to sell. While the number of wacky theories is perhaps equal to the number of wacky web sites out there – a figure which we cannot even begin to calculate – there are two major “alternative” narratives which have taken the lion’s share of the attention, and therefore deserve debunking.

The first, and most pernicious, is the Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theory, which holds that this deeply conservative and reified sect, which has been around since 1928, is “really” the driving force behind the movement to overthrow Mubarak. This is the theory being put out there by the Fox News network (Judge Andrew Napolitano of “Freedom Watch” excepted), the neoconservative usual suspects, and the Israel Lobby. Acting as a kind of human bullhorn for these groups, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton ......

Much more significant than hyped fears of a Brotherhood takeover, however, is the subtext of this fear campaign, which is all about regime change being bad for Israel. A new government, no matter how liberal on the surface, and how US-friendly it may turn out, is bound to be less friendly to Israel, and certainly far less willing to keep the Palestinians penned up in Gaza......

What these two seemingly contradictory narratives have in common is that they both assign the Egyptian people to, at best, a supporting role in the events now unfolding before our eyes. The neocons tells us that the Brotherhood is the secret manipulator pulling the strings behind the scenes, while others insist the long arm of the US State Department (and, presumably, the CIA) is the hidden hand behind Mubarak’s ouster. Both “theories” are nonsense......"