First results of Egyptian elections: Egyptian military has promised democracy will be limited

There are indications that Islamists have done well in Egypt's first round of elections. Perhaps better than expected.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

Later in the article, the New York Times explains that the Egyptian military dictatorship has given assurances to Westerners that Egypt's voters will not control foreign policy.

The new majority is likely to increase the difficulty of sustaining the United States’ close military and political partnership with post-Mubarak Egypt, though the military has said it plans to maintain a monopoly over many aspects of foreign affairs.

It almost goes without saying that what the New York Times is relieved to report is that for the benefit of Israel, or so that fewer than six million Jewish people can have an enforced political majority state (unlike white South Africans who suffer the indignity of living in a non-white political majority state), more than 80 million people should be denied representative or accountable control over their foreign policy.

Barack Obama lied when he said colonialism is over.

The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism.

Many of the states of the Middle East are the exact same states, ruled by the exact same regimes put in place by imperial Great Britain. If colonialism ended in UAE or Jordan, when did that happen? Not only do those regimes not have different relationships with the United States than their acknowledged colonial predecessors had with their global empire, but no event has marked their freedom or independence from imperial control.

Obama is not mistaken. He is lying. He knows his control over the policies of the US empire in the Middle East operates exactly the way Winston Churchill's empire controlled largely the same subordinate political bodies.

It may be instructive to take another look at how Egypt was treated as a colonial subordinate around 100 years ago.

When at last the combined forces of the occupying army and the Interior Ministry were able to quell months of strikes and protests, the British were compelled to reconsider their position towards Egypt. The eventual outcome of that process was the unilateral decision in March 1922 to grant Egypt a qualified independence. Although the country would be governed thereafter as a constitutional monarchy, the British retained the right to intervene in any matters seen to affect the security of imperial communications, the interests and safety of foreigners on Egyptian soil, the threat of foreign invasion, or the status of Egypt's relationship with the Sudan.

But beyond the fact that Obama lied about the colonial status of the Middle East, it is important to understand why he lied.

The United States is not a proudly colonialist country, even as much as Great Britain was in 1922. By the United States' professed values, the concerns of fewer six million Jewish people do not outweigh those of more than 80 million Egyptians. The idea that US policy should be shifted to that degree is racist even by the US' own currently claimed moral standards.

The idea that the rights of over 400 million people in Israel's region, including in this example 80 million Egyptians, should be limited to ensure that fewer than six million Jewish people never have to live in a non-Jewish political majority state has survived as long as it has in the United States people like Juan Cole and organizations like the New York Times closing discussion to prevent the issue from being raised.

This is a topic that is not even, according to US values, subject to debate. Is a majority Jewish state worth harming 400 million non-Jews in Israel's region? No. By US claimed values there is no coherent argument that could be made otherwise.

Instead gatekeepers have prevented the question from being asked on any substantial scale. But as the power and effectiveness of these gatekeepers decrease, Israel's viability as an enforced Jewish political majority state decreases with it.