What’s your favourate Gaddafi Caricature?

Below is a selection of the depictions of Gaddafi I saw around Benghazi. Leave a comment to tell me which one is your favourate.

Haven’t been able to figure out what “Ben Mi Gan” means… we think it means son of something unpleasant, possibly a Lybian derivation of the Italian “Minga”

Gadaffi holds a banner of himself, with the words “I’m the Leader” on it.

Top left corner “Drawn by the Martyr, Qays El-Helali ” Top right corner “No Comment”

Top left corner “Drawn by the Martyr, Qays El-Helali ” Top right corner “Flip your face” (i.e. turn around and leave).

“I won’t flee”

The Trashcan of History

Saif: “Forward!”, Gaddafi: “Revolution, Revolution, Revolution!”

Top Left: “No Comment”, Trashcan: “Trashcan of history”

We’ve reached Chad, Dad.

Gaddafi “who are you?” [reference to a speech] Map of Libya “We’re Libya”

The end of the Colonel

Check Mate, of the king of kings of Africa (it’s a clever pun in Arabic)

Out with Mubarak, in with Marx?

Had another piece published over at Comment is Free:

In a recent TV discussion, Hossam el-Hamalawy, the prominent Egyptianleftist blogger, was asked: “So you’re the president of Egypt. You wake up, what’s the first thing you’re going to do to reorient the economy?”

Hamalawy’s answer was admirably concrete: raise the minimum wage to 1,200 Egyptian pounds ($198) per month, set a wage ceiling of 15,000 pounds ($2,480), renationalise the corruptly privatised factories, cut military spending and redirect those funds to health and education.

That a Marxist should suggest such steps is not surprising, but in Egypt they have now entered the mainstream. Neoliberal economic policies were thoroughly tried under the Mubarak regime, and demonstrably failed.

In 2008 the World Bank named Egypt as its “top reformer”. Mubarak’s adherence to the Washington Consensus strategies, however, delivered prosperity only for the already affluent elite. Meanwhile, the quality of life for the rest of the country deteriorated. This has not been lost on Egyptians.

In a recent conversation, Ahmed Attiya, a journalist for the Egyptian daily al-Shorouk – who describes his own politics as centre-right – put it to me that “even the conservative liberals nowadays support income taxes and minimum wages”, adding that “social justice measures are on the agenda of every Egyptian party I have heard of”.

Read the rest here.

Latest from Tahrir for Russia Today

I did another interview for Russia Today about the violence which marred the first day of Ramadan in Cairo as the police and Army Cleared Tahrir Square, again. I’m in the second video, a little bit down the page.

Citizen Radio and Russia Today

Hi all,

I’ve been a little slack recently, have been semi-homeless and completely without a laptop. However I haven’t been completely out of the action. I did an interview for the wonderful Citizen Radio on Thursday, then one for Russia Today on Friday.

Interestingly, the Friday interview talks about the dominant presence of Islamist groups at the “day of unity” protests that were held that day, which runs against what I was saying in the previous interview, about how the Tahrir protests were dominated by secular forces, and that the battle over Islam vs secularism was mainly happening in the realm of party politics, rather than on the street.

I think my points still largely hold, though. At the time I write this the Islamists have left and the square is back in the hands of hip young revolutionary types. It will be interesting to see how it pans out from here.