Nov 18 2008
Undemocratic Arab regimes Afraid of Obama’s change
by Daoud Kuttab
It seems like an appropriate enough cartoon. The depiction of the president elect Barack Obama with the US flag behind him and the bubble quoting Obama as saying the change has come to Washington. Looking up to the Obama depiction was an excited Egyptian woman congratulating the African American senator, reminding him not to forget that people around the world have been hoping and praying for his success. This was followed by the Arabic phrase: ‘uqbal inna meaning may the same [change] happen to us.
According to the opposition weekly Sawt al Umma, the cartoon appearing in a major Egyptian daily caused an emergency among the Egyptian leadership. The weekly stated that 150,000 copies of the paper’s first edition were quickly removed from the streets and destroyed and the ‘troublesome’ phrase disappeared from future prints that day. The before and after cartoon depiction appeared in Sawt al Umma.http://www.shobiklobik.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=172011
This is certainly not the first time that a political cartoon has caused powers in our region to be worried about losing their powers. But the paranoia of the Mubarak regime is a reflection of the concern by many Arab autocrats about the Obama euphoria empowering those calling for change. Obama’s victory on the change mantra was not lost to people around the world yearning for political reform. Continue Reading »