Robert Fisk’s World: A glimpse of Obama in a Cairo emptied of its people and its poor

[Jackeens]

Robert Fisk’s World: A glimpse of Obama in a Cairo emptied of its people and its poor

Go into the average newspaper office and you'll find the reporters staring at Sky News or the BBC or Al-Jazeera International.

But visit the studios of Sky News, the BBC or Al-Jazeera International, and you'll discover that all the journalists there are reading newspapers. Its an odd form of osmosis which - being an old-fashioned reporter – I'm not very happy about. I still believe, along with an encouraging number of young Arab and Israeli reporters, that we've got to be out on the streets, just as I was when I started in journalism in the Blyth office of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. So Fisk was prowling the streets of Cairo this week, hunting for Obama and Lady Hilary.

A colleague gave me Obama's detailed schedule, and there was the key: "11.50 am: POTUS and Sec of State Clinton tour mosque." Poor old Obama, I thought. Surely he didn't deserve to be reduced to a codename like POTUS – until dimwit Fisk realised this stood for "President of the United States". How very American. The Sultan Hassan mosque was just below the citadel and with my faithful driver Amr (the Egyptian equivalent of my even more faithful driver Abed in Beirut), we swept through the police-heavy streets of Cairo to track down the POTUS and his lady. So empty were the drab boulevards of downtown Cairo that we drove at 60mph. I should add that Amr comes from the Citadel area of Cairo and knew every back street to avoid the thousands of cops thronging the usually filthy highways of this raving hot city. And we got there. The mosques and the great Citadel of the Mamlukes baked in the noontime sun and around them lounged or stood to attention or snooped thousands of uniformed or plain-clothes mukhabarat security police. They stood in the street, they stood atop 13th century mosques with rifles, they sat glowering in tea-shops. They had emptied the place of real people, genuine Egyptians, and had "become" Cairo. The plain-clothes lads - no women, of course – were all dressed in horrible 1970s suits with gun butts protruding from the bottom of their jackets. Each wore an outrageously florid tie of indeterminate quality.

More: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-a-glimpse-of-obama-in-a-cairo-emptied-of-its-people-and-its-poor-1698176.html

[Cha]

1. I'm loving these Robert Fisk

commentaries..kicked and Rec'd for tomorrow!

[Jackeens]

2. Lots more here Cha

http://www.independent.co.uk/search/index.jsp?ecePage=1&eceExpr=FISK+OBAMA&eceSort=descending&eceField=all&eceMode=search&eceForm=simple&dateRange=all

Although that Independent search function isn't the most reliable. Really interesting articles by him - all worth reading (but you'll need a free week!).

[Cha]

4. Thanks..what an

education that will be!

[janx]

3. The abbreviations and acronyms are ridiculous.

I get so tired of them. Sometimes, it's impossible to tell what people are talking about online unless you are used to these abbreviations. I'd love to do a satire, but at this point I'm too tired!