The well-connected Cairo industrialist Shafik Gabr warns Lloyd Grove that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are trying to destabilize Egypt and the country could descend into anarchy.
Egyptian industrialist Shafik Gabr was in Davos, Switzerland, when the revolution began. It was January 26, the second day of protests in Tahrir Square, and from 1,600 miles away at the World Economic Forum—teeming with financiers, celebrities, and heads of state in the crisp, Alpine air—it didn’t look much like a revolution.
But by the time Gabr arrived in Cairo on Friday the 28th—having cut short his schmoozing to rush home on his Gulfstream 200—the planet’s most populous Arab country had changed forever.
Shafik Gabr at home in Cairo, Egypt on February 28, 2009. (Credit: Jason Larkin / Getty Images)
And not necessarily for the better.
“The stock market is closed, the banks are closed, transfers are delayed. The economy is in paralysis,” Gabr told me this week from Cairo, where he is chairman and managing director of the ARTOC Group, a real estate-engineering-consumer products-media conglomerate that employs 3,500 Egyptians. “I am a person who has always believed in the importance of orderly transition with law and order, because the minute you lose law and order is the minute you enter into a dark tunnel, a vicious circle…. If we do not have law and order—which as of yet we do not—then Egypt will become a very complex, dangerous, fluid place.”
The 58-year-old Gabr—who speaks idiomatic American and has degrees in business and economics from Cairo’s American University and the University of London—is a suave and gregarious world traveler. He is supremely well-connected, not only on the Egyptian power grid but also in Washington, where he boasts contacts in the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the State Department.
Except when it comes to making money, Gabr is a committed incrementalist. He has become a near-billionaire while walking a fine line—making friends and influencing people in the regime of deposed President Hosni Mubarak while insistently pushing democratic reforms and economic empowerment for ordinary Egyptians.
Now gradualism had given way to anarchy. The peril was apparent as soon as Gabr landed.
“Coming from the airport, I saw people in the street throwing stones, carrying weapons,” he said. “When I came back, my daughter was at home with her grandmother, and for six and a half hours I basically walked the entire neighborhood of Mokattam”—where his family lives in a fabulous hillside mansion overlooking the city—“just to make people appreciate how dangerous things were.”
Gabr went on: “People were starting to pack things to run out of their houses. So we started civil patrols, like Neighborhood Watch, with teams of neighbors walking through the neighborhood at all hours. We had machine guns fired at us. My speculation is that the criminals broke out of jail and some of them took weapons out of police stations.”
It was obvious to Gabr that there was method to the madness.
“If we do not have law and order—which as of yet we do not—then Egypt will become a very complex, dangerous, fluid place.”
“There was a serious plan to scare the populace, no question about it,” he said. “There was a huge number of police stations that were torched all at the same time, all in the same manner. I cannot attribute it to any party. I can say very honestly that there were factors playing a major role beyond the youths in Tahrir Square, to torch, attack, break cells in the prisons for prisoners to be released, to steal police uniforms, to steal armaments, in the very same exact manner across Egypt, not just Cairo. And that requires planning. It’s almost like one of those movies where you have sleeper cells.”
Despite the fact that President Obama was born in Hawaii, Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller lets frequent Caller columnist and "Fox News Forum Contributor" Tommy De Seno go birther in a column headlined "The birther movement is President Obama’s fault":
I’ve long maintained that the existence of the "birther movement" is President Obama’s fault. He could dispel the rumors about his birth by simply showing everyone his 1961 birth certificate. By doing so, he would also save a lot in legal fees. Yet, no one has ever asked Obama why he’d rather lose money than show his birth certificate. It’s time to ask that question.
…
If he really wants the birthers to shut up, he has the power to do so by releasing the 1961 document. Why not just do it then? It’s a simple task.
…
I call shenanigans on the straw-man argument that "the birthers still won’t believe him." Yes, they will. And so too will others who just don’t know where he was born, not because they are kooks, but because Obama himself acts kooky in spending money to win lawsuits he could win for free by showing his birth certificate.
By defending the lawsuits and not showing the 1961 document, Obama feeds the suspicion of those who already think he is lying. That’s why this issue has the power to linger, and that’s Obama’s fault alone. I hope the birthers continue to bite his ankles until he releases the records. He deserves nothing less for making this issue stay with us.
That blame-the-victim birther nonsense won Tommy De Seno a spot on the Daily Caller’s front page:
On July 29, 2009, FoxNews.com published a similar piece by De Seno, as Media Matters noted at the time. That piece was headlined "Obama’s to Blame for the Birther Movement" and, contained many of the same lines he uses in the current Daily Caller piece. Both quote Ronald Reagan’s "trust but verify" line, for example. Both contain the lines "Sure his grammar school records show that he was enrolled as an Indonesian Muslim, but some people will say anything to get their kid in the right school. It doesn't really answer the question." Both ask of Obama’s purported failure to prove his birthplace, "Why not get rid of a conversation that has been with America since the campaign"? Both reference John Kerry’s Yale records.
So here’s what we’ve learned today: The way to get a piece published on the Daily Caller’s front page is to recycle an 18th-month-old FoxNews.com column peddling birther conspiracy theories.
Remember when Tucker Carlson insisted the Daily Caller wouldn't be a right-wing site?
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