EVENT:George Galloway

WHERE NOW FOR EGYPT AND THE MIDDLE EAST?

Where: Khalili Lecture Theatre
SOAS, Russell Square, London, WC1

Time: 3.30pm

Speakers include:

Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism

George Galloway, Founder of Viva Palestina

Kate Hudson, General Secretary of CND

Andrew Murray, Founder and former Chair of the Stop the War

Chaired by Seumas Milne, Guardian columnist

Public meeting

Kamal Helbawy, Centre for the Study of Terrorism, London, UK
Dr. Kamal El-Helbawy was born in the Governorate of Menoufia, Egypt in 1939 and joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of twelve. He served as the official spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West from 1995-1997.
Following graduation from Cairo University in 1960 and for 10 years after Helbawy worked in the field of manpower planning and training with Central Training Organization in Egypt. Dr. Helbawy studied Business administration; interpretation, political science in AUC and in Pakistan and he is specialized in strategic studies.
While lecturing at Sokoto University he participated founding the first branch of Muslim Educational Trust in Sokoto in 1971 in Nigeria. Dr. Helbawy traveled to Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s where he was among the founders of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and became their first executive director until 1982. He served as an advisor to the Arab Bureau of Education for Gulf States (ABEGS) from 1982 - 1987. From 1988 to 1994 Dr. Helbawy was in charge of Muslim Brotherhood affairs and activities in Afghanistan - During the same period he was based as an advisor at the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad - Pakistan. He served as the editor in chief of Arabic weekly - Qadaya Dowaliya - International Issues published in Pakistan from 1988-1994

After settling in the United Kingdom in 1994 Dr. Helbawy helped create the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Muslim Association of Britain(MAB) and he became its first founding president.
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There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.

The peoples of the Arab world, and therefore the rest of us, are now living through those weeks ? described in words used by the Russian revolutionary Lenin a century ago.

Revolution is back on the agenda, on the front page of the New York Times even, at just the time when globalised capitalism is mired in its deepest economic crisis for generations and the seemingly almighty power of US imperialism is being demonstrated to be anything but.

There was a foolish and shortlived attempt to dub the revolutionary uprising in Egypt the ?Lotus revolution,? but no amount of cheap advertising copy can devalue the profound and welcome changes that millions of Egyptians are fighting for.

But the courage of the protesters in Tahrir Square, in Alexandria, in the great port city of Suez, and in every town and city in Egypt, has already settled some questions definitively.

How long have we been told in the West that the poor benighted people of the Arab Muslim worlds are incapable of taking their futures into their own hands?

All the lies deployed to justify the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan took this great lie as their premise ? that the West must bomb and blast the people of those countries into ?democracy? because they are incapable of changing their societies themselves.

And the US State Department, British Foreign Office and French Quai d?Orsay don?t like it one bit. It?s not only their close personal connections with the torturing regimes of Ben Ali and Mubarak which now stand fully exposed. We know a little about Tony Blair, who still found Mubarak a force for good as the death toll from his clinging onto power climbed above 300.

More is at stake than these politicians? personal connections with Mubarak. The cornerstone of decades of US and Western policy of holding down the mass of the people in the region in the interests of oil, corporate control of trade and investment and Israel is shattering. Every Arab despot ruling the region almost without exception from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf knows it. Which is why the wind of change that is intoxicating their people is bringing a chill to each of those regimes.

And that?s why the State Department and its counterparts, caught flat-footed over Christmas with the revolution against Ben Ali, have been bending might and mane to contain the revolution in Egypt. How could it be otherwise? Half the population of Egypt is on less than $2 a day, when the price of a kilo of tomatoes has increased fivefold in 12 months to exactly that daily wage.

The inspiring resurgence of the movement on the streets of Egypt has created further crisis for the regime and for its Western backers, who had to become more forthright in pushing Mubarak to go. They would prefer to have kept him. They would prefer to keep the regime without Mubarak, in the person of Suleiman. They are risking this revolution deepening and radicalising, so that when the regime?s key figures do fall the great fountain of humanity in Egypt?s streets will not be satisfied but will demand much more by way of political and social justice.

For progressives in the West this is a historic development, and everyone must play their part to help ensure that progress wins in Egypt, not bloody repression in the name of the party of order.

We must ruthlessly expose the hypocrisy of our governments. When they express support for the Egyptian revolution it is as a rope supports a hanging man. They want the army to be the bedrock of any future regime. They do not mean the army of 1973, which bravely fought against Israel. They do not mean the army of soldiers fraternising with their brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers in the streets. They mean the army of the Egyptian high command, the generals, who have been bought and paid for by Washington and who will do its bidding.

When Cameron, Clinton, Hague or Obama talk of democracy in Egypt and the region what they mean, to paraphrase that great Algerian St Augustine, is god grant them democracy, but not yet.

Hillary Clinton spelt it out. Democracy, she said, is not only about process, it is about outcomes. Quite right. But the outcome they fear is that any remotely democratic government in Egypt or Jordan would not produce the outcome of supine adherence to Western interests and the state of Israel.

Victory to the Egyptian revolution!
Katharine Jane Hudson is a UK academic and political activist.
Kate Hudson is currently the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Prior to her appointment to the post, she had served as Chair of the organisation from 2003 to 2010. She was also Head of Social and Policy Studies at London South Bank University from September 2003 to 2010 and is now a Visiting Research Fellow. She was founding editor of the journal Contemporary Politics, serves on the editorial board of Debatte: the journal of contemporary central and eastern Europe and is a member of the Board of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. Hudson is also a member of the Communist Party of Britain. In the 1990s, she met and married Redmond O'Neill, an activist in Socialist Action and adviser to Ken Livingstone.

Andrew Murray has been national chair of the Stop the War Coalition since its foundation in 2001. He is in his second spell as director of campaigns and communications for the Transport and General Workers' Union and previously held a similar position at ASLEF, the train drivers' union. From 1977 to 1985 he worked for the Morning Star, mostly on its parliamentary staff and he was a columnist for the same paper from 1998 to 2003. Born in 1958, he worked for the Reader's Digest, the International Herald Tribune and the Sussex Express between 1974 and 1977.
He was previously a staff journalist on the Economist and studied economics and politics at Oxford and London universities. He was a member of the National Union of Journalists' executive for 10 years and is author of The Enemy Within and co-author of Beyond the Casino Economy.op the War - the story of Britain's biggest mass movement

Organised by The Respect Foundation
Contact: therespectfoundation@gmail.com