7,000 people jailed in Egypt since the beginning of the “Arab Spring”

  When Egypt’s President Mubarak stepped down Barack Obama hailed this as a new birth of freedom in the Middle East, this is some of the coverage of this historic event:

After more than two weeks of anti-regime protests in Egypt that had sometimes caught the United States off balance, President Obama Friday hailed the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, saying “the people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.”

Mubarak’s exit came as welcome news after days of uncertainty. The event that Obama and administration officials had been hoping for did finally happen Friday, a day later than some had expected.

Obama said Friday “this is not the end of Egypt’s transition — it’s the beginning. I’m sure there will be difficult days ahead and many questions remain unanswered.”

But he added he had confidence that the Egyptian people “can find the answers and do so peacefully.”

He compared the change of power in Cairo to the fall of the Berlin Wall and quoted Martin Luther King’s statement that “there’s something in the soul that cries out for freedom.”

  This was supposed to be the beginning of the “Arab Spring” where the peoples of the various countries in the region embraced freedom and democracy and made the world a better place, and Barack Obama was basking in the glory; his famous Cairo speech was credited with beginning the freedom movement across the region.

  But many of us wondered who it was the the United States was supporting in these uprisings and nobody was able to answer these questions. There were rumors of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood fighting together to bring about this so-called change in the Middle East, and now we are seeing that freedom and democracy in Egypt might not mean the same thing to the Egyptian protesters as it does to the people of the United States.

  Since Mubarek’s resignation over 7,000 people have been jailed; meet the new boss, same as the old boss. These people have been jailed for speaking out against the government, so much for this revolution leading to a new Egypt. The Arab Spring is being portrayed by the Obama propaganda machine as being a victory of freedom throughout the Middle East; Obama even went so far as to quote Martin Luther King and compared this moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it is becoming obvious that this new birth of freedom might not be all of what we were told it was after all.