Egypt’s Arab Spring “revolutionary period is over,” lamented Georgetown University Arabic literature professor Elliott Colla on June 25 at the anti-Israel Washington, DC, Jerusalem Fund before about twenty listeners. With stereotypical academic bias, his presentation, “The Poetry of Dissent,” ignored the political dangers of an “Egyptian revolution” celebrated, in his leftist view, for “many, many accomplishments” of popular culture.
Seemingly unconcerned by the possibility of Egypt becoming a sharia state after dictator Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow, Colla focused on literary “documents of a social movement that tried to change a regime but stumbled.” His slides were reminiscent of a college English seminar, examining genres such as “Literary Journalism,” “Literary Memoirs,” and “Graphic Novels” among the “expressive cultures of revolutionary Egypt.” He described the “speed of publication” as “remarkable” for the various forms of literature that appeared between Mubarak’s February 2011 fall and the July 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-dominated government. “Everything tends to become melodrama” in soap opera-like novels from this period, he observed, while the “Collective Memoirs” presented in a slide were “open-ended and polyphonic.” Such minor details somehow interested him more than, say, a MB revocation of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.
In Colla’s telling, the Egyptian proletariat sans Islam was no different from that of revolutionary France or Russia in rising against oppression for “bread, freedom, [and] social justice,” as demanded by a popular slogan. Slides on “Anti-Police Invective Chants: 25 January 2011” and “Hija’—Invective” slogans, or, as he described it, “hate speech we like,” led Colla to ponder “when might hate be appropriate.” Stating that, “invective discourse” against Mubarak’s authorities “was at times the dominant mode” of protest speech during his overthrow, Colla displayed a slide with “ACAB” graffiti, or “All Coppers are Bastards,” a phrase drawn from zealous “ultra” soccer fans.
Colla claimed that during the “Arab Spring” the “rules of language have been overturned by the revolution,” despite rising post-Mubarak blasphemy prosecutions. The word “aha,” he noted, means in Egyptian Arabic dialect roughly “F— this” and enjoyed new popularity during Mubarak’s fall. Another slide displayed graphic graffiti of a man fornicating with a woman under the English obscenity “F—SCAF,” a condemnation of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
Employing a sociological analysis, Colla mused that Egyptian protesters had a “feeling of being part of something that is bigger and losing yourself,” without any allusion to whether this larger entity was threatening. As examined in one slide, a “song leader/lead chanter” would lead crowds with words from a “slogan composer” (often “failed poets,” he explained) that belonged to all Egyptian political groupings. Along with invective, these chant leaders would also use the “Hamasa—Encouragement” poetry, with demonstrators chanting in a circle to “charge themselves up.”
For Colla, the “art” of Egypt’s “well-crafted” choreographed protests spelled fun, not foreboding. “Maybe you could study them as dances,” he suggested, praising the “wonderful machine of innovation” involved in Egyptian protesters’ creation of effective slogans. By comparison, “American protests are lame,” with repetitive chants involving “two, four, six, eight!” He had a point, as anyone who’s been to an American “anti-war” protest can attest.
Colla’s admiration for such protests and the “revolutionary socialists” among his Egyptian friends ignored the ideological threats and sectarianism that have so vexed the region. For instance, the chant, “Speak to [Mubarak] in Hebrew/He doesn’t understand Arabic,” clearly indicated the influence of Islamic anti-Semitism upon the Egyptian masses. In her audience comments, Jerusalem Fund Program & Communications Manager Samirah AlKassim referred to an Arabic chant she heard in 2003 in Egypt involving the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, another reminder of a not-so-socialist Middle East. Colla’s passing reference to his studies of art as a form of “humans making and unmaking things” unintentionally invoked his recent apologia for the Islamic State’s ravaging of non-Islamic cultural artifacts.
The audience received little explanation for why Egyptians such as labor leader Kamal Abu Eita, pictured in one of his slides, celebrated the MB’s 2013 downfall and joined General Abdul al-Sisi’s regime as a minister. Colla noted that various anti-Mubarak Egyptians approved the torture and killing of MB members after the 2013 “counterrevolution,” without noting the reason. Instead, he mourned that Egypt’s revolutionary “moment is over, at least for the present.”
Colla made no reference to the jihadist terror, persecution of Christians, sharia human rights abuses, Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict, and other such issues plaguing Egypt and the wider Middle East. He observed that the Sisi regime had reinstituted censorship controls to suppress anti-regime literature and slogans that emerged after Mubarak’s fall, but failed to mention the MB’s repression—such as their certain action against anyone using F-bombs against Islamic pieties.
Colla’s adulation for “Arab Spring” Egypt resembled the equally naïve past praise by Edward Said and other leftists for the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s shah, which gave rise to the even more brutal and dangerous Islamic Republic. As indicated by the “Prayer of Fear” poem (which concerns Egyptian state repression) Colla included in his presentation, he still has a hagiographic view of the “Arab Spring.” His conviction that non-Western peoples such as Arabs are perpetual victims is dominant among intellectual elites and dangerously oversimplifies a Middle East where freedom has many foes, but few friends.
Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project; follow him on twitter at @AEHarrod. He wrote this essay for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Brian says
Muslim countries can only be ruled by vicious dictators who will not allow Islamofascism to get breathing space.
Angemon says
Like George Santayana said, “those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them”.
And he was probably right, because he was a philosopher and stuff.
RonaldB says
Infidels,
As punishment for being kuffirs and denying the bentificent alluha, you are hereby condemned to listen to Elliott Colla’s ramblings for an entire year straight.
quotha raven says
RonaldB – LOL – this guy Colla SO reminds me of the confident, egocentric mind set of many of my husband’s colleagues’ when I was a faculty wife at a university. I felt at the time I was included in the insular ivory tower…unless I opened my mouth. When I did, though, I was introduced to the close-minded, agenda-driven culture that, and many other universities embodied. The term “ethical narcissism” would have come in handy, but helas! I’d not yet heard of it. Cheers! quotha r
Uncle Vladdi says
I’ve often said this before now, and, since they will never change, I will say it again:
Liberals are racists: they always assume that ONLY White Western people (including, of course, the Jews in Israel,) are INTELLIGENT enough to be guilty of being truly evil, while all their pet “People Of Colour” (including the “swarthy palestinians”) being mentally inferior and all, just can’t help being enslaved by their instincts and emotions into acting as violent animals when frustrated, the poor oppressed little dears, so the liberals will always indulge their crimes, much as one ignores the new puppy as it pees on the rugs.
So here’s their interminably ongoing “narrative” (story):
“SO JUST STOP PICKING ON ALL THE THE POOR HELPLESS MENTALLY INFERIOR SWARTHY ANIMAL VICTIMS, YOU EVIL MENTALLY SUPERIOR WHITE BULLIES! YOU KNOW THEY’RE AT THE MERCY OF THEIR ANIMAL INSTINCTS SUCH THAT THEY JUST CAN’T HELP BEING VIOLENT WHEN CONFUSED, SO STOP BAITING AND CONFUSING THEM, YOU HATERS!”
Kathy Brown, Esq. says
Now that’s illuminating Unc.
They’re also sexists nonpareil, yes? It’s the same refrain, womyn can never be responsible for anything since they’re so weak, stupid, blah blah blah, which they’d have to be to continue down the same road keeping mum about sharia, islam, FGM, etc.
I wonder if they themselves ever realize they think this way? Wait-stop me before I attempt to enter the mind (!?) of a liberal…
Rob says
Great step forward in Egypt here Elliott:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2135434/Egypts-plans-farewell-intercourse-law-husbands-sex-DEAD-wives-branded-completely-false.html
mortimer says
“Poetry of Dissent”???
I wonder what Elliott Colla would have written about Hitler’s melodramatic big shows at the Nuremburg Rallies.
nacazo says
aha elliott colla and the muslim brotherhood (cair’s grandfather)
Karen says
The aha-bomb! Love it!!
Matthieu Baudin says
I’ve heard several people like Elliott Colla lament the fact that the ‘wrong side’ won the cold war.
I wonder how much we can hold these Romantic Totalitarians responsible for the quagmires they lure us into by putting a gloss on the social excesses of revolutionary, millenarian movements.
shams78 says
Westerners whine here about “lefties” and “communists” (actually liberals who have jack to do with communism) in western universities. And hide in their mother’s basements while making violent keyboard warrior posts directed at Muslims.
While Communist Kurdish YPG (PKK) is fighting ISIS in Syria. Some European Communists actually volunteered to join the Kurdish YPG and are fighting as foreign volunteers. One Communist woman from Germany was killed in action against ISIS a few months ago. The Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Turkey helped them travel and join the Kurdish YPG as leftist Communist Turks among the few Turks who are sympathetic to the Kurdish cause, since they are not racist. Since US of A has supported an openly racist, right wing, nationalist, bigoted government in Turkey for decades during the Cold War and the CIA supported right-wing, racist, nationalist Turkish Grey Wolves (Bozkurt) who murdered Kurds and alleged Turkish Communists.
All these westerners don’t put their money where their mouth is. While Communists are out there fighting ISIS others in the west sit on their couches and whine.
I’m not a Communist and I don’t make infantile keyboard warrior threats against against people, and I’m not going to Syria. But many people here make these threats….
Ed says
Property being covertly snapped up in the UK by Europe Trust, with Ahmed Al-Rawi as executive director, syphoning off finds to the Muslim Brotherhood (banned as terrorists even in some Muslim countries but still not the UK) means are students are inadvertently financing western islamisation and terrorism. There’s so much stealth under our noses that we are unaware of it is frightening.
How long before our football clubs can’t play on holy days, or have Jewish players? As the UK sells off more and more to Saudi and other Arab nations, we are slowly but surely being taken over.
Paleologos says
As a Catholic, I consider Pope Francis and his support of the Palestinians, the biggest Catholic embarrassment of my generation …
http://nypost.com/2015/05/17/pope-francis-calls-palestinian-leader-an-angel-of-peace/
… not to mention he is also a global warming moonbat …
http://mashable.com/2015/06/18/pope-francis-climate-encyclical/
I have personally excommunicated Francis from my world, and will patiently await another pope in the mold of Benedict XVI, who understood the intrinsic evil that is islam. See his Regensburg speech.
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html
… excerpted in part …
… In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις – controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.[4]
***************************************************************************************
Having said all that, I am glad Robert posted this because Georgetown has long been a Catholic embarrassment institution … promoting many brain bereft individuals like Colla. Colla is merely one more in a long series of Georgetown knothead alumni/faculty.
I understand Catholicism has produced some ultra liberal thinkers like Father Drinan, who I disagreed with often … but he did support Israel, and he was a thinker …
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/253364/sad-story-robert-drinan-michael-potemra
But now my Catholic religion seems hell bent (forgive the pun) on promoting pure idiots!
I hope most of these Catholic clowns recede into the shadows like the cockroaches they are
… Amen! 🙂
R/
Paleologos
Reply
Oliver says
Isn’t Georgetown (or their “law” school) where that woman/student (I forgot- thankfully, her name) who gave the speech at the De, Conv., about why birth control pills should be mandated in healthcare policies?
(Which, THE BEST OF THE WEB- a WSJ blog, found that a 90 day supply of generic birth control pills was $10. Hardly, for someone going to Georgetown U or the law school or living in that area should find a wallet breaker).
Kathy Brown, Esq. says
Yes Oliver: And you’re right to put ‘Law School’ in quotes ad you did.
Indeed-that is the school attended by the traveling whore aka Sandra Fluke. And yes, as you point out, for any normal woman, this would be a non-issue.
But of course SF isn’t a normal woman; she’s a womyn, aka a Lib Leftist, so all she thinks about is sex, ways to denigrate her own country, and anything but confronting the actual sexism in the world which is islam.
She also has no pride, modesty or ladylike behavior, trumpeting her promiscuity abroad to all and sundry, in so doing establishing no doubt her feminist ‘street cred’.
She had her 10 minutes of fame. God willing: We have seen the last of her.
Oliver says
Ms. Brown, thank you for your reply. As to Fluke, if I am not mistaken, she ran for some political office in a far left area (I think in California, but not sure) and WAS DEFEATED–BADLY.
And, again, going by my memory for an item i read back in November, by someone with little name recognition and a smaller bankroll.
So, perhaps we have heard the last of her.
Paleologos says
OK … I went from moron to moonbat describing Francis … that’s as nice as I’m going to get!
🙂
R/
Paleologos
Oliver says
I gave up reading about this anal pore academic about halfway through.
But a question for him and his followers and the other liberal/progressive anal pores who condemn Israel and support the Palestinians and other Muslims groups.
I have asked this before, never ( that i have seen0 gotten a decent response.
IN THE PAST 67-70 YEARS ( say the end of ww2 / the start of the state of Israel-May 1947) OTHER THEN HOMICIDE ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS ( RESTAURANTS; BUSES; HOSPITALS; ETC); ROADSIDE BOMBS; HIJACKINGS; KILLING INNOCENTS AT RANDOM WHAT THE HELL HAVE THE MUSLIMS CONTRIBUTED TO SOCIETY?
ISRAEL, ON THE OTHER HAND HAS MADE SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS IN YEARS ( TREATMENTS FOR MS., MD, ETC); GIVEN US THE TECHNOLOGY THAT IS THE BASIS OF CELL PHONES AND THE PENTIUM CHIP ON WHICH MOST COMPUTERS RUN, ETC.
IF THE BDS PEOPLE WERE HONEST- THEY WOULD FORGO ALL TREATMENTS DEVELOPED BY JEWS; THROW AWAY THEIR CELL PHONES AND COMPUTERS. AND LIVE LIKE THE PAKISTANIS- WHO DON’T ALLOW POLIO VACCINES 9 DEVELOPED BY JEWS) BUT DO USE CELL PHONES-SO PARTWAY ‘HONEST’.
But, i doubt that these self important jerks would do that, or consider the achievements of Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere,
Karen says
Colla employs the same old tired, predictable template; present the perpetrators of criminal violence as victims of western oppression, and draw moral equivalency between America’s sins of the past to the terrorist’s sins of the present. Boring, but I suppose it works on a lot of people.
Mirren10 says
The name, Elliot Colla, sounds like some horrid disease.
Of course, the rhetoric of the left *is* diseased.
karen says
Colla….. reminded me of colon, and you know what that’s full of. (Apologies for the crudeness, but I couldn’t help myself. Think of it as poetry.)
Kathy Brown, Esq. says
My dear Karen: It’s clear you’re a conservative not a lib. Only we have manners, are conscious of vulgarity, and cultivate the social contract.
I take no offense at your figure of speech; in this case, it’s apt.
Karen says
🙂
Angemon says
LOL!!! Good ones, Mirren and karen 😀
Linde Barrera says
To Mirren10- I would like your opinion, if you would care to give it. There is talk that my union, the American Federation of Teachers, really likes Democrat Hillary Clinton for President. After the Benghazi and emails lies, I became disgusted and vowed never to vote for her, even if the rank and file membership endorsed her. So, even though you are in the UK, are you in a position to write about how a possible Hillary presidency (God forbid) and her ties to middle east $ would impact on the US and the rest of the world? Hope you are enjoying the summer. Thank you Mirren10.