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When I interviewed Dr Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid in 1995, then professor of Islamic Philosophy at Cairo University and his partner Dr Ibtihal Younis who taught French Literature, they tried to put a brave face on their predicament. ‘When we lived in sin no one paid attention,’ joked Dr Younis, who became Mrs Abu-Zaid two months earlier, ‘ now we are respectably married, they [ Muslim fundamentalists] want us divorced.’
The couple were targeted in a test case designed by Islamists lawyers to sneak Sharia (Islamic code) into Egyptian secular legal system historically secular based on French law.
The applicants, a group of Islamists lawyers unearthed a forgotten ninth century court ruling known as Hessba which permits any group of Muslims three or more to seek injunctions or force action against people or activity if they prove in a court of law that they acting to avert harm befalling Islam. Sharia, the plaintiffs argued, forbids Muslim women marrying non Muslims since their children will be born non Muslims as they automatically follow their father’s faith in Egyptian traditions, hence they wouldn’t act if it was a Muslim man marrying a non-Muslim which defence lawyers in several cases later illustrated its contrast with article three of Egyptian constitution of equality between sexes.
Although the court initial rejected the application since the applicants could prove they were affected in person by the Abu Zaid’s academic activities or marriage, the plaintiffs reapplied to court under another judge who accepted that they were representing majority of Muslims’ interests. This time the court accepted the applicants’ argument that Muslim Dr Younis shouldn’t have married her atheist boyfriend in the first place.
Abu Zaids’ marriage was nullified by the court setting a precedent that aided Islamists to form a Hessba each time they wanted to silence a secular intellectual. The late filmmaker Youssef Chahine, internationally acclaimed feminists Dr Nawal -ElSaadawi and her husband novelist Sheriff Hattattah, were among scores dragged before courts under Hessba. Horrified by Islamists discovery of 1100 old Hessba, scores of celebrities, among hundreds of mixed faiths couples (it has been normal for generations) fled Egypt, including the Abu Zaids (although the appeal court turned the ruling in their favour) who settled in the Netherlands where he became professor of Humanism and Islamic Studies at Utrecht University.
The Hessba ruling was overlooked by parliament during when in 1922 great constitutional reforms confirming independence from Ottoman rule and introducing secular European laws to replace outdated codes dating back to last Egyptian independent kingdom ruled by Queen Cleopatra (69-30 BC) and accumulation of codes from oppressive Arab colonial rule (639-1250), rul of the self-indulgent Mamluks (1250 - 1517), Ottoman Empire laws (1517- 1805) and autonyms Mehmet Ali modern rule (1805-1922).
Islamists targeted Abu Zaid when his seminars encouraged students to think outside the frame of rigid 13th century interpretation of Islamic texts considered by fundamentalists as the ultimate reference on Islam. Islamists’ influence grew in 1980s and by mid 1990s they openly intimidated women to give up western fashion that was the norm since Europeanization of Egypt’s social and culture life by Ismail Pasha ‘ the Magnificent’ ( 1830-1895) around the time of opening of Suez canal in 1869.
Traditional Islamists who believed Quran ( Mohammedian Bible) to be the words of Allah delivered to their prophet by the Arch angel Gabriel, were shocked by Abu Zaid’s philosophical analysis of the text in his books, ‘ The concept of the text: a Study of Quranic Theology’ and ‘ Studying the false interpretation of Quran’.
His research in ancient texts 1980 – 1992 was published in four volumes: ‘The Philosophy of Hermeneutics’, ‘Critique of Islamic Discourse’, ‘Text, Authority and the Truth’ and ‘ Women in the Discourse of Crisis,’ challenged the orthodox assumptions about the Quran’s textual authority within the Islamic tradition as he advocated interpretation taking into account social and historical context which were irrelevant to 20th century life.
Fundamentalists’ crusade against Abu zaid was lead by head of Islamic Studies the Islamist Dr Abdul Sabour Chahine who handpicked a committee to evaluate Abu Zaid’s works as candidate for professorship of Islamic Philosophy. It condemned the research as ‘blasphemous’ calling Abu Zaid ‘an infidel’ and Chahine lost no time announcing the ‘ verdict’ to a 700 strong congregation during a Friday prayer at a Cairo mosque controlled by radicals.
Earlier in the year writer Farag Fouda was assassinated following condemnation during Friday prayer; and late Naguib Mahfouz, 1988 Noble laureate was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist who heard his condemnation during a Friday lesson.
Born in July 1943 in Qahafah 82 miles north of Cairo, Abu Zaid’s peasant family had no money for his schooling, but Vocational Studies grants enabled him to obtain communication diploma securing employment in 1960 with Telecommunication Authority. He saved for eight years to join Cairo University to read Arabic and history. Graduated with honours in 1972 he became a fellow at Islamic Studies Department, working overtime to finance his MA ( 1977) and PhD (1981) in Islamic Philosophy while learning English and German language, which helped him as a visiting professor to universities of Ossaka and during lecture tours Islamic countries. In his last tour he contracted an unknown virus in Indonesia and fell ill when Cairo arrived on June 30. He was rushed to intensive care, but died of multiple organ failure on Sunday and buried in his village of Qahafah on Monday July 5.
He was survived by his wife Ibtihal
Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid, Islamic philosopher and scholar, Author of 13 books.
Born Qahafah, Egypt July 10, 1943
Died Cairo July 4, 2010
End
© copyrights Adel Darwish 2010 Not to be reproduced, reprinted or published in full or inpart without the written permission of the author.

When the Munich Olympic Games started in 1972, hardly any one heard of ‘Black September Organisation’ BSO( Ayloul al-Aswad) the Palestinian terror organisation, apart from a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services’ agents following the deadly game of assassinations and counter assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and Israeli intelligence service Mossad. The game, sometimes spectacularly violent, was often more about revenge rather than a pre-emptive step.
The BSO, a splinter from the Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO, was established ‘to avenge the blood of the martyrs of Black September’. The Name given by Palestinians and their Arab nationalist backers to Septembers 1970s ‘ battles of refugee camps’, when the mainly Bedouin Jordanian Army ( formally the Arab Legion of the British Aram), known for their unquestionable loyalty to King Hussein (1935- 1999) attacked Palestine Liberation Organisation PLO fighters who broke an agreement confining their activities to refugee camps (the 1969 Cairo Agreement established a framework of coordination between Palestinian guerrilla groups and governments hosting refugee following violent clashes in Lebanon and Jordan in 1960). Palestinian fighters challenged the late King Hussein’s sovereignty taking-over major cities, setting up checkpoints and collecting taxes from Palestinians who became Jordanian citizens. The Last straw for the Jordanian monarch came when groups belonging to Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine PFLP hijacked four civilian airliners, BOAC, Swissair, TWA and an Israel El-Al then landed them at Dawson airfield near Amman. The airport was totally controlled by Palestinian guerrilla blocking Jordanian security personnel from operating. BSO aim was to ‘ avenge the blood of 20,000 martyrs’, as the organisation literature circulated in refugee camps and university campus in the Arab world in 1970’s claimed (official figures by the Jordanians put the death toll at 1000). BSO, which was later aided by international terrorist groups like the German Bader Meinhoff, and the Japanese Red Army, targeted Arab regimes it accused of backing the Jordanian Army in September 1970.
In November 28, 1971, they assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan’s prime minister during the September refugee camps war, outside Sherton hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who later made peace with Israel, turning his back on Colonel Gamal Abdel Naser’s revolutionary Arab Nationalist agenda.
The chief of operation of Black September was a Mohammed Oudeh, a alestinan born former science teacher ( employed by the Jordanian ministry of education in 1960s), who was known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud (Abu is father of… and Daoud was his father’s middle name which he gave to his only son). It took him five months to plan the operation using his contacts within Syrian intelligence – who took advantage of diplomatic privileges- as well as the Stasi (former East German ntelligence service) to smuggle equipment, explosives and weapons to Munich, as he later told me (his admission was completed over a number of years in different locations, including Amman, Damascus and Beirut) .
Mr Oudeh spent the evening of September 4, 1972 at a restaurant attached to Munich central railway station complex, briefing 11 of ‘operators’ from his organisation over dinner, and going over the final details with them.
A few hours later, just before dawn, armed members of BSO scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes’ village, while the other three (who were never caught) helped them from outside. They managed to break into Israeli athletes sleeping quarters taking them hostages, and killing two who resisted. The Israelis’ say they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach, but Mr Oudeh years later said they were ‘armed Israeli secrete agents’.
BSO offered to release the nine Israeli hostages in exchange for 236 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, but Golda Meir ( 1898-1978), Israelis Prime Minister at the time refused to negotiate and for 20 hours a tense standoff ensued while television images of an empty balcony on a grey, modern dormitory where the group and their hostage made their stand-off, were beamed around the world.

Mr Oudeh has been consistent, over half a dozen of personal conversations, in media interviews and in his 1998 book (min al-Qudus Illa Munich ‘From Jerusalem to Munich’, published in English a year later as ‘Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist), that in planning Munich operation his instructions were clear ‘ to avoid killing or injuring any one, including Israeli hostages’ whom he wanted to use as a bargaining chip to release Palestinian comrades in Israeli jails. But later he added that he was deliberately prolonging negotiation in order to maximise publicity ‘alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances’, in his own words.

Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound (Since world TV cameras were transmitting live the image of the outside building, which was also seen by the hostage takers) the West Germans finally agreed to transport both captors and their hostages, in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck the military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (The Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers released in 2004).
To every one’s surprise, West German security staged a bungled attempt to rescue the Israelis at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages bodies were found on the tarmac, and on the plane.
Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught maths and physics in Westbank secondary schools (Administered by Jordan’s ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft PLO charter (constitution) and other legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (parliament).
He remained in East Jerusalem until captured by Israel in 1967 Six Day War when he moved to Jordan to join the PLO. He later admitted that he had been in contacts with PLO as a ‘ sleeper’ of the PLO largest Arafat lead subgroup, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to taking part in Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces using air cover attacked refugee camps run by the PLO, inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama, which was the first time Palestinian ‘resistance’ fought Israeli army face to face instead of hit and run or bomb planting operations they started in January 1965.
He had major disagreement with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes not aiding the Palestinians, or making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as ‘ enemies who should be fought before fighting Israel.’
He went underground moving into Lebanon via Syria after 1970s camps wars. He moved between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, then to Europe.
After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He changed residence to Ramallah in the West Bank following 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.
When his memorise on Munich was published, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria - the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime in the anti-peace Arab bloc.
Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (whom he claimed to be Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance where he collapsed.
He remained defiant to the end. In his last interview with Aljazeera 1999, he said he would do Munich all over again as he had no regret. “Today, I cannot fight you anymore,’’ he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure last week, “but my grandson will and his grandsons too.”
Abu Daoud is survived by his wife, five daughters and a son Daoud.

Majority of Britons think Islam is unfair to women, lacks justice and is linked in their minds with extremism and terrorism, according to a recent opinion poll. The poll, conducted by You Gov on behalf of Explore Islam Foundation, a moderate Islamic organisation trying to promote Islam as a faith for peace and self discipline, found that 58% of Britons linked Islam with extremism while half of those asked associated the faith with terrorism. Last week’s poll also discovered that 69% of Britons believe Islam encourages the oppression of women while less than four of out ten asked thought Islam was having a positive impact on society. Only 13% believed it was a religion based on peace, while a mere six percent associated Islam with justice.
The finding came as a mega disappointment for the foundation as they were preparing for ‘Mohammed Project,’ a campaign to promote Islam. But other findings might give them a bit of hope that their campaign might win some minds and hearts. Sixty percent admitted their ignorance of most details of Islam, while a third of those polled said they wanted to know more about Islam as a religion.
A Foundation spokesman said the figures might be disappointing, but it would help them redesign their ‘Mohammed project’ aiming at providing individual Britons with Islam as a philosophy for peace with oneself. The main drive of the project relies on posters and leaflets explaining ‘the positive aspects of Islam’. However, as a journalist with four decades of experience, I am sceptical of the effect of campaigns relying solely on posters or public addresses in large meetings.
Foundations like Exploring Islam need to wake up to reality. The fact of the matter is that Muslims themselves, and no one else,  are responsible for giving the rest of the British population a negative impression about Islam; and only them, as Muslims, can gradually change their fellow Britons’ perception.
Various terror groups have politicised Islam, turning the faith from what started as a spiritual experience enjoyed by the individual or a traditional rituals practiced by congregations in worshipping places, into a political ideology.
Evil minded and psychologically damaged preachers selected Quarnic verses, out of their historic or symbolic context, to literary translate into texts justifying murder and violence against the ‘other’. Such interpretation manifested by deeds or loud demonstrations linked Islam with violence and terrorism in the minds of Britons.
Take other non Islamic 20^th century violent groups like the Basque separatist ETA in Spain, or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), they never linked themselves to a faith, nor did they adopt God, names or images of prophets or saints on their banners.
On the contrary, perpetrators of massacres against tourists in upper Egypt have declared their names gamaat Islamiyah  (Islamic Group)  and Islamic Jihad (Islamic Crusade); in Gaza, Hamas is short for   Islamic Resistance Movement  ( And consider the contrast  between Britons’ sympathy towards the Palestinian people with televised scenes of Hamas’s armed gangs pushing their former coalition partners from Fateh over roof-tops and sending suicide bombers to blow up civilians in restaurants and buses ). Those who put bombs in cinemas and theatres,  beat up unveiled-women and assassinated judges who tried their fellow terrorists in Egypt call themselves ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, a group from its very womb  more violent groups like al Qaeda were born, with leaders like Ayman El- Zawahiri proudly declaring himself as an MB disciple. The ‘Army of Mohammed,’ group claimed responsibility for blowing up Shia mosques in Baghdad. The group, which invented blowing up embassies by suicide-explosive trucks and organised several air-hijacks, has topped all groups in hijacking  the most prominent name for all Muslims calling themselves Hezbollah, (Hezb-o-Allah)  literary the party of god.  So if responsibilities of such acts are claimed by groups whose very names are associated with Islam, what would Muslims expect a British public to think of Islam?
If you count all members of these parties and groups together, they wouldn’t count for more than 1000.0% of Muslims within the area of their activities; yet they managed to have a huge impact focusing the minds and attention of media consumers on their evil actions as ‘ Islamic activity’, through operations deliberately designed as mass murder for a maximum impact. The  9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda were a deliberate genocide, so was the attack on tourists in Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor, or exploding two bombs during a wedding party killing scores in a hotel in Amman, or several attacks by hand grenades and machine guns against residential compounds in Saudi Arabia. All designed for maximum murder, terrorising impact and to reach the front pages of press worldwide.
Meanwhile Muslims in Britain never marched en-mass to protest against such atrocities, or at lease to distance themselves from those murderers who claimed to be defending Islam; yet you see hundreds of angry British Muslims on the streets burning books they haven’t bothered to read, or stone embassies in protest against publications in other countries they assumed to have believe insulted Islam.
To make matters worse, many Muslims in Britain, when talking privately with their non-Muslim neighbours or colleagues,  try to justify such insane acts of violence as ‘a frustrated Muslims’ response to the occupation’ of Palestine or Iraq, as if one immoral act would justify an equally immoral response. Two wrongs never can make one ‘ right’.
These justifications are totally unconvincing to a British public brought up on a Christian moral foundation of turning the other cheek.
Another disastrous reason for a negative impression of Islam, is Muslim’s apparent resistance to a full integration into British society while continue to reject the culture and the way of life of the majority. The irony is the Muslims, mainly from the Indian sub-continent chose  to emigrate to Britain (and some paid bribes to human traffickers, told lies and used other methods, forbidden by Islam, to secure a visa or sneak to Britain or sought asylum). I haven’t come across a single Muslim who was forced to come to Britain or to stay against his or her will, unlike majority of African Americans who were sold as slaves in the New World in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.
Muslims here openly attack the British way of life in public, describing the way British and secular women dress as  ”sinful”, while hardly any of them used the term ‘ sinful’ to refer to murdering fellow human beings. Other Muslims deliberately provoke disgust ( Like killing sheep in Adha festival out in the open scaring children in a society where keeping pets is a way of life, while they could simply ask a butcher to perform the rites in a specially designated slaughter houses ).
Muslims lead by ignorant Imams who neither speak English nor read Arabic (the original language of Quran) into self isolated cultural, and sometimes geographical, ghettos, refusing to mix with indigenous whites.
In my view, Exploring Islam Foundation money and effort are likely to be wasted without having the slightest impact on British population. The view will only change when British Muslims change their own view of Britain as a home they chose for themselves and their children. White Britons’ impression of Islam will only began to change when mainstream  British Muslims take the initiative to condemn violence and terror committed by other Muslims from the lunatic fringe, by coming out  of their ghetto into the main British street in support of British values of justice, fairness and championing the underdog.  
However, the picture is not all gloomy. There are, so far, successful attempts by enlightened Muslims. The most successful in its efforts to   fully integrate in British society, is a group made of Muslims and other followers of Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic faiths, is the Conservative Arab Network CAN. Chaired by Egyptian born British GP Dr Wafik Moustafa and its Parliamentary Chairman the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham Daniel Kawczynski, himself a polish immigrant.
Dr Moustafa insists on CAN being inclusive, hence its members consist of several generations of immigrants from the 22 nations of the Arab League, they include Muslims, Jews, Yazidi, Baha’i’s and many others, Arabs and non Arabs like Kurds, Assyrians, Nubians, Copts and Berber. They are proud of their eastern heritage and their British nationality and culture.
A few weeks ago, a group, of mainly Muslim Arabs, led by Dr. Moustafa went to Wooten Bassett in south-west England, where coffins of British soldiers died in Afghanistan pass on their way from the RAF base nearby. CAN members, stood alongside the villagers, paying respect, and each praying to his/her own god for the souls of young men and women, who made the ultimate sacrifice defending British way of life and British principles of liberty and democracy, to which the Muslims of Afghanistan aspire.
 This positive action was recounted by Dr. Moustafa at the reception held by CAN for the newly elected members of Parliament in Westminster last week, and was attended by more than a hundred MPs and Lords, all gave a standing applaud to this patriotic gesture by British Muslims.

CAN positive feature is its integration into British life, and resisting separation. I wish CAN every successful and I hope the group resist attempts to politicise its activities by radical Arabs who turn any Arab or Islamic grouping into a propaganda platform for radical Palestinian causes. The integration of British Arabs into their British society where they vote, and pay taxes is, for them, as crucial as a future independent state is for the Palestinians.
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© Copyrights Adel Darwish 2010, not to be quoted, lifted or reprinted in part or as whole without prior permission from Adel Darwish
 

Left wing Egyptians have turned Egyptian popular diplomat, Mohamed El-Baradei’s London lecture into Farce……but he still walks tall and remains popular, thanks to public at large.
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and a hopeful candidate for 2012 Egyptian Presidency election, was in London tonight where he spoke for 20 minutes on need for change in Egypt and his hope for restoring democracy and rule of law that existed before the 1952 military coup.
Dr El-Baradei, who was, at one point compared to Mahatma Ghandi by Dr Wafik Moustafa, Chairman of the Conservative Arab Network during the meeting, spoke rather well in the meeting answering questions for another 90 minutes, about the need for change in Egypt.
Dr Moustafa later explained that like Ghandi, who lived outside India ( in South Africa) for many years, but became a focal point for Indian nationalism, gaining independence by peaceful means, Dr El-Baradei, who has been criticised by Egyptian Regime media for ‘ knowing little about Egypt since he lived abroad for 20 years’, brings with him a more rational and scientific approach to Egypt’s chronic social and economic problems.
Dr El-Baradei urged those ‘interested in change for the better’ to pursue peaceful means starting with signing a petition urging the government to hold a fair and transparent election observed by the judiciary. The signatures list to give a strong mandate to a party or a group of people representing the Egyptian nation has its roots in Egypt’s modern history. A movement back in 1919, lead by Saad Pasha Zaghloul, collected one million signature delegating the Pasha and his team to speak to London and the rest of the world on behalf of the Egyptian nation. The Egyptians wanted an independence from the Ottoman Empire, a constitutional monarchy and a secular pluralist parliamentarian democracy. This was achieved in 1922 with a constitutional monarchy of King Ahmad Fuad I and Zaghloul Pasha Delegates ( Wafd) party secured a landslide victory. The movement gave birth to 1923 constitution, the most progressive and equitable one in Egypt’s 7000 years history, giving equal rights to all and the women the right to vote. This lead to an age of prosperity, pluralist Westminster style parliamentarian democracy and unprecedented growth. But constitution was abolished by the 1952 military coup which lead to a one party dictatorship under Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, until the late President Anwar Sadat, restored the multi-party system in 1976. But the one party, ( Democratic nationalist Party), still dominates the state owned media, all institution. The party is full of corrupt upstarts and chokes civilian life and all institutions.
No new parties can be formed or fight elections without the approval of the upper house where the DNP controls 90% of the seats, which Dr el-Baradei highlights as a main obstacle to new liberal or Nationalist parties to fight election on a platform of change or reform. The Noble prize for peace laurite had publicly, in the past, put forward a list of conditions for him to accept nominations to fight presidential elections ( since all parties, except DNP urging him to become a leader). Conditions like fair and free elections to be observed by international observers; lifting the 40 years old emergency laws; rule of law, and giving equal airtime on state owned media to all candidates.
He also gave a frank, learnt and concise analysis of Iran’s quest to acquire nuclear ‘know who’ saying he didn’t believe Iran wanted a nuclear bomb at present, but wanted to reach the point where the regional powers do believe she has the material, the knowledge and the skill to build a nuclear device, with the aim of regional dominance.
The downside of the event was the organisers themselves, a bunch of communist losers with some outdated agenda who wanted to ‘ hijack’ el- Baradei as a prize for the left. The Islamists terrorist ‘ Ikhwan’ ( Muslim Brothers) were also there, launching attacks on ‘ liberal’ thinking Egyptians.
The meeting descended into something between farce and anarchy, especially with the ‘ chairman’ ( a Marxist psychiatrist) trying to capitalise on the presence of Dr el-Baradei, which lead to some time heating exchanges between him and members of the 300 or so strong audience who packed one of University College Hospital larger lecture theatres. The Chairman also, foolishly, picked fights with the media, and at one point had a heated exchanging with the BBC Arabic Affairs Editor, who, legitimately, wanted to ask questions reflecting the interests of his listeners, namely UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear ambitions. Dr Salah Fadl, who chaired the meeting, angrily saying he only invited the media to ‘ cover the event not to ask questions the liked to ask,’ which lead to the BBC man walking out in disgust. I guesses Dr Fadl, would almost certainly live to regret his unwise words.
Many Egyptians left the meeting disappointed by the way it was organised and chaired, by the leftist whose agenda was not clear. Dr el-Baradei, although still popular with many Egyptians, was not given opportunity to further explain his idea of gathering as many signatures as possible to force the government in Egypt to listen for the call to change.
Tonight’s organisers missed an opportunity with a dozen or so TV cameras and scores of journalists, British, Egyptians and Arabs to put out a call for Egyptians everywhere that there is a time for change to restore the democracy which the 1952 military coup has quenched replacing the Westminster style multi-party parliamentarian system with the still going autocracy.
Perhaps next time Dr el-Baradei comes to London he would be too wise to let the communists, with their outdated ( and customary disastrous) agenda, have the better of him.

The Liberal Democrats Conservative coalition is to put an Islamic style Niqab on their ‘Transparency’ promise, by blocking ministers’s media interviews

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