Free Republic

The military junta ruling Egypt has announced that parliamentary elections will be held in September. Rather than spending the next five months complaining, those who aren’t supporting the Muslim Brotherhood better get started actually working and organizing. I’ll analyze this a lot more in the coming months but briefly the blocs are as follows: Islamists: The Muslim Brotherhood says it is aiming at getting 30 percent of the seats. I think they’ll succeed. A smaller, moderate Islamist party — whose members split from the Brotherhood because they say it is too extremist — would be lucky to get any seats....

Throughout the Middle East, reformers have been driven away by autocratic rulers. We Westerners are desperate to see the political systems in the Middle East evolve from authoritarian theocratic or oligarchical models to some variation of representative government. That desire suffered another setback on Saturday when former Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour, 41, was sentenced to five years in prison for (what outside observers insist are trumped-up charges of) forgery. Up and down the region - Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority - the Western pluralist model of representative democracy has failed because broadminded, Western-oriented reformers have been...

On Friday night, prominent Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour was attacked in Giza, sustaining first-degree burns to his face and losing 20% of his hair after a young assailant sprayed him with flames from a pesticide aerosol. Naturally, the immediate suspect is the Egyptian government, which has persecuted Nour and his Ghad party relentlessly since Nour finished a distant second to President Hosni Mubarak in the 2005 elections. However, many analysts have been reluctant to accuse the regime of ordering the attack for three key reasons:

CAIRO -- In Washington this month, George Bush met with Gamal Mubarak, heir apparent to the Egyptian throne, and sent regards to Mr. Mubarak's father, President Hosni Mubarak. The House Appropriations Committee turned back an effort by Wisconsin Democrat David Obey to withhold a fraction of Egypt's $1.7 billion annual aid allocation. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that any cuts would damage a "strategic partnership" that is "a cornerstone of U.S. policy in the Middle East." Also this month, in Cairo, pro-democracy activists such as 39-year-old Ahmed Salah of the Egyptian Movement for Change and dozens of his colleagues...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Several hundred Egyptians protested in central Cairo on Monday in the largest street demonstration since the launch last year of a campaign against continued rule by the Mubarak family. Liberals, leftists and Islamists chanted: "Enough, shame, have mercy" and "Down, down with (President) Hosni Mubarak" in a public square outside the gates of Cairo University, as tens of thousands of mostly bemused commuters drove past. Many of them carried yellow flags or stickers saying "Enough" -- the slogan of an informal movement dedicated to stopping Mubarak from obtaining a fifth six-year term in office or arranging for...