Al-Ahram Weekly

		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

It's like this, cat
Sir- I want to thank Fayza Hassan for liking animals. She is here in Egypt one of the few who have a heart for helpless beings too, not only for themselves.
I myself feed all the cats in the district where I live and some more outside of it, twice every day. I feed about 150 cats a day, including my own 10 cats at home. When I first started doing this more than 30 years ago, people hit and kicked the poor things, and killed them too. They broke my heart. Now I have stopped that and the poor animals can sleep in peace somewhere until I come and feed them, which I will do until I die. I am old now, but I pray to God to let me live to help all those poor creatures.
I pray she too lives a long time to love and help those poor animals.
Farida El-Masri
Cairo

True crimes
Sir- Mohamed Hakki's latest comments on the US elections are not much more than a recap of much of the US media coverage, which not only is shaded Republican, but has consistently failed to deal with the real issues and crimes of this election.
The first of these is that the US elections were financed to the tune of $3 billion, most of it from corporate and multinational contributions. This translates into what many of us have been seeing for years, that the US Congress and our state legislatures are for the most part controlled by corporate interests. This can hardly be described as democracy.
The second issue is that fully half of those eligible to vote in the US do not do so, knowing full well that, except for the episodic show of meaningless elections, they have no role in US politics.
The third and most shocking issue is widespread voter fraud in the US elections. This was most evident in the state of Florida due to the controversy at hand, and included: police roadblocks that turned away blacks and other people of colour such as Asians and indigenous Creoles; people of colour turned away at the voting booths for supposedly not being on the voter lists, despite having registered to vote; overly strict interpretation of voting regulations by elections officials in counties with large populations of blacks and other peoples of colour that excluded many of them; refusal to allow non-English speakers to have access to the translators who were already at polling places; and other acts, all of which are crimes according to US laws.
Presented with these allegations by the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), Janet Reno and the US Justice Department are "stonewalling" and refusing to investigate. Not only this, the candidate most affected by these crimes, Al Gore, is keeping surprisingly silent about these matters. The combination of these two facts allows one to speculate that there was so much voter fraud in US elections elsewhere, that no one is going to open this particular Pandora's Box.
Lastly, there is the term, "people of colour," which should alarm all Egyptians, and indeed everyone throughout that area of the world that is generally labeled "Arab."
The profound amount of racism in this country is not limited to African-Americans, and indeed Arab peoples are often portrayed with racist stereotypes and propagandistic rhetoric to the US people. One of the terms I've heard used for Arab peoples is "sand niggers," and only students might be aware that, as just one example, without you we would not have the science of algebra.
It is not only American citizens, but world citizens, then, who should be alarmed by the recent elections' underlying racism, a racism that, with the violent suppression of dissent by the police, is much on the increase in the US despite a few high-profile public officials and media "talking heads" and a few entertainment programmes on TV.These racist attitudes come from the very top: not only from politicians but their corporate masters who are attempting to force the New World Order down the throats of the rest of the world.
James A Cronin Portland,
Oregon
US

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