The government’s U-turn on the proposed retail closing time law has attracted the attention of many Egyptian columnists, with many describing the cabinet’s approach as an imitation the Mubarak era methodology, while ignoring the shop owners’ concerns in the matter.
In the Arab region, other writers deplored a number of pressing issues, with a focus on the recent appointment of a Jordanian ambassador to Israel from Jordan’s influential Obeidat tribe.
The failures back off
Amr Al-Shobaki
Al-Masry Al-Youm newspapers
The government’s unwise approach while announcing the retail curfew law could be the main reason for its U-turn on the decision, says Al-Shobaki. Although Al-Shobaki’s opinion pieces are usually supportive of the government, he denounces the cabinet’s “Mubarkite” method in this regard.
He condemns the government’s lack of comprehension of shop owners’ feelings and considerations before announcing the law. He says he accepts the proposal to close shops at 10pm, arguing that the move could have helped Egypt appear more organised.
Quoting one of the comments posted under his column, Al-Shobaki cites questions that aim at interrogating the exact mechanisms through which the government tended to implement the decision and how a law as such could have drastic effects on traffic.
The message pushed Al-Shobaki to think again about the government’s ability to carry out announced decisions regardless of its fluffy statements. Although the retail curfew law sounded acceptable to Al-Shobaki, the government’s hazy attitude and the lack of presidential interference had led to the failure of its application. If the government had opened dialogue with ordinary Egyptians, especially shop owners, such a law could have been successful, states Al-Shobaki.
Gehad Al-Khazen
Eyes and ears
Al-Hayah newspaper
Al-Khazen starts off his column condemning extremist Islamic preachers who blindly call for the application of Shari’a without listening to liberal arguments. In Egypt, the columnist supports Al-Azhar’s position, which is to demands a secular democratic state guided by Shari’a. Islamic Shari’a, in Al-Khazen’s opinion, is a thousand times better than Jewish jurisprudence.
The columnist then switches his attention to Jordan where he commends the Obeidat tribe, one of the most influential tribes in northern Jordan, for disowning one of its members as envoy to Israel. Al-Khazen praises the Jordanian’s women reaction to the move as they dressed in black as a sign of protest.
From this point, the columnist calls upon Egypt and Jordan to cancel the peace treaty with Israel, after its new government has proved being a new sort of Nazism and prejudice that does not care for peace in the world. The writer brings his piece to a close after mentioning the recent crackdown on a terrorist cell composed of a number of extremists in Britain. He writes that radicals should be combated exactly like terrorists. Radicalism and terrorism are two faces of the same coin.
