5. Isolation of the pro-Mubarak Protesters
Another indication of the great sense of civic duty shared by most of the Egyptians is the fact they totally isolated the pro-Mubarak protesters. Here again, it became a matter of passionate debate among Egyptians whether the pro-Mubarak manifesting crowd were real NDP members or police officers or even paid servants, who performed their spectacle after getting 50 LE or 100 LE each. Again here, one should replace the term "'police officers'' with "' Organized Crime'' to be correct; but it would be highly unlikely that the latter may be involved in anything unrelated to money.
On the other hand, the assumption that people would go risking their lives for just 10 or 20 US $ (the equivalent of the above suggested prices in Egyptian pounds) is rather misplaced. If we assume that there were 10,000 pro-Mubarak protesters in downtown Cairo - and I really don't believe that this figure is wrong - this would mean anything between $100,000 and $200,000 as a total operation cost. If we multiply this amount by five, which implies a total amount of US $1 million; the amount is minimal, if what is at stake is a 3-decade long presidential tenure. However, it does not make any sense to have ready supporters, eager to act and protest, and pay money instead, even though the amount sees to be minimal for the huge property made by the Mubarak family alone over the past decades.
It is true that the terminating president Mubarak does have many followers; of course, this expression is quite relative. "'Many followers'' does not mean 25% of the total population of the country, but with Egypt totaling ca. 82 million people, a meager 5% represents already 4 million people across the country, and proportionally speaking, ca. 600,000 - 700,000 people in Cairo.
In my earlier article (as per above), I specified that "Egypt's socioeconomic elite was very small'' and that they "totaled at the most ca. 200000 people'', adding that "the Mubarak regime made it possible for the socioeconomic elite to live as per Western standards ...., and simply put in jail those who with action or flagrant public speech threatened the continuation of the said social order''. In doing so, through the consecutive governments and administrations over the past three decades, Mubarak turned his NDP into a tool of social penetration and political support.
Many simple people, belonging to either the middle or the lower classes, found in the NDP membership a successful way to eliminate bureaucratic barriers in launching a business, obtain remarkable favors, and last but not least, find a job position that would otherwise be an impossible dream.
In this regard, NDP deputies managed to acquire a political clientele on whom they bestowed considerable socio-professional and economic privileges. These have been the typical NDP supporters; these were the pro-Mubarak voters in the last presidential and parliamentary elections whereby the abstention was extraordinarily high. And it is only normal for an Egyptian to surmise that the NDP supporters are more numerous in Manoufia and in Al Minya, provinces where the terminating president Mubarak and his wife respectively originate from.
This aforementioned is enough to elucidate the identity of the last week's pro-Mubarak protesters; they were not paid thugs, as irrelevant Western mass media intentionally propagated in order to fabricate the fake and distorted image of the factoid that they were ordered to diffuse.
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