World View: 'Explosive' Polio Outbreak in Somalia

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com:

• Concerns raised about a possible civil war in Egypt
• ‘Explosive’ outbreak of polio spreading in Somalia

Concerns raised about a possible civil war in Egypt

Dramatic videos were broadcast on Saturday of Egyptian security forceshiding behind tanks shooting and killing unarmed protesters with theirhands up, further polarizing the country after almost 1,000 peoplehave been killed in the last week in clashes between security forcesand Muslim Brotherhood (MB) supporters. Although most MB supportersare protesting peacefully, some reports are saying that some activistsare stockpiling weapons in preparation for a major battle. Egypt’sinterim government on Saturday threatened to dissolve the MuslimBrotherhood organization entirely, and seize its property and assets,calling it a terrorist organization. However, attempting todissolve MB would not end the protests and riots, and mightmake them worse. 

Many politicians are expressing concern that Egypt is headed for acivil war, and they’re using Syria as a comparison. But from thepoint of view of Generational Dynamics, Egypt and Syria are completelydifferent cases. 

Syria is in a generational Awakening era (like America in the 1960s),with plenty of survivors who have vivid memories of the 1982bloodbath when tens of thousands of people were slaughteredin fighting between Sunnis and Alawites in the city of Hama.These survivors do not want to see anything like that happenagain, and the war in Syria would have fizzled long agoif it weren’t for the actions of the psychopathic presidentBashar al-Assad, supported with massive heavy weapons shipmentsfrom Vladimir Putin, the psychopathic president of Russia. 

Egypt is in a generational Crisis era. There is no inhibitionof the kind felt by the survivors in Syria. A full-scalecrisis civil war is a real possibility in Egypt.BBC

‘Explosive’ outbreak of polio spreading in Somalia

With the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab blockinginternational aid workers for vaccinating Somalians against polio, anNations, “The fact that [over 100] children show symptoms ofparalysis means that there are probably thousands more with thevirus, who do not have symptoms, but are capable of spreadingit.” 

Polio is highly infectious, exacerbated by poor sanitation and a lackof clean water. It invades the nervous system, and can cause totalparalysis in a matter of hours. The disease is spreading throughregions of Somalia controlled by al-Shabaab and various warlords, andis also spreading to the almost half a million Somalia refugees incamps in Kenya. On Wednesday, medical charity Médecins SansFrontières (MSF – Doctors without Borders) closed its programs inSomalia after 22 years because of repeated terrorist attacks andmurders by al-Shabaab. Polio remains endemic in three other countries– Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — mostly because al-Qaedalinked terrorist groups refuse to allow vaccination programs,sometimes claiming that they’re a secret plot to sterilize Muslims andprevent more Muslim children. BBC and Middle East Online

Permanent web link to this article
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail