Gamal Abdel Nasser Quotes

We will fight from house to house, from village to village. We will fight than live humiliated. We are building our country, our history, our future.

Not one of our political spokespeople—the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser’s time—ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force.

„The holy march on which the Arab nation insists, will carry us forward from one victory to another … the flag of freedom which flies over Baghdad today will fly over Amman and Riyadh. Yes, the flag of freedom which flies over Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad today will fly over the rest of the Middle East

President Gamal Abdel Nasser was aware when he closed the Gulf of Aqaba and drove out the U.N. peacekeeping force that Israel had no choice but to fight. Nasser not only threatened the very existence of Israel but defied the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, which had pledged themselves to keep Aqaba open.

The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.

As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.

«Quando il presidente Gamal Abdel Nasser, alla metà degli anni Cinquanta, espulse i leader dei Fratelli Musulmani, questi si rifugiarono in Qatar»,

About that time, due to its growing popularity, the Egyptian government legalized the Brotherhood again, but only as a religious organization. It was, however, again banned in 1954 because it insisted that Egypt be governed under shari’a, or Islamic law. That year, Abdul Munim Abdul Rauf, a Brotherhood activist, was accused of trying to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed, along with five others. Four thousand members were rounded up and jailed, and thousands of others fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Lebanon.

As we’ve examined, the anti-American insurgency in Iraq drew its strength from Sunni revanchism. One way to view Baathism historically is as one among many exponents of Sunni political power. It competed in its heyday with pan-Arab nationalism, as expounded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Islamism of Sayyed Qutb’s Brotherhood, and the Salafist-Jihadism of bin Laden. Indeed, the Islamic Faith Campaign was meant to preempt Salafism’s usurpation of Baathism. Today, the secular socialist ideology is in a tenuous state of coexistence and competition with the caliphate-building takfirism of ISIS.

vital historical fact: that Gamal Abdel Nasser signifies the only truly Egyptian developmental project in the country's history since the fall of the pharaonic state. There had been other projects: a Greek one in Alexandria, an Arab–Islamic one under the Ummayads (the first dynasty to rule the Islamic world after the end of the era of the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’), military–Islamic ones under Saladin and the grand Mamelukes, a French one under Napoleon's commanders and a dynastic (Ottoman-inspired) one under Mohamed Ali Pasha and Khedive Ismael. But this was different – in origin, meaning and impact. For Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East's most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move – to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians – and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice’, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.

Early on, the Muslim Brotherhood was an ally of sorts of the 1952 army coup that brought the “free officers,” led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, to power. Indeed, Nasser offered Qutb a number of positions. But as Nasser embraced a more secular nationalism and Arab socialism—and consolidated his own power—the two men bitterly fell out. In 1954, a member of the Brotherhood failed in an attempt to assassinate Nasser. The organization was banned. Qutb, charged with being a member of the Brotherhood’s “secret apparatus,” was jailed. There he wrote a series of commentaries that were smuggled out and eventually published under the title Milestones.

toutes deux farouchement nationalistes et résolument hostiles à la société cosmopolite d’avant : d’un côté, les Frères musulmans, qui bénéficiaient d’un vaste soutien populaire ; de l’autre, les forces armées, au sein desquelles un homme fort allait émerger, le colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser.

When the young General Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup against King Farouk in July 1952, he turned to the Germans who had been training his erstwhile enemy’s forces to create his own intelligence and security network in order to consolidate power. Seamlessly shifting their allegiance from King Farouk, the German detachment set about their new task, still with the backing of the CIA and Gehlen Org. The training was led by Otto Skorzeny, a notorious ex-Nazi who had been part of an elite unit that helped Mussolini escape from Allied jails during the war.

This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition. The intention behind Operation Susannah was to sour relations between Egypt and the West; its effect was to sour relations between the Egyptian people and the Jews who dwelt in their midst. The terrorist attacks seemed to confirm the suspicions of Egyptian Muslims that their Jewish compatriots owed allegiance to a foreign country and posed a threat to national security. As Stanford professor Joel Beinin put it, ‘The involvement of Egyptian Jews in acts of espionage and sabotage against Egypt organized and directed by Israeli military intelligence raised fundamental questions about their identities and loyalties.’31 The whole affair backfired disastrously on Israel. Pinhas Lavon was the minister of defence at the time and strenuously denied ever giving the order to military intelligence to activate the ring. He denounced the type of action in the affair that bore his name as stupid and inhuman and added that it had all started in Iraq.32 Lavon was forced to resign; ‘Cruel Zionism’, however, continued to characterise Israel’s conduct long after the ‘Lavon Affair’ had died down. The ‘Unfortunate Business’ may have started with the bombs that went off in central Baghdad back in 1950 but it probably had much deeper roots.