'Obama did not want this revolution'

By Lucky Gold

As Egypt waits for the delayed results of its presidential election, one of the revolutionary voices of the Arab Spring had a message for another president – Barack Obama.

“The U.S. administration should back off,” said Mahmoud Salem, aka “Sandmonkey,” the pseudonym under which he has authored a blog since the early days of the uprising.

“It was the message of Barack Obama’s administration to keep Mubarak,” he said Thursday on Amanpour. “Obama did not want this revolution and right now they (the American government) have made a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood to have (Mohamed) Morsi as the president. They have been meeting them (the Muslim Brotherhood) for the past year. They need to stop pressuring us.”

Speaking from Cairo, Salem suggested multiple reasons why the American administration would favor a Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood victory: “To resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to create some sort of some sort of Sunni alliance against Iran, or to create another Pakistan model.”

Whatever the reason, he said, “We don’t want any of those things. The Obama administration needs to back off.”

A lot of dead people are somehow still voting

Salem did not limit his criticism to the American government. There was plenty of blame to go around in Egypt, he said, where “the transition period so far has been one that has been entirely unstable and there is no actual clear path forward toward anything.”

“Nothing has worked as planned,” he added, “All the institutions are corrupt and the situation is ridiculous. We don’t know what will happen. We have a presidential election happening right now in which the results are being negotiated. There’s no transparency to the system.”

“A lot of dead people are somehow still voting,” said Salem. “We have no clue really who won.”

Dismissing the results of the election, whenever they are announced, Salem concluded, “The entire system needs to be revamped and there needs to be a new election… We are at a deadlock. All the options are bad.”