mohamed elmasry

Mohamed Elmasry‘s astonishing defence of Robert Mugabe, which appeared in yesterday’s Montreal Gazette, somehow escaped our notice until today. It’s difficult to summarize without spoiling its inherent, terrible beauty. But basically, while Elmasry concedes a certain “clumsiness” in the Zimbabwean president’s approach to redressing “100 years of social injustice in his country,” his position is that in reality Mugabe is “no worse than many leaders in the developing world,” and that his people are purely the victims of Western sanctions born of sour, racist grapes.