All those bleeding heart liberals who cry for the lost legitimacy of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood ("MB") in Egypt should get their facts right. To start with, the actual number of the MB members in Egypt is estimated to be fewer than 500,000 in a country of 90 million people, making just over one half of one per cent of the population. If we look at the Egyptian Presidential election held in June 2012, Fifty per cent of Egyptians abstained from voting, and it was approximately half the remaining 50% who voted for Morsi, making it roughly 25%. However the election was subject to such a well-documented, outrageous and widespread vote rigging by the Islamists with hundreds of complaints made and all ignored. From the number and magnitude of these complaints it would be safe to say that a significant percentage of these votes were in fact fraudulent. That would bring down further the number of Egyptians who actually voted for Morsi and the MB. The great majority of those voters preferred to vote for Morsi (especially with all the promises that the MB made during the election campaign) rather than to vote for other contender, Shafiq, who was considered part of the old Mubarak regime. Despite all that, the official documents of the Electoral Commission that supervised the election shows that at the final count Shafiq was ahead by over 300,000 votes. The MB then showed its fangs and made its threats (to the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces "SCAF" that was running the country) to turn the streets of Egypt into “rivers of blood” if Shafiq was declared the winner. In what many commentators later described as a master stroke, SCAF decided to declare Morsi the winner by a small margin. This way SCAF avoided the potential bloodshed in Egypt and handed the inexperienced MB government a poisoned chalice; a country whose economy was sliding into a recession fast and whose population had great expectations from the new democratically elected government and was growing very impatient for results. There is no doubt that Morsi and the MB had a very difficult task ahead of them. In order to succeed, they should have overcome their inexperience by relying on the advice and counsel of experienced professional politicians and public servants. Instead, the MB’s main obsession during its first (and only) year in government was to place their own equally inexperienced people in leadership positions in government, state organisations and apparatus, regional cities and trade unions. These appointments were made on the basis of loyalty to the MB rather than on merit, and were implemented with such a flagrant display of arrogance and over confidence. This attempt to dominate all senior leadership positions in the country was to implement what was openly referred to as the “Tamkeen” plan, which literally means “enabling something” or “getting a hold on to something”. The idea was for the MB to exploit the opportunity of being in government to cement itself to seat of power and to ensure that it will continue to rule in the future regardless of what the Egyptian people wanted. The MB also made a number of other blunders that did not endure them to the Egyptian people. Morsi issued a constitutional amendment giving him wide reaching legislative and administrative powers and started to run into problems with the judiciary, especially the High Constitutional Court, who opposed his attempt to effectively turn a democratically elected government into a quasi-dictatorship. In an act of pure thuggery, Morsi’s supporters set up a blockade in front of the High Constitutional Court and prevented the judges from entering the Court in order to consider the constitutionality of some of the laws enacted by the government. The police were given specific instructions not to interfere with these demonstrators. One of the controversial issues that demonstrated the over confidence bordering on arrogance by the Morsi government was the farce of passing of a new constitution for the country that was drafted purely by the Islamists and their supporters. Parties representing other segments of the Egyptian society had withdrawn in protest over the domination of the process by the Islamist parties, including the MB. With all the problems that the country was facing and the foolish way in which the MB government mismanaged its affairs, opposition voices was starting to rise. In response, Morsi removed the Prosecutor General (traditionally elected by judges) and appointed his own man to the job. This started a period of prosecuting opponent of Morsi and the MB and jailing some of them on such political crimes as “insulting the President”. The famous TV comedian Basem Youssef was one of the people prosecuted for such a crime. Morsi also started banning some of the opposing newspapers and TV channels. In another act of thuggery, the Morsi supporters set up another blockade outside Media City in Cairo, a radio and television production facility, preventing workers from gaining access to their place of work and threatening to invade the place if attacks continued against the president. Again, there was no intervention from authorities to protect these legitimate businesses from this illegal blockade. On top of all that the economy was going from bad to worse and from worse to disastrous. The people of Egypt were gradually forming the opinion that the MB was more interested in helping out their Hamas brothers than in the welfare of Egypt. Many stories were circulating about a deal that the MB had made with the USA and Israel to give Hamas the Northern part of the Sinai in order to set up a state for the Palestinians. There were also blunders made by the Morsi government regarding certain disputed territories with Sudan and the issue of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. With all this happening it was only a matter of time before the Egyptian people decide that enough is enough and demand new elections. They did that on 30 June and again on 3 July, 2013. Millions of Egyptians came out in protest against Morsi and the MB in all cities and towns of Egypt. The situation was reaching a critical stage and the dispute between the MB government and the opposition forces was starting to cripple the country. The army gave all parties more than one opportunity to resolve their differences to no avail. The head of the High Constitutional Court is now the interim president pending fresh elections, in which the MB could have participated had they not started the current episode of violence that should be condemned by all freedom loving people. All the MB’s cries of legitimacy are therefore nothing but a lie and a big joke. The fact is that the MB does not possess one democratic bone in their collective bodies as their first year of government has demonstrated. To think otherwise is childlike naivety.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Aug 2013 18:17:35 +0000
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