Many pro-June 30 analysts seem to suffer from a deep-seated elitism joined with anti-Islamist prejudice, which cannot but create a type of hysterical politics that explicitly favours one group of Egyptians over another. For pro-June 30 academics, journalists, and analysts, using terms like “the nation” to reference anti-Morsi protesters is not problematic because, for these commentators, those protesters are the nation. In this view, the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters are not truly Egyptian. Eltantawi wrote in July that she questions the Muslim Brotherhood’s respect for the Egyptian border and Egyptian national identity. The Brotherhood’s alleged disloyalty to Egypt has been a major theme in the Egyptian media, where the group has been framed as a foreign occupier. Prominent television journalist Lamees El-Hadidy proclaimed on July 3 that “Egypt is coming back to us,” and told her viewers that no group – “neither the French, nor the English, nor the Israelis…nor the Muslim Brotherhood” – could “rape” the people of Egypt. In his July 26 broadcast, Khairy Ramadan said that the Brotherhood doesn’t “understand the meaning of nation” and called the group “foreign agents” and “unpatriotic.” Recognizing the elitism extant in pro-June 30 scholarly and media discourse is essential to understanding why so many have supported the Egyptian government-driven rhetoric of “treason” and “cleansing” that has followed the events of July 3.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 21:18:52 +0000
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