August 25, 2013
Lecturing Egyptians about democracy
The West has completely ignored Mohamed Morsi's undemocratic rule during his first year in office, and still does. Instead they are now lecturing Egyptians on the proper way of practicing democracy.
But is this lecturing for Egypt’s good?
Morsi was not a case of "a freely elected leader with flaws" as Western media likes to report, as we may have here in Canada, but it was a case of a president who has promised to work to establish a liberal democracy before he was elected, but he never worked to fulfill that promise once elected. Never.
Morsi, once he took office on June 30, 2012, he started a speedy program of turning the country into a theocracy; a fact which has never been reported.
Western media also never reported when on November 22, 2012 Morsi declared that all his decrees are immune from any court challenge, formally becoming an-elected-president-turned-a-dictator.
The siege of the supreme court of the land by his supporters never got the headlines it deserves. His campaign against the county’s justice system smearing its judges and his plan to fire – against the country’s constitution - 3,500 of them was never reported either.
In the second round of the presidential election Morsi got 13 million votes, 2% more than his opponent, about 4 million votes from Islamists and more than double that number from the rest including moderate Muslims and Christian Copts.
But against Egypt’s historical character he was taking the country backward, with less tolerance, less freedom and no respect to the rule of law.
In the process he was working against the country’s electoral and created enemies out of the Church, Al-Azhar, moderate Muslims, academia, judges, lawyers, media, writers, artists, farmers, labor, the army, the police, youth and women groups.
This is not what Egyptians understood by “establishing a democratic state”.
Morsi’s making mockery of democracy was never criticized by the West; he was elected on a program of respecting the rights of minorities including Christian Copts and Shia Muslims but instead he turned around and fueled violence against them and enshrined discrimination in an Islamist constitution written by Islamists which was approved only by 20% of the registered voters.
Morsi’s supporters committed the crimes of killing and maiming members of the Shia and Christian Coptic minorities and moreover blamed their communities for the ills of the county; marginalizing them by charging that most are “foreign agents”. They have also harassed media people and siege their TV studios and houses.
The Western media have ignored Morsi’s refusal to even consider the demand of the vast majority of Egyptians on June 30, 2013 that he calls for an early presidential election, a very democratic demand indeed.
Once Morsi was ousted, the Muslim Brotherhood, true to their long history of violence since their formation in 1928, started a campaign of terrorism across Egypt.
The Brotherhood is a tiny minority numbered 200,000 in a country of 90 million. They are a secret fanatical organization with loyalty to its international presence rather than to Egypt. They have practiced political violence against all Egyptian governments before and after Egypt’s 1952 Revolution.
In Germany it is illegal to "organize" around or to "spread" the destructive Nazi ideology. You cannot eliminate Nazism through the legal system alone. The rest of the job is left to the education system, media, religious institutions, and public opinion. The US has also been fighting terrorism on the same fronts.
Egypt is on the right track to treat the Brotherhood as Germany treats the Nazi ideology and as the US has been fighting terrorism.
