I think many people want to see a clearer long term vision and they are right in seeking that. However, they often seem to demand too much in terms of what can be planed and accounted for. This is a long drawn war and the first battle will start by the end of the month.
The Tamarod movement is simply calling for early presidential elections. They declare that the current government has brought nothing by disaster to our lands and that we simply can not afford to continue like this for three more years.
The laundry list of grievances is very long, it includes lies, deception, breaking down the state, naked power grabs, a medieval constitution, fomenting sectarian strife, collapsing economy, horrific human rights violations, a corrupt prosecutor general, activist detentions.. and finally a a disgustingly parochial and buffoonish president that likes of which Egypt has not seen in modern history.
If you are worried about what sort of of political arrangement will emerge out of early presidential elections, or what happens if the army steps in, or a civil war erupts … there is no good answer. It is a bit hard to see that far ahead or to account for all the political dynamics that may emerge. Tamarod is a grass-roots none ideological block that is only very loosely affiliated with the politically impotent National Salvation Front. Their immediate goal is to remove the Islamists strangle hold on power. They have to maintain their laser like focus on that.
If you have good ideas, bring them forward and try to articulate them the best you can. But I beg you, do not just sit still and watch country sink into oblivion for lack of a long term vision that no one can honestly formulate. If your are a Doctor and you have patient who is going into cardiac arrest, you apply the defibrillators, then you worry about treatment.
What Tamarod are doing is bold intervention to save this country. If they succeed there might be a little hope left… if they fail, then it is curtains for Egypt…IMHO.
As a man drowning at sea,
exhausting all his energy swimming away from the visible shore
… for a straw to save him.
Damn him and his race!
He will get no quarter from his idol
… and no pity from me.
Cowards are the muck that we have to
tread through on our long march
… to freedom.
Foolishly I thought that such words bind us.
Foolishly I thought that we prayed to the same God.
The god he worshiped was of made of adulterated matter. Made of fears, hopes and social constructs. It was a dominating and dogmatic god, like he was.
A useful god that cleared for him a road to power and domination over feeble and base minds that continue to worship the Nietzschean dead god of their illusions. The wretches!
Meanings of holy Words, copied from generation to the next without spiritual transubstantiation. Meanings that with time become confused for the Words of God. As cells proceed unto death by making copies, and then dying, those meaning having moved through generations making ever more erroneous copies in minds until DEATH!
Now I know that he is dead! His thoughtless utterances only affirm that he is a machine devoid of spirit. Motivated by an evolutionary imperative to spread death and stasis in the minds of humanity. He replicated himself through a viral meme, mustering all the resources and powers in his path. What meme? You man ask? Well… he fashions pocket sized gods for the miserable and lost.
I turn to the Source, I reach out for the infinite, the uncontained, the unfathomable, the grandest mystery. The spectacle of the praying-machine haunting me.
How many youths will have to die?
…to save your face and preserve a lie!
How much tears must be shed?
How much blood must be bled?
How many holy words used in vain?
To sow confusion can cause much pain?
Renaissance is nonsense!
Conscience is pretentiousness!
How many noble words by avarice consumed?
Can they one day be dug out and exhumed?
And the word of God you used to claim…
the passions of many who now worship your name
Morsi! thou art hideous !
There is a palpable frustration, hate, and mistrust towards the MB and Islamists in general. The damage they have done to their creditability will be neigh impossible to fix. Even if we are lucky enough to stave of a civil war, we are being pushed into becoming a low-trust-society with all its nasty sociological, psychological, and economic implications. They can celebrate their “yes” referendum victory all they like, it is Pyrrhic!
They have mutilated themselves almost irreparably and in the process have also created serious fissures in the Egypt’s social fabric. Even when they get pushed out from their position of political dominance, which I am confident they will, it will not be easy repair the damage that they have done.
The time ahead requires a great deal of wisdom on part of all non-Islamists. We will not move forward if we just continue to react to their base, cowardly, deceptive, and self-serving behavior.
Why are all those protesters going about protesting? There will be a referendum on the constitution in a week and if they do not like newly drafted constitution they could simply say so at the ballot box?
They are also fond of adding:
Those who are currently protesting want to bring down a democratically elected president. They are such sore losers and pathetic whiners. But we will defend the will of the people, we will not let a corrupt and counter-revolutionary minority dictate their will on the rest of society. In a democracy we work out our differences via the ballot box, not protests.
So here I am, standing with those who are crying out for freedom, and being labeled an enemy of democracy and an elitist. Such has been the message that the MB incessantly trying to spread to western media during this recent crisis in Egypt. The message it sends to its members and other hard core “Islamists” supporters is far less varnished, it goes something like that:
Those who oppose the president are enemies of Sharia. They are westernized secular liberal infidels who must be fought by every means possible. They are enemies of Islam.
In short, they present themselves as victims of retrograde forces that are trying to kill Egypt’s young democracy and that they must also protect legitimacy and sharia (such was the slogan of their demonstration as Cairo University last Friday). Internally, they label their political opponents as infidels and enemies of Islam. In their twisted ideology, such enemies are fair targets for “jihad”, which in the minds of their more hardcore members often translate to physical liquidation.
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| From the MB’s demonstration on Dec 1. Egypt’s flag is a sitting mat, and the MB’s banner is held high |
It is telling that during their demonstration their were two prominent chants:
يا باديع يا باديع انت تؤمر و أحنا نطيع
Oh Badie, Oh Badie, you order and we obey
and the more ominous
إدي يا ريس الإشارة واحنا نجيبهوملك في شكارة
Give us a signal president and we will be bring them (i.e. your opponents) in a body bag
Such are the peaceful way of the brotherhood. The president, it seems, wields secondary power compared to Badie (the MB’s supreme guide). It was the supreme guide who was issuing statements today about how get out this impasse and not Morsi.
Most of those who voted for Morsi in the presidential elections thought they were voting for a president, not a marionette who is controlled by the leader of an organized that is shrouded in secrecy and that is implicated in numerous terrorists activities.
It is becoming clearer by the day that Morsi is not your garden variety president, he is backed by highly organized group who can act as his shock troops on demand. Morsi has been trying hard to maintain a strangle hold on popular media via his minister of information (a sort of miniature Joseph Goebbels). In the past few months, Morsi’s administration has been politically appointing members of the brotherhood in key position in Egypt’s sprawling governmental bureaucracy. Most Morsi’s speeches have been from inside mosques and the language and rhetoric are more akin to a grand khalif that a president. Liberals as becoming increasingly aware that if left unchecked Morsi might do seriouse damage to Egypt’s tolerant and cheerful culutral DNA. Morsi has not given reason in the past five months for his non-MB and non-Salfi supporters to trust him. Hence, the vast majority of liberals and leftists have come to the conclusion that this is man who is almost impossible to do business with. Almost all Morsi’s non-Islamist advisors have abandoned him.
Morsi has given himself unlimited powers via his illegal constitutional decree. There was nothing in the constitution that he had sworn to respect that gave him the power to issue constitutional decrees at will. In the early days of his presidential term, Morsi had annulled a similar decree that was issued by the supreme council of the armed forces (SCAF) on the grounds that it was not put up for referendum. In the face of mounting public criticism, Morsi seems to be trying to deflect attention away from his failing by pushing the country to the brink of a civil war. He does that by painting his opponents has enemies of religion and unleashing his shook troops to cow them into submission. The counter reaction is often quite ugly and many, in response to losing hope in attaining any measure of justice, are resorting to attacking the headquarters of the Freedom and Justice party (FJP).
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| Morsi declaring to the MB and other Islamists: “In the name of the infallible, inerrant, and untouchable ruler. I call upon thee to prepare for a holy ‘Jihad’ to protect my holiness” (by Ahmed Nady) |
I feel we are living under a reign of terror. MB militias can go about and beat-up and torture anyone with impunity. They can then claim to be victims, and try to muster sympathy for another vicious attack. They even stoop so low as to claim those who died during clashes with their militias as their own martyrs. Things were never that bad under Mubarak. The MB have no problem reneging on oaths or promises, they lie, they deceive, they distort, they torture, and they murder. They even have the nerve to do all of this while falsely claiming that it justified by divine law. They flagrantly violate the Sharia that they claim to be protecting. They pose the greatest threat to genuine message of Islam (at least from my perspective) in modern times.
Morsi is asking us to be patient and trust him fully for two month while he retains his god like powers. We have a very bad history to giving rulers full trust and full authority and hoping they will relinquish it when it is no longer necessary. It started with the coup d’etat in 1952, when the generals promised they would restore democracy in a year or so, and they stayed in power for 60 years. Mubarak has his emergency status that was supposed to last a few months, extended to 30 years. SCAF was suppose to hand over power to civilian control in 6 months and it lasted for over a year (it could have lasted much longer, if was not for the tax in blood that the revolutionaries had to pay). Now we have Morsi! He has given us no reason to trust him and has no accomplishments that would vouch for him. But, he has his militias and his supporters to call up to crush those opposed to him. They fail to see how absurd they sound when they declare “We are going out to protest against the protesters who are protesting against our president.”
Why am I going out in protests and risking live and limb? Is it to thrust this or that politician forward? Is is pure hatred for Islam (as the MB and their friends like to claim)? No. I am simply fighting for right to live in this land with a modicum of freedom. I do what I do because I do not want my children to be tortured or disfigure for expressing their views. I do not want them to be arrested for the crime of thinking differently as Morsi and his friend would have it. I do not want people issuing fatwas that it is okay to kill them for opposing a particular politician (yes we have that now and they do so without any risk of prosecution). I do not want them to live as second class citizens in while the MB lays waste their history and cultural heritage.
It is absurd to cast the current struggle as one between pro and anti Morsi groups. It is one between those whos stand for fascism and those who fight for freedom.
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| The protester at the presidential palace (Itihadeya) on Dec 7, after the broke through the army’s barricades and occupied the road leading to the palace. |
We will fight this battle out to whatever conclusion. Our failure would be a disaster for Egypt and a terrible calamity for the rest of the world.
Prelude to the great clash:
Morsi is simply saying to those who disagree with him: go to hell!!
In times when a constitution is at stake, a wise leader works to build consensus. He does not go around beating up his opponents. He does does not start a civil war.
The revolutionaries are not some sheep that you can shoo off with stick. Morsi is treading very dangerous waters. The little hope for a political solution out of this impasse that might have persevered a little that is left of his dignity is now, beyond any doubt, over.
A popular perception is growing is the Obama administration is strongly backing Morsi. The US showered praise upon Morsi as a respectable international statesman for his effort in mediating a cease fire in Gaza. He was on the cover of time as “the most important man in the middle east“. His absurd obstinacy only became clear after lavish praise by Clinton and others were heaped upon him. Many see the Morsi as the US’ man in Egypt, in the same way the Mubarak was. Many see that the United States has not given up the habit of cultivating dictators that are friendly to their interests in the middle east.
If we succumb now to fascists who cloak their murderous ways in religion, the implication for Egypt and the rest of the world will be dire indeed. In minds of all Egyptian liberals, Morsi has lost all legitimacy. He must step down, or be forced to step down. It appears that there is no peaceful ways to achieving that. The less bloody option would involve the army stepping it. It the army steps in, we are back to SCAF rule. The liberal coalition leadership in the form of ElBaradie, Sabahy, and Amr Mousa seem to be running out of creative solutions to this crisis.
A civil war seems eminent. Lord have mercy!