Perspective is Perception, is Fact
"It's the worst kind of bullying. What's happening here is that we are a punchbag for the police and the military. We've been at it for 85 years and never as much as thrown a stone at a policeman who came to arrest us.
"It's a military coup so we think it has no legitimacy.
"We can only control the conduct of the Muslim Brotherhood itself and its members. We have a high level of discipline and are a non-violent organization, but we have a lot of sympathetically minded organizations around us who are saying democracy has failed and we told you so. We are not coming up with good arguments to reply to them."
Jihad al-Haddad, spokesman, Freedom & Justice Party
"It's a peaceful protest, we don't use weapons but we will sacrifice our lives for Dr. Morsi."
Sadek Said Sadek, Brotherhood member
"I have a message for the army; it's our army not al-Sisi's army. Our leadership are restraining us while they have a discussion with themselves. Many of our young men have fighting experience in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chechnya and other places."
Same Ahmad, Brotherhood supporter
Resigned to the possible need to martyr themselves for the greater cause of Islam, of the implementation of Sharia law in Egypt, of demonstrating by the patience of repression born of many years of a rigidly authoritarian government that had pledged itself to peace with a detested neighbour, and cooperation with the United States, while seeking to advance the future of the Egyptian people, the Brotherhood now knows the bitter taste of victory that was short-lived, leading to the dejection of a popular revolt against the promise they proffered but never managed to build successfully upon.
They are disappointed at the outcome, disbelievingly, apallingly so. But they have their supporters. Turkey's foreign minister scorned the overthrow of the ruling Freedom & Justice Party as "unacceptable", insisting that Mr. Morsi be released from undignified, unpalatable, custody. As a possible hint that Turkey might conceivably find itself in a similar position of popular rejection through ongoing protests against its growing implementation of Islamism and authoritarian rule so grating to Turks, this turn of events is distinctly discomfiting.
But what has occurred represents an episode of "I told you so" jollity to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. "Political Islam", he crowed, is dead. His own crisis in leadership through a popular revolt by his underserved Sunni population who, for their pains in offending him are now suffering the consequences of heeding the call to revolution through intrusively diabolical foreign meddling led by Islamic extremists and fundamentalist groups like the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood proof of their evil. He feels gratifyingly validated.
Despite then-President Morsi's candid and unexpected view condemning Syria's Alawite regime for brutalizing its own citizens in preference to listening to the will of the people, surprising his hosts in Iran at the time, Iran professes disappointment at his and his party's fall from grace in Egypt. For despite Mr. Morsi's infelicitous dismissal of the imprudent and violent response of the Syrian regime, he redeemed himself well enough by fostering a new relationship of understanding between Egypt and Iran after a long hiatus in diplomatic relations.
Tunisia, now ruled by Islamists after the ouster of the hated autocratic government in the first paroxysm of the Arab Spring, considers the overthrow a "flagrant coup", with Ennahda party leader Rachid Ghannouchi expressing astonishment at this turn of events. For the overthrow most certainly represents an undermining of democracy, and its end result would feed radicalism, he warned. The irony is just too delicious to pass by without noting its absurdity of reasoning.
Just as the curious observer from afar notes that while the Muslim Brotherhood leadership states their unequivocal love for Egypt and Egyptians and that violence is the furthest things from their minds, they have called, regardless, for an intifada. Sadek Said Sadek, a French teacher who took part in the protests against the removal of their Islamist champion from power as President of Egypt, made his statement of peaceful intent hard by the very place where an Islamist who represented an offshoot of the Brotherhood assassinated the late Anwar Sadat thirty years before.
Labels: Conflict, Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, July 09, 2013
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