Legitimacy and traffic terror
Mamdouh Al-Sheikh
Al-Watan Newspaper
Columnist Mamdouh Al-Sheikh recalls the traffic mayhem last Friday, when the Muslim Brotherhood protesters took to the streets and blocked several streets around Cairo and Giza. He mentions that the effects were not felt by any state apparatus or leader, but by the regular citizen.
He explains that the Brotherhood takes the saying “the end justifies the means” to the extreme; they think that they are allowed to use any method possible to achieve their goals. Al-Sheikh believes that the Brotherhood depends on terrorising citizens, including using violence, which is something forbidden by the Quran.
He adds that terrorising will not change anything,and certainly not reinstate Morsi as president; the Brotherhood has lost all credibility with the Egyptian people. “The government, days before the removal of Morsi, increased the punishment for road blocking, and clearly differentiated between it and peaceful protesting,” Al-Sheikh writes.
He recalls how the Brotherhood leadership used to criticise road blocking when they were in power, and that this shows their hypocrisy. He claims that theactions of the Brotherhood are not representative of Islam and that they who won the people with religious slogans should have been the first people to enforce them. Instead, they have become a “delivery service” of misery to the Egyptian people.
He explains that forces inside and outside of Egypt deluded the Brotherhood into thinking that they were on the brink of victory, contrary to everything that was happening on the ground. He adds that this will hurt the Islamist project more than it would hurt the Brotherhood.
He concludes that he hoped that these recent actions are not an indication that the Brotherhood has chosen “scattered evil to support legitimacy”.
