Imagine sitting at a friend’s house, watching the president address the nation after a week long crisis, with his supporters just the night before opening fire on civilian protesters in Heliopolis in horrifying clashes that spanned the whole day. Imagine finding out that he issued the illegal constitutional declaration that enflamed and divided the entire country, because- and I quote- one of the suspects in the Camel incidents, who was declared innocent by the courts, had a meeting with 3 other unnamed people in his office.
The president that has under him state security, general intelligence, military intelligence, the Ministry of Justice, the police and the general prosecutor’s office declaring that he had no choice but to issue this declaration because four people had a meeting. And then, as he swipes the page of his speech on his IPad, he instinctively licks his finger first as if he is turning a paper page. Imagine.
Imagine that this president saw that the situation was so urgent, he called for a national dialogue meeting with the opposition in two days to resolve the crisis, one that all of his allies and none of the opposition attend, and he walks in, talks for 5 minutes, then leaves the dialogue he called for immediately, telling people to talk to his VP and that he is leaving to guarantee the “neutrality of the dialogue”.
Imagine that his group’s uber-intellectual, Fahmy Howeidy, shortly after also leaves because he had another important meeting to attend, and that this group of clowns come with a solution after midnight that isn’t a solution, drafted by ex-presidential candidate Selim Al-Aawa, who wrote the Sudanese constitution that eventually led to Sudan getting divided into two countries. They fronted that guy. Just Imagine.
Imagine that the next day, you are no longer greeted with the president’s face, but with those of the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his second man Khairat El-Shater, who both hold press conferences defending the president in hiding, while the army builds walls around the Presidential Palace.
Imagine watching the Supreme Guide claiming that all who died in the clashes are Muslim Brotherhood, despite there being dead Christians in the clashes, and El-Shater talking about how hard it is to get investment into this country and blaming the whole crisis on the Christians and the Church. Imagine knowing that those are the people who run the Order that is running your country at the moment. Imagine.
Imagine knowing that your president, the first civilian democratically elected post-revolution president is a puppet for that group, and his puppeteer is the second man in this order, and not even the first. Imagine that this group has its people, for two weeks, wondering openly on TV talk shows about why the people, after a revolution, cannot tolerate having a temporary dictatorship for a few months, since they endured it under Mubarak for 30 years.
Imagine them being unable to comprehend that because you simply won an election by 1%, you can’t just do anything you damn please in the name of democracy because you are the majority. Imagine them openly stating that this constitution, since it supports Shari’a, will have 90% support in terms of votes and that the opposition are all Christians and agents and no more than 40,000 in the entire country and want to repeat the constitution writing process to allow gay marriage. Imagine.
Imagine that this group is still pushing for a referendum over a constitutional draft that is created by an illegal Constituent Assembly that a third of its members withdrew, while an entire country goes in flames over it, with hundreds of thousands of Egyptians in the governorates are protesting and clashing with this group’s supporters.
Imagine that with this referendum being 4 days away, and the presidency has no judges to supervise it, doesn’t have the schools to host it, did not open the door for journalists or observers to go in and observe the process, and gave no way for the voters to find out where they are supposed to vote. Your country’s constitution. Imagine.
Imagine that the secular side is the majority for the first time, with people in the streets all over Egypt viewing this as a referendum on the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsy and want to vote No on both and teach them a lesson.
Imagine them finally rallying behind a unified opposition front, called the National Salvation council, who just yesterday issued that they will boycott the first referendum they actually have a great shot of winning, because they think it’s an illegitimate referendum and we shouldn’t dignify it with our votes, despite it being the country’s constitution and everything.
Just freakin’ Imagine.
