As the world now knows, 30 June was a success. Millions went out to the streets, and we ended up with a mixture of scenario 2 and scenario 3 from my previous article: Morsi did get deposed, but this time by the military to avoid open civil war and an eventual bloody revolution. Credit must go to the Egyptian people for coming out in the most historic numbers that the world has seen which left the military no choice but to give Morsi an ultimatum, which he ignored to his peril. Now we are facing a new transitional period of six months, and a hopeful yet foggy outlook on our future. That being said, a disclaimer has to be inserted here: revolutions are messy to say the least, and usually no one walks away clean from them. We are now wading the murky waters of a new transitional period, with the Muslim Brotherhood still very much in existence and operational, so it should come as no surprise that this is far from over.
Helping the Brotherhood survive is the narrative of outright lies that they keep spewing to the international media, thanks to their incorrigible spokesperson Gehad El-Haddad, who has been saying the word legitimacy so many times he is starting to remind us of Morsi’s last speech (57 times. 25 minutes where legitimacy was said 57 times), coupled with “military coup”. Nobody seemed to ask him what kind of military coup comes with a 48 hours ultimatum, since coups are usually surprising and immediate. I guess the military likes to give people it intends to overthrow a 48-hour head start to spoil their plan. I guess, according to international media, their sense of fair play extends to coups. The Egyptian military: nicest coup-throwers ever!
The problem with that narrative is that it relies on a number of assumptions, and none of them are true: 1) That the Brotherhood is democratically elected by millions of votes, 2) that their constitution was legitimately instated, and 3) that they are a legitimate political party through the FJP. Regarding the first assumption, since the parliamentary elections, the opposition forces have been screaming bloody murder regarding the votes the Islamists received, after uncovering systematic fraud in the voter rolls and issued government ID’s that found the existence of up to 9 million fraudulent and non-existent votes. A good example to study would be Al-Wafd Party’s Ibrahim Kamel case in Menufiya, who – after a voter came in with multiple government IDs asking him which poll station she should go to first- found in his district’s voter rolls hundreds of names each repeated as many as 32 times in his district. Upon further investigation he found out that the many of the names with the same ID number have been repeated up to 600 times nation-wide. No one investigated from the state or cleaned the rolls, which inexplicably had 12 million more eligible voters added to them 9 months later, because 12 million voters have all turned 18 in one year (hint, we are a country of 80 million people, do the math). 1994 must have been the year they introduced Viagra to the Egyptian market or something.
Needless to say that given how corrupt the Egyptian state institutions were, there was no actual way to verify the election as either free or fair, or get any real assessment of how many voters actually voted for whom. However, if Morsi did get 13 million votes in 2012 and his constitution got 10 million votes as well, the question becomes: Where are they? Why aren’t they on the streets fighting against the removal of their legitimately elected president and constitution? When parliament was dissolved during presidential elections we figured the people were occupied with it and didn’t have time to object. But now what’s their excuse? Why were there millions of anti-Morsi protests in every governorate in Egypt and the Morsi protesters, coming from all over could only fill one intersection in Cairo? Where are those votes?
Secondly, in regards to the constitution, well, you could read all about it here, here and here (spoiler: it wasn’t legitimate in its creation neither was its referendum legal or properly administered). This leaves us only one last assumption to debunk: that the Brotherhood is a legitimate political party represented in the FJP. It is not. It is a terrorist organisation, and all of their allies are also terrorists. Before you roll your eyes, let me ask you the following questions:
How many political parties in Egypt have sent their supporters with guns to beat up opposition protesters, like the Brotherhood did in the presidential palace? How many political parties have snipers on their headquarters’ roofs that sniped and killed 8 protesters that were protesting in front of it? How many political parties send their supporters and allies to lay siege to the Supreme Constitutional Court and the Media City to terrorise the judges and media personalities from legally stopping or speaking against their own illegal constitution? How many political parties incite their supporters against Christians to the point that the Coptic Cathedral gets attacked for hours while the police don’t intervene, or where their elected president and allies incite their supporters against Shi’a muslims only to have four of them brutally killed in a despicable hate crime four days later? How many political parties have political conferences with their “elected president” in attendance as the keynote speaker that hosts known Islamist terrorists from Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya who gave speeches announcing that anyone who goes out to protest on 30 June is an apostate and an infidel and thus deserves to be killed? How many political parties have their leaders and allies before 30 June state that if Morsi gets deposed they will “burn the country” and afterward announce that “terrorist attacks in Sinai will stop only if Morsi comes back to power”? Please provide examples, and Afghanistan doesn’t count.
The Brotherhood and their chief spinsters have been blatantly lying to themselves and the world. They have been claiming to be peaceful protesters against a military coup when every single one of their peaceful protests seem to end in armed clashes where guns, shotguns and machine guns are used by them, and where tens end up getting killed and hundreds injured. And mind you, this is not an isolated incident we are talking about: Those clashes have happened in Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Ismailia, Port Said, Suez, Minya, Beni Suef, Assiut, Sohag, Damanhour, Tanta, Mahalla and Menufiya, and those clashes were always against the residents of those areas and not against the military that they say they are resisting peacefully.
Yes, we should have given them a full term to do what they please with no accountability. After all, we “elected” them. Right. If this was your president, what would you do?
