NIDRA POLLER: MISREADING EGYPT-AGAIN
Misreading Egypt… again
Nidra Poller
Willful illiteracy has reached new levels in the misreading of recent events in Egypt. The democracy-loving [sic] Muslim Brotherhood replaced the Facebook-Twitter generation in the hearts of journalists, and the Joint Forces for The Good—the United Nations, the European Union, and Leaders of the Western World –demanded the restoration of President Morsi, placing the Good squarely in the Muslim Brotherhood camp. As for the military, they have been given the role usually attributed to Israel: heavy-handed, heartless, trigger happy oppressors. In fact, the narrative fabricated to hide the truth about what is happening in Egypt is a variation on the theme of the “Arab-Israeli” conflict.
When Tahrir Square started filling up again this year, sympathy naturally flowed to the anti-Morsi contingent. The story was that the democratic revolution had been hijacked by the Islamist government that turned out to be not as moderate as expected. Morsi’s destitution was seen from the viewpoint of young secular-looking Egyptians. The army was with the people, as in 2011, using force to ensure their freedom. And the pro-Morsi operation was cutely described as “sit-ins”… one more example of the vibrant democracy that had wafted into Egypt on the petals of the Arab Spring.
Commentators, emissaries, and those ever-present “specialists” who specialize in making sure that no harsh truths about Islam will pierce the intellectual fog, did the peace process routine. Now that the balance of power has shifted, the winners must make concessions, offer the ousted Islamists a seat at the table, release Morsi and let him try on a new pair of political shoes. Never mind that the pro-Morsi camp swelled, agitated, and clearly articulated its position: we won’t disband until our democratically elected president is back in power. We won’t retreat, we won’t compromise, we are ready to die as martyrs [shahid]. Commentators, emissaries, and those comical specialists read the ultimatum as a prelude to negotiations.
But the majority of Egyptians were not duped by the Western fiction. They knew the aims and methods of the Muslim Brotherhood, they knew what was going on inside and around the Brother’s territories, and they were not about to let them organize an open-ended violent subversive movement. When all offers to allow a peaceful exit had been refused, the army and police went into action with their customary brutality. (Not nearly as rough as erstwhile Springtime darlings… the Libyan freedom fighters, for example.) The death toll was substantial. The Brotherhood, armed with its martyrs, cashed in its chips and was raised to Victim status.
Western media, emissaries, officialdom, and the Forces for the Good went radically pro-Brotherhood. SkyNews couldn’t get enough of the Brother’s UK spokeswoman, a lovely soft-spoken young lady in off-white couture hijab who could be a model for upscale beauty products. Cradled in respectful silence from awed journalists, she warbled the party line. Democracy? No one loves democracy better than the Brotherhood. Peaceful demonstrations? A basic right of citizens. What about the 43 police and military personnel killed on August 14th? Don’t ask. In fact, no one did. British, American, and French journalists hung out with the Brothers. So, of course, if they wanted to stay alive, they too talked about democracy and the right to demonstrate peacefully. Fuzzy images of Brothers shooting off their Kalashnikovs were impossible to verify. Besides, they came from the interim government established, frankly, by a coup d’état! Egyptian soldiers executed in the Sinai weren’t nearly as touching as funerals for the Brotherhood martyrs. The smoke from burning Coptic Churches took days to reach the screen and never stirred the media conscience numbed by more than a decade of feeding the Jews to the Palestinians.
Comparisons with what I call the “lethal narrative” of the “Mideast conflict” are too numerous to elaborate in detail here. It is all of a piece: The two-state solution is no less a fiction than the Arab Spring. The legitimate statehood aspirations of the Palestinians disguises the same reality as the fervent attachment of the Muslim Brotherhood to democracy in Egypt. Or anywhere else. Jihad conquest is the driving force, the imposition of sharia and the expulsion or extermination of infidels is the aim and purpose. Western media are the purveyors of the narrative and Western governments are, with rare exceptions, AWOL.
In the absence of leadership we have US Senators McCain and Graham rushing to the scene like firefighters without hoses. They almost had a deal: In exchange for the release of a few MB topdogs, the Brotherhood would cut the “sit-in” population by close to half. The Brothers, like those Palestinian “activists,” were shouting “no concessions, all the power, all the land”. Like Palestinian gunmen, they hid behind masses of women and children, offering up sacrifices to earn international sympathy.
How much longer will our populations accept this dangerous game? Domestically, here in Europe, we are subjected to religious-political violence—mistaken for common criminality–that cannot be controlled by our systems of law enforcement. In the United States subversion assumes myriad sociological and civil rights disguises that are corroding the political system, eating away at hard-won freedom, and clogging the public mind. While Israel, our only bulwark in a region exploding with murderous Islamic rage and destruction, is pushed into negotiations with its genocidal enemy. The Brotherhood turns on the indigenous Copts in Egypt, jihadis are determined to wipe out the indigenous Jews in Israel, and Western nations steeped in anti-Zionism are helpless, both domestically and internationally, to defend themselves.
Why should Israel be conciliatory when the Egyptian Strongman doesn’t hesitate to tell the American Weakman to mind his own business? Why should Americans put up with Muslim Brotherhood aficionados inside the government, the universities, and every last civic, cultural, and professional organization when Egyptians, horrified after just one year of Morsi’s rule, rose up and kicked them out?
Barack Hussein Obama’s campaign promise to withdraw the US from its position of world leadership was lauded as if we were a totalitarian world bully. Now we see what happens when the captain abandons the ship and the sharks close in.
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