’Israeli’ Ambassador to Egyptian Minister: Al-Sisi ’National Hero for All Jews’

Al-Ahed news reports:

The "Israeli" ambassador to Cairo has supposedly told a minister in the interim government that "Israelis" view Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi as a "national hero".

According to the Middle East Monitor citing from the "Israel" Radio, the ambassador phoned the Egyptian Agriculture Minister Ayman Abu-Hadid to congratulate him on his new post, adding, "Al-Sisi is not a national hero for Egypt, but for all Jews in "Israel" and around the globe."

Why are Egyptian Liberals Celebrating a Massacre? Max Blumenthal's excellent analysis

I have to say that I fully agree with Max Blumenthal on each point he makes here. To me, this is the most credible analysis I have seen so far.

What do you think?

A few thoughts and speculations about the events in Egypt and Syria

Even though I have been closely following the events in Egypt I did not write anything about them for a while already.  Frankly, I felt too horrified, too appalled and to disgusted to write.  Besides, I am hardly an expert in Egypt and others have already said it all, and much better than I ever could (see, for example, here and here).  As for me, I just continued to follow the events, in silent shock and horror at what was taking place.

Still, just by watching different times of reports, I began noticing a few possibly interesting features which did not seem to catch much attention.

First this: most reports speak of the regime vs the pro-Morsi demonstrators.  And yet, especially when parsing Russian reports, I get the feeling that the reality on the ground is much more complex.  For one thing, I get the feeling that there is a substantial part of the demonstrators who are not at all associated with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  From their looks and interviews, they appear to be non-MB protesters who oppose the crushing of democracy and the bloodbath taking place.  Some of them even said that they had no association with the MB.

Then, I also have the feeling that there are quite a few gangs of common thugs who are happy to use the opportunity to attack people at gunpoint and steal all their belonging.  I have no way of ascertaining the magnitude of this phenomenon, but it does appear to be non-trivial.

Then, there is the business of the burned Christian churches.  I hear different figures, ranging from 7 to 50 to many more.  Each time I hear these reports I feel uncomfortable, and I wonder if I am the only one.  Here is why:

I would most definitely not put is past any Sunni extremist to burn down a church, God knows they have done some elsewhere (Chechnia, Bosnia, Kosovo).  But one still has to ask the question - cui bono - who benefits from that?

The MB official line is that they are defending democracy and human rights.  Is that really compatible with the torching of Christian churches?  Are the MB really so dumb as to not realize how bad this makes them look in the international media?  Also, considering that the Morsi supporters are busy fighting a far better trained and better armed enemy (cops, military, internal security), would attacking Christian churches really be a top priority for them?

Now look at the same question from the point of view of the military junta.  Does not every burning Christian church not vindicate them and their claim that they are saving Egypt from terrorists and extremists?

And what does the past teach us?  The Empire has used flase flags not only in Bosnia (Markale market) and Kosovo (Racak), but also in Algeria where a huge number of atrocities attributed to the Groupe Islamiste Arme (GIA) were, in fact, conducted by the Algerian military special forces.  So far all of these false flag operations have been a resounding success for the Empire which has never had to admit to them even though in each case the evidence was there, but restricted to only a few people who really cared to investigate them.  But as far as the mainstream media is concerned, this never happened.

Please - before accusing me of pro-Muslim bias - I ask that these issues be at least explored.  I appeal in particular to the non-Muslims reading this to whom I submit the following: does it make sense to denounce the false flag operations committed by the Empire in putative support of Muslim groups only to then reject the possibility that exactly the same trick could be used against Muslims elsewhere?

I personally believe that the Empire makes no difference at all between Muslims and non-Muslims.  The Empire uses whatever group is available at any given moment in time and manipulates the desires and goals of this group for its own, Imperial, interests.  Right now, in Egypt, there can be little doubt on whose side the Empire stands nor can there be any doubt as to which sides benefits from the burning of these churches.

Finally, even if these churches were, in fact, torched by Morsi supporters of the MB - so what?  I remind you that Malcolm X was killed by members of the Nation of Islam - yet it is pretty darn clear who created the circumstances for that murder and who benefited from it.

So yes, I am deeply suspicious about the reports about all these burned churches.  Am I the only one?

One more thing: the really bad news out of Egypt is that all the uniformed folks seem to have no compunction or second thoughts about shooting their fellow Egyptians.  From all the reports the bloodbath has truly reached phenomenal proportions and the so-called "security forces" are even willing to storm mosques and use deadly force on anybody, including women, children and the elderly, found inside.  The sheer viciousness of the use of deadly firepower against clearly non-violent demonstrators is rather amazing.  By the way, I am not suggesting that all or even most of the demonstrations are non-violent, not at all.  Many, if not most, are indeed violent, and I have seen footage of "civilians" in these demonstrations which are armed with assault rifles.  The fact that these armed "civilians" are clearly willing to open fire while standing in the midst of civilians also tells me that there are some in the pro-Morsi side who clearly want as many civilians killed as possible.  And this all adds up for a very ugly mix:

If the "security" forces are willing to kill as many Egyptians as ordered, and if there are those inside the MB who feel that the more people die the better, then the bloodbath is certain to continue.

Eventually though, and unless some uniformed units change sides, the MB will have to be defeated.  So far, the junta has successfully cleared every single location in Egypt it wanted to clear - from Tahrir Square to the Ramses Square Mosque.  My guess that in Cairo at least the regime is firmly in power.  What is going on in the rest of the country is, however, anyone's guess.

Russian TV reports speak of 50'000-60'000 Russian tourists currently on holidays in various tourist locations, mostly on the Red Sea.  The Russian government has now banned the sale of holiday tickets to Egypt and has authorized the free repatriation of any Russian nationals from there.  The remarkable thing those is that the Russian tourists themselves seem to feel rather safe.  They are contacted by various Russian media outlets on a daily basis but all they report are either very minor incidents or cases of more or less enforced curfews.  Clearly, the violence has not yet spilled over into the main resorts of Egypt.  So we have a bloodbath in Cairo, relative calm in the tourist resorts and basically no information at all as to what is going on in the rest of this huge country, right?

Has anybody heard or seen any report about that is happening in the rest of Egypt?

Besides the greater Cairo metropolitan area (9+ million people, Alexandria (4 million) and Giza (3 million), there are another 16 cities in Egypt with a population in between 200'000 and 600'00 for a total population of about 6 million people.  Considering the distances involved and the fact that these cities are spread through the depth of the country, this shows that there is a real potential for local resistance to the rule of the central government.

Again - if any of you have any information about what is going on in the rest of the country I would be most grateful for it.

One more thing: the violence in Egypt seems to have temporarily eclisped the war against Syria and against Hezbollah which has now reached a new qualitative level with the car bomb attack on Hezbollah in Beirut.

In Syria, as far as I know, the government forces are still pressing their advantage even though they seem to be able to concentrate only at a few cities at a time.  As for the insurgents, there are making use of a simple and flexible tactic: every time the government forces are concentrating on location A, the insurgents attack in location B.  Considering their lack of capabilities and their operational situation this is a sound tactic, but hardly one which can turn the tide.

Another interesting development in Syria is the dramatic increase of al-Qaeda attacks against the Syrian Kurds.  My guess is that being pressed by government forces al-Qaeda is literally running out of space and that they naturally looked towards the Kurdish areas of Syria which happen to be located in a strategic corner of the country which excellent land communications potential.  Whatever may be the case, they are taking a huge risk here because of the Kurds can set aside their often confused political agendas and if they actually turn their rather formidable military capabilities against al-Qaeda then this might really end up being a "coup de grâce" for al--Qaeda in Syria.  Alas, I don't have the feeling that the Kurds are ready to accept the fact that their best chance for the future would be in a firm alliance with Syria and Iran.

That's about it.  Please consider all of the above as just the speculations of a rather ignorant person.  I offer them mainly in the hope of getting a good discussion going and, especially, with the hope that those of you who have some information about what is going on in Egypt and Syria might be willing to share it with the rest of us.  Or, you can follow my example, and engage in wild speculations without really knowing what you are talking about :-)

Let's not take ourselves too seriously and let's just enjoy sharing impressions and speculations.

Many thanks and kind regards,

The Saker

What basic logic suggests to me about the situation in Egypt

I was just listening to the latest news out of Egypt about the hundred or so people killed today and I kept wondering what kind of convoluted logic would be used to blame it on the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  And, sure enough, I heard one pundit saying that the demonstrators were responsible because they were not peaceful but armed.  Another commentator then admitted that holding the democratically elected president in jail was not an option and that new elections should be organized in which Morsi should be allowed to participate.

Does any of that look totally crazy to you or is that only me?

Honestly - I find no redeeming quality to the MB, nor do I want to see these guys in power in Egypt.  I dislike their ideology which I see as profoundly reactionary,  I don't like their leaders whom I see as irresponsible and, frankly, rather stupid, and categorically disagree with Sunni Islamists' stance on the war in Syria.

But for all my dislike for the MB, it is rather obvious to me that they simply cannot be blamed for the violence in Egypt.  Violence needs to be looked at two levels here: an individual one and a corporate one.  On an individual level I am sure that both pro and anti Morsi demonstrators have used violence, as did individual policemen and soldiers.  However, in this case the individuals are to be considered responsible - not the organizations they belong to.  But on the corporate level, the only ones who used violence are the coup leaders and the police.  As an organization the MB did not unleash the current wave of violence - the Army did - and at the most the MB can be accused of defending itself or responding to violence.

Furthermore, if the military and the police are the only one guilty of the corporate violence on an immediate level (i.e.: they directly engaged in it), on an formal level the cause of all the violence is the coup itself (they created the circumstances which made it all possible).

Considering the above, I am baffled to hear somebody suggest that new elections have to be organized.  Organized by whom?!  By the same military which is guilty of the current violence and the coup which preceded and triggered it?  And, if Morsi is allowed to run, will he do that from his jail cell?  Or will the MB be banned by the "democratic military" as a "terrorist organization"?!  Would it not be more logical to have the MB organize these elections and ban all the parties and political figures which supported the coup?  I know, just kidding.  But seriously - would that not be at least as logical.

As I said, I intensely dislike the MB and I really do not wish them well.  But I have to admit that if I was an Egyptian member of the MB I would have to come to the conclusion that the entire democratic process and ideology is, at best, a farce and, at worst, an evil and toxic lie and that real change in Egypt can only happen as a result of an armed insurrection followed by a *real* revolution, one which does not only remove puppets, but achieves an irreversible regime change.

Is that not the only logical conclusion?

This all reminds me of a poem by Bertold Brecht:

Die Lösung
Bertolt Brecht

Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?

The Solution
Bertolt Brecht

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer's Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

(check here and here for historical context)

The Saker

Why the military coup is a disaster for the Egyptian Christian community

The Lebanese newspaper Daily Star published the following article:

Wave of attacks on Egypt Copts, state failing to act: NGO

CAIRO: Egypt's Christians have been targeted in a wave of attacks since the ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Mursi, and the state is failing to protect them, an NGO said Monday.

Sectarian violence since the latest political upheaval in Egypt began has killed four Coptic Christians in Luxor governorate, with churches elsewhere torched and looted, said the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

A Coptic man was also found decapitated on Thursday, five days after being kidnapped in the restive Sinai, where gunmen killed a Coptic priest the week earlier.

"What is disturbing is the failure of the security apparatus to act -- which at times looks like collusion -- to protect citizens and their property who are being targeted on the basis of their religion," the EIPR's Ishak Ibrahim said in a statement.

"Copts are paying the price of the inflammatory rhetoric against them coming from some Islamist leaders and supporters of the former president, who accuse Coptic spiritual leaders of conspiring to foment army intervention to remove Dr Mursi," he added.

In the worst violence cited by the rights group, in the two day's after Mursi's ouster, revenge attacks over the killing of a Muslim man in Al-Dabaiya, a town west of Luxor, left four Copts dead and several homes torched and looted, the NGO said.

It accused the police of taking no action to protect them or escort them from their homes, which were surrounded, despite the fact they repeatedly calls the security services for help.

The EIPR said it was troubled by the "disregard" of state institutions for these incidents and called on the interim authorities to take swift action to protect Egyptians and "end inflammatory campaigns targeting citizens on the basis of religion".

Sectarian tensions in Egypt have risen since an Islamist came to power for the first time in 2012, following the country's first free elections.

Egypt's Coptic Patriarch Tawadros II accused Mursi of "negligence" over his response to clashes outside Cairo's Coptic cathedral in which two people died and many were wounded.

The funeral service was for four Christians killed in a gun battle with Muslims in a town north of Cairo in which one Muslim also died.

This article makes an assumption which is illogical, to say the least: it implies that it would be in the military's interest to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood and/or the Salafis from killing Christians.  That is fundamentally wrong for the following reasons:

First, every case of a Muslim murdering a Christian can now be used by the state propaganda as a "proof" that the coup was needed to remove these "bloodthirsty Islamists" from power.  This is also why the Algerian military had a vested interest in having the FIS and the GIA commit as many atrocities as possible.

Second, by directing the wrath of the Islamists against the Christians (which is not too hard considering that Christian clergymen were also present at the military's official declaration that they were overthrowing the democratically elected government) the military is distracting the Islamists from their real enemy: the military, of course.

Third, while Mursi was in power it was possible to blame him for any anti-Christian attacks and demand that he deal with the guilty Islamists.  Now that Mursi has been overthrown, he can hardly be blamed for what is followers or allies might do.  In other words, at least when he was in power he had a "responsibility of command" for what was happening in Egypt, but now that he has been overthrown, he cannot be held accountable (unless he personally and directly participates in anti-Christian attacks).

Now, please get me right, as a Christian myself I am under no illusion about the vicious and bloodthirsty nature of some of the Islamists in Egypt.  My point is that as long as Mursi was in power he had a double legitimacy:

a) he was democratically elected
b) he was also the chosen candidate of the Islamists

Therefore as long as Mursi was in power he could be held accountable and he had better legitimacy to try to stop such atrocities than anybody else. Even more importantly, while Mursi was in power he had a clear interest in preventing anti-Christian violence: to prove that the MB could rule Egypt effectively and secure the peace.


In contrast, the military, of course, fails on both accounts since it no legitimacy and, arguably, no "provable" responsibility.  As for the Islamists, they can blame it all on "uncontrollable" "extremist" groups, which might even be true in some cases.

I am frankly disgusted by those who applauded the military coup and who now shed crocodile tears over the plight of the Christians in Egypt.  Did they really believe that a coup would make Christians safer?!  Is is possible that those who supported the coup could really be unaware of a basic fact of human history: lawlessness always puts minorities at risk!

The reality is, of course, that nobody cares about Egyptian Christians, least of all the US and Israel.  If they did, they would not have overthrown Saddam Hussein and they would not have attempted to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.  

What is happening to the Egyptian Christians was clearly foreseeable and is therefore directly to be blamed on those who supported the military coup.  Only a fundamentally dishonest or ignorant person could deny that.

The Saker

The collapse of legitimacy: How Egypt's secular intelligentsia betrayed the revolution

by Khaled Abou El Fadl for ABC Religion and Ethics

Legitimacy (shar'iyya) is a key word in the Arab world these days. In Egypt, it is the most contested word in the political language of the day. Morsi's supporters are willing to die in the name of shar'iyya, and his opponents claim that the true source of shar'iyya are the masses of Tahrir Square.

The Egyptian intelligentsia do not seem to tire of defining, explaining and expounding upon this key word. The amount of philosophizing that flows endlessly from the pens and mouths of Egyptian intellectuals is dizzying and, in my view, mostly incoherent, opportunistic and forced.

So, for instance, according to the pundits that fill every media outlet:

• There is revolutionary legitimacy, which is different from electoral legitimacy, and there is constitutional legitimacy, but there is also supra-constitutional legitimacy. The legitimacy of constitutions can be trumped by meta-principles, grund norms, or preemptory principles.
• There is legitimacy created by expectations and promises made during the electoral race, and conversely, the loss of legitimacy because of the failure to uphold those promises.
• There is the legitimacy conferred and withdrawn by the guardians of legitimacy, who are also the ultimate protectors of Egypt's sovereign state interests.
• There is the legitimacy of the streets and the legitimacy of the manifest destiny of Egypt in human history.
• There is a lost legitimacy of an elected president who dared infringe upon the sanctity of the judiciary - something like the religious idea of mortal sin. But there is also the legitimacy of a judge, who remains a member of the judiciary, but is granted executive, and legislative powers all at once.
• There is the legitimacy granted by a sincere commitment to democracy, and the illegitimacy of parties that should have never been allowed to form a political party because they are religiously based.
• There is the legitimacy of the social contract and the illegitimacy of those who are insincere in their commitment to the contract because they do not believe in the civic state and its legitimacy.

In short, after a revolution that overthrew one of the oldest dictatorships in the Middle East, and after six different popular elections, Egyptian intellectuals seem to be hopelessly chaotic in their understanding of what legitimacy is, and how one goes about acquiring it in a democratic system.

The revolution of 25 January 2011 promised a complete paradigm shift in the way the Egyptian intelligentsia think about political legitimacy. The revolution created a hope, which now feels like a passing dream, that Egyptians could learn the lesson taught by so many tragedies in human history. Quite simply, this lesson is that sovereignty belongs to the citizenry, and that the only source of legitimacy is the integrity and sanctity of the democratic process. No group and no person, whatever the imagined urgency or ultimate wisdom, has the right to short change or overrule the process.

One truly hoped that the Arab Spring was the beginning of a new era in which it is finally understood that sovereignty belongs to the people, and that the exclusive and sole way that the sovereign will can be expressed - and hence, the only way to gain legitimacy - is through the integrity of the process. The integrity of the political process must be defended above all.

Civil society needs civic values, and civic values are upheld through a civil discourse that does not exclude or marginalize the other. Civic discourses cannot be navigated if the participants of the discourse get into the habit of using language to eradicate the other's worth, value or dignity. Civic discourses try to search and achieve consensus over shared values, and strive to respect and tolerate values upon which people cannot agree. Yet it has become all too common for liberal secular forces to refer to Islamists as traitors, murderers, fascists and hoodlums, and on the other side, for Islamists to question the faith, piety and loyalty of their opponents.

But in principle, regardless of how polarizing the discourse might have become, respecting the process was the only guarantor that there would be a non-violent and reliable way to challenge power, hold officials accountable, and establish legitimacy. If all else fails, civil disobedience would be the last resort because it can correct procedural deviations while remaining within the bounds of the civic order. Violence and forced military interventions de-legitimate the very logic of a civil order. 
***

The secular intelligentsia in Egypt and in the Arab world in general has locked the region into a near perpetual circle of self-defeatism because they appear incapable of understanding that nothing kills lofty ideas quite like the pragmatic hypocrisy of their bearers.

***

The military coup, even if it came in response to widespread grievances, is a fatal blow to the Egyptian Revolution. It is a fatal blow because it reaffirmed the politics of the old guardians in Egypt. It confirmed the traditional polarized, mutually exclusivist and equally supremacist politics that has prevailed, not only in Egypt, but throughout the Middle East since the colonial era. Unfortunately, the military coup and the return of the repressive security forces in Egypt came as a natural conclusion to the elasticity of the claims of legitimacy made by so many parties after the revolution.

But more than anything else, it is the Egyptian secular intelligentsia and the revolutionaries themselves that forced the revolution to commit suicide. This secular intelligentsia - not only in Egypt, but also in the Arab world in general - has locked the region into a near perpetual circle of self-defeatism because they appear incapable of understanding that nothing kills lofty ideas quite like the pragmatic hypocrisy of their bearers.

Hence, it is critical to understand that the failure above all else is the defeat dealt to the ethics of legitimacy. It speaks volumes that the grievances against Mohammed Morsi were that he tried to monopolize power, he failed to respect the rule of law as embodied in the judiciary and he infringed upon the rights of dissenters. Yet the representative of the judiciary sitting as Egypt's interim president is blissfully untroubled by the unlawful closing of opposing media outlets, by the mass arrests and even murder of pro-Morsi advocates, and by his own monopolization of legislative and executive powers deposited in him by the military.

The secular intelligentsia that presented itself as the upholder of civic and democratic principles during Morsi's rule is now celebrating the appointment of Mohamed ElBaradei, who has not gone through a single electoral test of his legitimacy and has been superimposed upon the sovereign Egyptian people through military will. One cannot miss the paradoxical irony that interim President Adli Mansour, sitting as a judge on the Constitutional Court, could not tolerate any degree of political intervention by a civilian president, but is not troubled by receiving his marching orders from the military.

Why did the Egyptian secular intelligentsia betray their revolution? Why have they fallen into such profound and blatant contradictions such that they killed the infant revolution? To answer this question we must go back in time and understand what can be described as the time honoured traditions of Egyptian politics.

Long before the military coup, the secular intelligentsia and some of their revolutionary partners destined the revolution to a painful suicide by indulging in what has now become an often-repeated offense. They imagined themselves as the one and only true possessors of legitimacy, not because they represent the sovereign will but because they and they alone possess the civilizational and intellectual values necessary for a progressive order in which true democracy, unhampered by reactionary forces, can be achieved.

Since the age of colonialism, legitimacy has become an elastic word that is exploited to invent and repress history; to construct and de-construct identity; and to uphold and deny rights. Legitimacy is possessed by no one but claimed by everyone, and it is enforced only through sheer power. In the absence of a transparent and accountable civil process, those who believe that they are the de facto possessors of legitimacy massacre in cold blood, torture, maim and commit every possible offense in the name of defending the existing legitimacy. 
***

Since the age of colonialism, legitimacy has become an elastic word that is exploited to invent and repress history; to construct and de-construct identity; and to uphold and deny rights.

***
It is paradoxical, but very telling, that long before the military coup, the secular intelligentsia, whether on the right or left, adopted and promoted the claim that the Islamists were brought into power by the United States to implement an American agenda in the region. According to countless published articles and intellectuals appearing on privately owned television stations, the Muslim Brotherhood was but a pawn for American interests in the region.

This conspiratorial framework was set out in great detail in numerous articles published in the opposition papers in which it was alleged that the United States brought Islamists to power in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt and planned to bring Islamists to power in Syria so as to keep Arabs backwards and underdeveloped. Although no country has done more to undermine the Brotherhood than Saudi Arabia, Egyptian intellectuals blissfully continued to claim that there is an Egyptian, Turkish, Qatari and Israeli conspiracy to augment the United States' hegemonic power in the Middle East and to end any semblance of independence in the region.

This conspiratorial view is repeated so incessantly and persistently, but it is not a propaganda ploy or simple rhetorical flare. Is it possible that the secular intelligentsia truly believes that Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi, who was trained and educated in the United States, and the likes of ElBaradei, who served under Hosni Mubarak and who is more at home in the West than in Egypt, are capable of setting an independent course for Egyptian foreign policy? Is it possible that this secular intelligentsia have not noticed that as soon as Morsi was overthrown, Saudi Arabia and UAE came forward to save the Egyptian economy with an unprecedented lucrative aid package?

I am confident that the secular intelligentsia has noticed, but the conspiratorial accusatory framework is a poorly intellectualized way of making a very important point, and that is: not just the Brotherhood, but all Islamists in the region, lack real legitimacy. Portraying the Islamists as part of a foreign conspiracy is driven by the need to cast them as outsiders to society. Accordingly, Islamists do not represent any type of traditional or native authenticity, but are agents provocateurs manipulated by outsiders. They exploit native symbols, but only to serve foreign agendas that have nothing to do with the material interests of the people they claim to represent.

The tactic of claiming that Islamists are agents of foreign interests is not new. It has been used by every Arab dictator who has repressed Islamic groups since the 1950s. The secular intelligentsia were forced to resort to it, not only because they were incapable of galvanizing the electoral vote, but because they themselves are alienated and poorly rooted in the cultures for which they claim to speak.

The colonial era witnessed the rise of a largely Western educated class that was trained and weaned to form the necessary bourgeoisie that would service the state bureaucratic apparatus necessary for servicing colonial interests in the region. However, at that time, many of the Western educated intelligentsia still enjoyed close ties to influential reform-oriented religious figures such as Muhammad Abduh. These religious figures worked to reconcile traditional Islamic values with the modern nation-state, democracy and constitutionalism. They also represented a symbolic link to historical continuity and the legitimacy of tradition.

The ability of the Westernized intelligentsia to negotiate grounds of commonality with religious intellectual forces granted them a relative degree of native legitimacy. Typically, this Westernized intelligentsia was thoroughly grounded in post-renaissance European thought, but knew precious little about the pre-colonial Islamic epistemic tradition. Indeed, this intelligentsia saw their own native tradition largely through Western eyes. In other words, what they understood or believed about Islamic history and thought came largely from the writings of Western orientalists. Even to this day, the general outlook of the secular intelligentsia - their understanding of the progression, trajectory, contributions and the very worth of the Islamic tradition is derived practically exclusively from the writings of Western scholars on Islam.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the secular intelligentsia played a critical role in translating orientalist literature into Arabic and taught these sources in urban universities throughout Egypt. As such, they acted as a persistent bridge to transplanting and transforming Western views of Islamic history and thought to an internalized self-view in the consciousness of the urbanized elite.
***

Typically, the Westernized intelligentsia was thoroughly grounded in post-renaissance European thought, but knew precious little about the pre-colonial Islamic epistemic tradition. Indeed, this intelligentsia saw their own native tradition largely through Western eyes.

***
The cooperative and friendly relationship of the Westernized intelligentsia with the reform and liberal minded Islamic scholars did not last. With the rise of Pan-Arab nationalism, and ideological movements such as Nasserism and Ba'athism in the 1950s, the dynamics between the Westernized intelligentsia and Islamic orientations changed in fundamental and dramatic ways. Arab nationalism adopted the rhetoric of religion as a fundamentally reactionary force pitted against a progressive force of national liberation. The secular intelligentsia, which at the time were largely leftist and socialist, legitimated and defended the repressive praetorian state as necessary for achieving progressive historical objectives.

A very significant number of Egyptian intellectuals, such as Hussein Haykal, saw religion as a private and personal matter that should play no normative role in the public sphere. In reality, however, religion was not excluded from the public sphere, but it was allowed to exist only within the narrow space allowed it by the Arab secular state. The secular state created officially sanctioned podiums for religion and, in effect, created an official state religion that rubber-stamped and legitimated state politics. At the same time, this state-sponsored religion lost its legitimacy on the ground as the clergy of Azhar became salaried employees of the state. With the domestication of the native Azhari clergy, critical Islamic thought drifted into stale apologetics that placated and satisfied only the most uninspired and unchallenging intellects. This helps explain the powerful symbolism invoked when El-Sissi placed the Shaykh of al-Azhar and the Pope of the Coptic Church on either side of him when he announced his coup.

The 1967 defeat and the rise of Saudi funded Wahhabi-Salafi movements in the 1970s heralded the death of pan-Arab nationalism, and challenged the privileged status of the Westernized Egyptian intelligentsia. While intellectually unsophisticated, Wahhabi-Salafi movements achieved something that the Westernized intelligentsia was no longer capable of doing - to appeal to and galvanize the masses.

After the cooptation of the scholars of Azhar by the state, and the death of the pan-Arab socialist dream, what captured the imagination of the masses was the impassioned rhetoric of the Islamic groups who recalled in the imagination of their audiences a time of glory when Muslims were powerful and respected, and when justice reigned.
*** 

The uncomfortable truth is that the Westernized intelligentsia continued to rely on the repressive state to continue in a privileged status

***
While Islamic groups appealed to the masses on the street by embracing many of their social and economic problems and by capturing their imagination with the promise of a regained glory, the secular intelligentsia had a very different path.

Over four decades the secular intelligentsia relied on the praetorian state to placate and repress the Islamists. But embracing the evolving language of the age, this intelligentsia adopted the Western language of democracy, pluralism, civil society and human rights. While failing to understand or engage the aspirations of the masses, the secular intelligentsia adopted an increasingly elitist and even supremacist attitude towards Islamists. They borrowed the language of modernity, postmodernity, globalization and the international community as a self-assuring and self-congratulatory discourse about their own ability to understand the complexity of the modern world, to rise up to the challenges of the globalization, and to move Egyptian society towards development and progress. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and poor grew ever larger, and the economic problems of Egypt became more complicated.

The secularist and Islamist discourses grew ever more polarized. The secularists saw the Islamists as reactionary forces often describing them as dhalamiyyun ("of the dark ages" or "living in the dark ages"), and the Islamists saw the secularists as essentially alien to the society they claimed to represent. The irony is that both parties spoke the language of democracy and civil rights, and both continued to believe that they represented the true and legitimate public good. In the name of democracy, Islamists won elections and in the name of democracy the secular intelligentsia continued to rely on the repressive state as their guarantor against the reactionary Islamist forces.
***

The uncomfortable truth is that the Westernized intelligentsia continued to rely on the repressive state to continue in a privileged status.

***
A new emerging reality, however, had overtaken Egyptian society and marginalized all else. The military and security forces continued to enjoy the patronage of the United States, and control the institutions of the state. But Egyptian society was flush with Gulf money, and this created an odd and painful dynamic. Saudi Arabia continued to fund Wahhabi-Salafi movements and, eventually, funded a number of privately owned satellite stations. However, other privately owned media sprung up that belonged to a class of investors with a complex web of interests involving Gulf money and Mubarak's state apparatus. Significantly, a large segment of the Egyptian secular intelligentsia relied on these profitable cultural venues for their very survival.

The Mubarak regime balanced the Islamist media with a secular media. The same balancing act is played by the Saudi government, which owns secular channels such as the rather racy MBC and plays them off religious channels such as Iqraa. Importantly, the Mubarak regime had a complex network of incentives, rewards and punishments for journalists, writers, media personalities and everyone who could affect public opinion. Most of the secular intelligentsia became clientele of the state in which they played the role of the loyal opposition. Their measured and domesticated opposition legitimated the repressive state apparatus that had become increasingly savage and brutal.

The Egyptian revolution was sparked by an idealistic group of youth who had lost faith in all the institutions of power. This youth was defiant, innocent, idealistic, and uncorrupted. But it was successful because the destitute masses had suffered enough.

The Egyptian revolution presented the arrogant and domesticated secular intelligentsia with a true challenge. Suddenly, for the first time, they were presented with the task of practicing what they preached, and of speaking for the populace without the mediating role of the repressive state. Even when at times, they defended the rights of a member of the Brotherhood or of an Islamist, the repressive state stood as an ultimate guarantor that the Islamists would never become too powerful.

For decades, this intelligentsia theorized about the sovereign will, reactionism, progressivism and the place of Egypt in world history, but for the first time, they were forced to come face to face, deal with, and explain themselves to the Egyptian people. For the first time, they could not simply dismiss the Islamists with contempt and arrogance, and they would have to figure out a native language - a language that does not simply transplant Western concepts, ideas and historical movements, but would actually empower these ideas with meaning to the Egyptian people. Would the secular intelligentsia be capable of working through the will of the people without guardian state institutions such as the army, police, or judiciary to package this will and present it in a palatable fashion?

Why did the secular intelligentsia fear the Brotherhood so much? The Muslim Brotherhood had been the perpetual victim. Since 1954, there was no significant time that passed without the Brotherhood being persecuted and repressed in some fashion or another. Unable to depend on the powers of the state, the Brotherhood developed a network of charitable projects, and lived and preached among Egypt's disappearing middle class and impoverished masses.

Like all wealthy Egyptians, the Brotherhood relied on Gulf money, but it was capital amassed when their members were forced to escape to Gulf countries during Nasser's regime. Under Sadat and Mubarak, many of those who lived in exile in Gulf countries returned to Egypt and focused their energies on entrepreneurial projects that capitalized on their Gulf connections. However, the Brotherhood had an odd love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia. They clearly accommodated Wahhabi-Salafi Islam and benefited from Saudi largess in some contexts, but at the same time, their brand of Islam was different. Unlike the Wahhabi-Salafi movement, they sincerely believed in democracy as the inevitable and Islamically acceptable system of government. They also rejected the infamous Wahhabi practice of takfir (or of calling their Muslim opponents infidels). Consequently, the Brotherhood was well positioned to appeal to the electoral ballot.

The secular intelligentsia tried to put off an electoral showdown with Islamists. They openly complained that they had not had a chance to work with the masses while the Islamists were adept at tricking and cajoling the simple-minded public that could not understand complex ideas such as constitutionalism and limitations on power. They tried in every way to dissuade the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) from holding a referendum that raised the ultimate question of the Islamic identity of the state. Many of them tried to convince the SCAF that true democracy requires the banning of religiously based parties, and the prohibition of religious symbolism in elections. However, the military wanted a real sense of the pulse of the masses, and did not want to be dragged into a violent showdown with Islamists.

The Islamists won the referendum of 19 March 2011 with 77 percent of the vote. The parliamentary elections of 28 November 2011 was a landslide in favour of the Islamists with the Brotherhood winning 43.3 percent and other Islamic alliances winning 25 percent. The Shura Council elections were also a landslide win with the Brotherhood capturing 58.3 percent and al-Nour 25 percent of the popular vote.

Both the secular intelligentsia and the SCAF itself were now worried, and the elite class of petty capitalists who for decades had thrived only through a parasitical relationship with Mubarak's corrupt state apparatus were worried as well. On 14 June 2012, the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC), staffed by Mubarak appointees, dissolved the entire parliament because purportedly the election laws discriminated against independent candidates. On 18 June 2012, the SCAF passed the infamous "revisions" to the first Constitutional Declaration insulating the armed forces from civilian oversight or accountability and granting the army veto power over the act of declaring war. A few days later on 25 June, the SCC challenged the legality of the Shura Council, giving a clear indication that it too was likely to be dissolved.

The last remaining hope for the Islamists was the presidential elections, which were begrudgingly held by the SCAF after repeated demonstrations and protests. Just in case the Islamist dominated parliament would not be dissolved by the SCC, the SCAF and the judiciary allowed General Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak's last prime minister, to run against the Islamists despite the numerous corruption charges pending against him. Moreover, the old regime with its full network of petty capitalists put all its weight behind General Shafiq, who was reinvented by the privately owned media into a revolutionary figure who fervently believed in the rule of law.

Considering that General Shafiq was given the full support of the Egyptian state and that the privately owned media launched a full-fledged attack on the Brotherhood, the real surprise was that President Muhammed Morsi was still able to eek out a narrow victory of 51.7 percent against Shafiq's 48.3 percent. The presidential elections presented the secular intelligentsia with a stark choice: they could support the old order or they could swallow the bitter pill of supporting an Islamist candidate.

Most chose to do neither. But their sense of grievance and belief that the masses were not mature enough to decide the fate of the country through free elections was only reaffirmed.

Morsi and the Brotherhood gave their secular opponents a golden opportunity with his poor performance as Egypt's first freely elected president. Comforted by the repeated electoral victories, he moved against two bastions of privilege and power in Egypt - both secular, entitled, elitist and deeply offended at having to limit their power. Egypt is the only purported democracy where it is a criminal offense to criticize the military or judiciary and it is impossible to penetrate through the veil of immunity behind which corruption takes place.

Although the Islamists were able to pass the New Egyptian Constitution by a 63.8 percent vote on 25 December 2012, this was the last straw. The old regime with its unholy and somewhat psychotic alliances returned. The secular intelligentsia once again manned all of the podiums provided by the privately owned media, the SCC kept rejecting draft after draft of the revised electoral that was intended to save the Shura Council from being dissolved, and the military started negotiating with Washington, D.C. to remove Morsi from power.

The guardians of truth, the military and judiciary, needed to reset the revolution on its proper course by undoing the results of all six elections and by turning over the revolution to its rightful owners - the rightful owners being the possessors of the secular truth, that religion has no role in the public sphere, and that the masses need to be shepherded into a democracy.

Most importantly, in my view, panicking from the new breed of democratic Islam, the Saudis waged a campaign of economic sabotage against Morsi's government causing repeated power outages and gasoline shortages all over Egypt. And, they opened their coffers to numerous writers and journalists for waging an incessant and sometimes irrational campaign against the Brotherhood.

The massive turnout of protestors on 30 June 2013 came as nothing short of a real gift to the Brotherhood's opponents. Weeks before the secular intelligentsia had been openly calling upon the old guardians - namely, the military and judiciary - to intervene to save Egypt's revolution. Reminiscent of the role they have consistently played since the colonial era, they called upon old guardians to save the country from the follies of its natives. The guardians of truth needed to reset the revolution on its proper course by undoing the results of all six elections and by turning over the revolution to its rightful owners - the rightful owners being the possessors of the secular truth, that religion has no role in the public sphere, and that the masses need to be shepherded into a democracy rather than be treated as true sovereign agents.

The actual coup was a mere formality. The secular intelligentsia, however, felt more empowered than ever before. Now, they badly wanted to believe that in one year of Morsi's rule, they had finally achieved what they had failed to achieve since the colonial period - mass appeal. This is why they jumped on the figure of thirty million people demonstrating in Tahrir as proof positive of the legitimacy of the secular project. It is this group in Tahrir Square and no other, who are the indisputable source of legitimacy, and of what the intelligentsia knew all along, that Islamists should return to the periphery of power where they belong, and should be prevented by the old guardians from misleading the masses.

This is why the secular intelligentsia did not have a problem with the unlawful closings of the media owned by Islamists and with the unjust arrests that included the speaker of the dissolved parliament and even the attorneys who represented the Brotherhood before the SCC.

Paradoxically, it is the secular intelligentsia that unwittingly admitted the empty circle in which they keep revolving. According to them, 1952 and 2013 were legitimate revolutions in modern Egyptian history - in 1952, the army rose against injustice and the people backed it up, and in June 2013 the people rose against injustice and the army backed them up! But the secular intelligentsia fails to note that in both 1952 and 2013 the army remained the ultimate arbiter of power and the only force that at will invents and destroys constitutions, rights and institutions.

Indeed, it does appear that they are determined to repeat history once again. By celebrating the coup of 2013, just as they celebrated the coup of 1952, the Egyptian secular intelligentsia demonstrated that they have learned nothing.

Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and Chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on Islamic law, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights. He is the author of numerous books on Islam and Islamic law, including The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists and The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books.

For Egypt’s Islamists, War Is Now a Legitimate Option

By Michael Scheuer for Information Clearing House
 
Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood were elected a year ago in what the so-called “International Community” judged a free and fair election. They and Egypt’s Salafist movement garnered nearly 65-percent of the vote. On Friday, Egypt’s military intervened in the political arena and overthrew and detained Morsi.

Why? Because those who deservedly and miserably lost to the Islamists in 2012 did not care to wait for the next election to try to defeat Morsi. Those in the West who have contended that some Muslims are not capable of democracy have been proven right, although the proof lies in the behavior of those pro-democracy Egyptians the West praises and supports. Egypt’s Islamists, on the other hand, played by the political game’s rules and—if the military’s diktat holds—they have lost and war is now their main option.

What next in Egypt? After a period of post-coup semi-quiet, I think, the likeliest answer will be escalating violence for the foreseeable future. If the Brotherhood and their Salafist allies cannot hold the power to govern they legitimately won by an overwhelming margin, they will decide quite correctly that it is time to reach for the Kalashnikovs. They will be encouraged to make this decision by the Western-dominated International Community‘s tepid criticism of Morsi’s anti-democratic overthrow, which was made while it loudly applauded the Egyptian army‘s promise of new elections relatively soon.

Egypt’s increasingly popular and bin Laden-like Salafist movement was never happy with the idea of Western-style popular elections nor did they believe the West would tolerate a Sharia government. Still, they put their religious scruples on the backburner and participated in the 2012 vote. To the West’s shock and horror, they finished on the Brotherhood’s heals.

Today the Salafists know that all future Egyptian elections will be rigged against them and the Brotherhood. (NB: Egypt’s coup-against-democracy will be read the same way by Islamists worldwide.) The Salafists will tell Morsi and his colleagues “we told you so” and head for their arsenals, as well as to Egypt’s borders to welcome fellow Salafist fighters coming to their aid from Eastern Libya, elsewhere in Arab-Spring-ed Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. And all of them will be supported with guns, money, and more volunteer mujahedin from the Sunni states of the Arab Peninsula.

The Brotherhood, on the other hand, is in an impossible situation; it can only opt for war. If Morsi and his lieutenants accept the military’s action and reward the losers of the election the Islamists won in 2012, they may form some kind of illegitimate temporary regime but only at the cost of their political and religious credibility.

In addition, such a blatantly corrupt and anti-democratic compromise will drive large numbers of the Brotherhood’s members—especially its young males, some of whom are in Egypt’s armed forces—into the arms of the Salafists. If this occurs, Egypt will have a civil war with part of the army siding with the Islamists and the other part with the effete, militarily useless pro-democracy forces. In such a scenario, the Egyptian Islamists will win, though, as in Syria, it may take a while.

What should concern Americans most about the near certainty of war in Egypt, and thus the broadening of the mujahedin’s overall war against the West, is whether Obama’s administration—in league with pro-Israel Republican and Democratic senators, Britain, and Israel—used its intelligence services to help the leaders of Egypt’s anti-democratic opposition to organize, fund, and train the democracy-killing forces that filled Cairo’s streets with demonstrations and prompted the Egyptian army to use that most democratic of all tools—a military coup.

Readers will recall that former-Secretary of State Clinton and her diplomatic minions—when they were not getting Americans killed in Benghazi—bank-rolled the intervention of a number of Western NGO-like groups to operate inside Egypt to build a secular, pro-democratic movement meant to overthrow the Islamists. When Morsi and his cabinet identified this violation of Egyptian sovereignty they—like Putin when he found the same U.S.-backed threat in Russia—arrested and jailed Clinton’s agents and then threw them out of the country.

Was that the end of it? Well if Obama, the Senate’s bipartisan Israeli shills, the British, and the Israelis were smart, they would have stopped right there. But events of recent decades suggest they probably just shifted gears and went from overt, NGO-type interventionist activity to covert action interventionist programs conducted by their intelligence services.

As the Western media—and no outlet more flagrantly than the BBC—have been busy cheerleading for Morsi’s removal, I have heard no journalist who has bothered to ask how Egypt’s spectacularly fractured pro-democracy movement—it fielded 17 disunited, feckless presidential candidates in the 2012 election Morsi won—has in a twelve-month become a better organized, better-funded, and more united and logistically effective force. While it is only a guess, my money would be placed on a bet that Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, McCain, Lieberman, Schumer, and Graham cooperated in devising a covert program that used their long-time friends in the Egyptian army and those Egyptians who this week proved themselves utterly incapable of democracy to invalidate Egypt’s free-and-fair 2012 election.

If this proves to be the case, the composite force of young Egyptians intolerant of the democratic process and Western and Israeli leaders who pretend Muslims do not hate their constant, cavalier interventionism will have ensured that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri’s 2005 forecast that only jihad can defend Islam and install Sharia rule is accepted as truth by more tens of millions of Muslims. And then we will have to face an ever intensifying, Salafist-led religious war against the West, a war which America will end up fighting overseas and at home.

Michael F. Scheuer is a former CIA intelligence officer, American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.