F6::"As they have moved from opposition to establishment, Islamist parties in Turkey, Tunisia and now Egypt have all been caught up in crises over the secular practicalities of governing like power sharing, urban planning, public security or even keeping the lights on."
This 12 years old boy is just stunningly, incredibly smart. Listen to him as he excruciates the Muslim Brotherhood, relentlessly dissecting their power grab for Egypt.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood calls for uprising after troops shoot protesters
After bloody clashes between supporters and opponents of Mohamed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian president, appear to subside, Egyptians warily await what will happen next.
By Abigail Hauslohner, Michael Birnbaum and William Booth, Updated: Monday, July 8, 12:44 PM
CAIRO — The political wing of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood called Monday for a popular uprising against the military after soldiers opened fire on supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi who had gathered outside the building where they believe Morsi is being held.
State-run television said that 51 people were killed and 435 were wounded in the shooting. Mahmoud Zaqzooq, a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman, said 53 were shot dead, including five children.
There were conflicting accounts of what triggered the violence. Brotherhood officials and several witnesses said troops opened fire unprovoked as the protesters were reciting dawn prayers. But a military spokesman said armed members of the pro-Morsi camp attacked troops at the headquarters, leading to one soldier’s death, and the military responded with force afterward.
Mohamed Askar, a senior military spokesman, said the protesters “came at us with machine guns, with live rounds, with bird shot.” Askar said Egyptian troops were shot at from nearby rooftops and that one officer was killed with a bullet that struck him on the top of the head. Another soldier was wounded and shown in video taken by the military, his chest peppered with shotgun pellets.
Another military spokesman, Ahmed Mohamed Ali, said at a news conference: “Any law in the world allows soldiers to defend Egyptian security when confronted with live fire. We are no longer talking about peaceful protests.”
Protesters described a scene of confusion and chaos, as live gunfire, bird shot and tear gas seemed to come from all sides.
“I don’t remember where we were facing, but the shooting came from everywhere,” said Abdel Rahman Mahmoud, a young subway cleaner, who sat on the concrete at the Brotherhood’s makeshift field hospital, both arms bandaged and sweat beading on his forehead.
Abdel Naguib Mahmoud, a lawyer from the Nile Delta town of Zagazig, said he and fellow protesters had knelt to the pavement for the second time, their backs to the Republican Guard palace, when he heard shouted warnings from the perimeter that security forces were encroaching.
“So we finished our prayer rapidly,” Mahmoud said. He said he heard the resounding boom of tear gas canisters being fired and the crackle of gunfire. Running toward the entrance of the sit-in area, he and several friends began to pick up the wounded, Mahmoud said. More shots rang out, and the men lay down on the pavement.
Mahmoud said he saw forces in military fatigues and police dressed in black. Moments later, an officer stood over him and kicked him, telling him to move, he said. When he ran, gunmen opened fire. He said he was hit in the back with birdshot, and he lifted his shirt to reveal a scattering of small bloodied wounds.
The violence dealt a significant blow to an already fragile political process. The Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party issued a statement calling for an “uprising against those who want to steal the revolution with tanks” and asking the world to prevent a “new Syria.”
Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb of the al-Azhar Mosque, Egypt’s top Islamic authority, had previously expressed support for Morsi’s ouster. But on Monday, he appeared on state television and called for all political prisoners to be freed and for a transition period back to democracy of no more than six months. He said he would remain in seclusion at his home “until everybody takes responsibility to stop the bloodshed, to prevent the country from being dragged into a civil war.”
That treatment, Tamarod said on Twitter, would echo the ban placed on former president Hosni Mubarak’s political party after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. A ban on the Brotherhood and other religious parties would also fall in line with Mubarak’s own policy, under which many of the Brotherhood’s leaders spent decades moving in and out of prison.
Askar, the senior military spokesman, suggested that the soldiers guarding the Republican Guard palace were targeted in a coordinated attack that involved rifle fire, molotov cocktails and positions atop nearby tall buildings.
“These buildings are 20 stories high, and they overlook the whole area,” he said. “So they must have been there for quite a while.”
He added: “The protesters have been here for four days now, so why would we suddenly attack them today?”
The soldier who was killed “was shot in the top of his head,” Askar said. “The shot definitely came from a rooftop.”
The senior spokesman said 200 people were arrested during the day and that the investigations and interrogations would be done by police and prosecutors, not by the army.
Askar said the statements, videos and evidence offered by Muslim Brotherhood activists were filled with falsehoods.
The pro-Morsi activists showed off bullet casings, live ammunition and shotgun shells. “Where did these things come from?” Askar asked, saying it would have been impossible for a casing to have traveled hundreds of yards from a soldier’s gun into the crowds. “I will tell you where they came from? The protesters had these bullets with them.”
“The Muslim Brotherhood is using these things to portray in the Western media that the army is against them, which isn’t true. The army is against those who are violent. We have no intention of shooting at peaceful Egyptians.”
Morsi supporters “tried to break into a military installation,” Askar said. “You saw the video where they have guns, spears, grenades.” He continued: “When the opponents of Morsi gather, do you have violence? No. When the supporters of Morsi rally, people get killed. They’re the ones who carry guns.”
Seeking to explain their version of events, military and police spokesmen showed reporters images from army cameras on the ground and aboard helicopters, as well as some news footage, saying the images portrayed an increasingly fierce attack on troops by Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
Individuals in the crowd are shown hurling rocks at the troops and later launching shards of toilet bowls from rooftops and throwing what appear to be spears.
Tires are set ablaze, and one group of young men is shown filling bottles and throwing molotov cocktails.
The army evidence includes video that shows one man with a short rifle and another with a handgun firing at the soldiers. In the military’s presentation, red circles appear around the weapons to highlight their presence to reporters and later for repeat play on television.
Other evidence shown by military included a shirtless soldier on a gurney whose torso was peppered with bird shot. They spokesmen also presented bottles of Auld Stag whiskey and clubs, daggers, swords and guns that the military said it confiscated from the protesters.
At an emotional news conference at the Rabaa al-Adawiya Mosque, where Morsi supporters have camped since the Islamist president was deposed on Wednesday, a doctor and others said that protesters had been shot in the back as they knelt to pray.
“These past three or four hours have been the worst in my life,” said Hisham Ibrahim, the doctor who is directing the field hospital outside the mosque that had received many of the victims. He said the makeshift medical center was equipped only for routine first aid and lacked the supplies to handle a mass shooting.
The field hospital had been set up in a building adjacent to the mosque, but its supplies and triage center spilled onto the concrete surface outside the building. Volunteers tied tarpaulins overhead to create shade, and dirty mats were placed on the ground for patients to lie upon. Medics huddled over a man with the deep gash of a bullet wound in his right thigh, while their colleagues treated a man who had been shot in the arm.
“#Bloodbath,” a Muslim Brotherhood official, Gehad el-Haddad, said on Twitter.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo announced Monday that it would be closed to the public on Tuesday, citing the risk of protests near the embassy compound, which is in the center of Cairo close to Tahrir Square. Many anti-Morsi demonstrations have taken on an anti-American tone, with protesters asserting that the Obama administration supports the Muslim Brotherhood. The Obama administration has been cautious in its comments about the coup, urging a peaceful transition back to democratic elections.
ElBaradei on Monday denounced the violence outside the Guard headquarters, saying on Twitter: “violence begets violence and should be strongly condemned. Independent Investigation a must. Peaceful transition is only way.”
Hours before the shooting, hundreds of Morsi supporters began a separate standoff with the military outside Egypt’s Defense Ministry in eastern Cairo.
Mohsen Radi, a former member of parliament from the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party who marched to the defense compound with a crowd of about 1,000 people, said the group was expanding its peaceful sit-ins to amplify the “pressure” to reinstate Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president.
Outside the Defense Ministry, the Morsi supporters formed a human wall, their arms linked, in a face-off about 100 yards from a row of armored personnel carriers and army troops at the ministry’s gate. As one protester unfurled a large banner, featuring an image of Morsi, onto the pavement in front of the Brotherhood supporters, an army officer said over a loudspeaker: “If you move one more meter, you will be shot.”
A third, even larger sit-in has been underway outside the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in eastern Cairo for more than a week. The demonstration has been the epicenter of pro-Morsi protests. Demonstrators, including families and children from across the country, have set up a a sprawling encampment there.
By early afternoon, Morsi supporters outside the Republican Guard headquarters building had erected fortifications built of paving stones that stood nearly six feet tall. The protesters shouted, “Come down you traitors!” at soldiers on a nearby rooftop, who were themselves reinforcing their positions with sandbags.
Fresh bullet holes were visible in the doors of cars and metal light posts. Men wearing blood-splattered clothes milled through the crowd, posing for pictures. The protesters marked — with bottles, bricks and tree branches — the spots on the pavement where the dead or wounded had left behind pools of sticky drying blood.
Near the protesters’ barricades, a six-story building was burning, smoke billowing out of the top floors.
Amro Hassan and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo contributed to this report.
Confused about Egypt? An expert walks you through it.
By Ezra Klein, Published: July 8, 2013 at 1:54 pm 16 Comments
Shadi Hamid is director of research for the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. His research focuses on Islamist political parties and democratic reform in the Arab world.
Fireworks light the sky as opponents of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi celebrate in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Wednesday, July 3, 2013. (Amr Nabil/Associated Press)
Ezra Klein: Pretend I know literally nothing about what’s happening in Egypt. Two months ago, I went to the moon, and I just came back today, and I asked you to explain why everyone is talking about Egypt. What do you tell me?
Shadi Hamid: Oh boy. Where do I start?
There were mass protests scheduled for June 30th calling for the ouster of President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s first democratically elected president. The protesters had a long list of grievances, some dealing with Morsi’s incompetence in governing, some dealing with his unwillingness to reach out to the full range of Egyptian political actors. The anger had been building over the last few months, and Morsi really failed to absorb, channel, or address that anger. He was rather stubborn till his last days in office.
EK: Can you be a bit more specific on the grievances? Is this about a bad economy? Or about Morsi personally? Or about rival political parties?
SH: The grievances are diverse. You have original revolutionaries, liberal elites, old-regime elements, civil bureaucrats, state institutions like the Ministry of the Interior and even the police, and ordinary Egyptians who are just angry about the economic situation. For all of these different groups there was a different set of concerns and priorities but all could direct their anger toward Morsi.
In terms of the economy, part of the problem is that you have these newly elected Islamist elites who come in at the top of the state institutions. But these institutions are made up of old-school state bureaucrats who are hostile to Islamist regimes and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is why you don’t want to be president after a revolution that doesn’t push out the old regime. In that way, 2011 wasn’t a full revolution because many of the old elements of the order stayed in place. The result was that the Brotherhood was technically in power but it couldn’t wield control over the state. That led to a kind of governing failure the Brotherhood simply wasn’t prepared for.
But there’s also the identity issue at the elite level, which is the Islamist vs. liberal divide. Many liberals felt the Brotherhood was attacking Egypt’s core identity. That’s where a lot of the hatred arose. You can compromise on how to run the economy. But when it comes to the very nature of the state, there is a real divide in Egyptian society about how those things should look. It’s not the kind of thing where you can negotiate what the role of religion should be. I think there was a fear the Brotherhood was going to use its power to solidify control over state institutions over time and then the very nature of the state of Egypt would be changed. That fueled a lot of the hatred among liberal elites, and some of those elites owned television stations or other media outlets they used to attack Morsi.
EK: Okay, so then the protests begin How do we go from people in the street to Morsi out of power?
SH: So with millions of Egyptians on the street, the military stepped in and announced a 48-hour ultimatum. Two days later, the army formally announced they were removing Morsi from power, taking the reins, and they would oversee a new road map for Egyptian politics. But what happened, really, was Morsi was removed by force, with armed guards taking him away, and he’s now effectively under house arrest. So this is a textbook military coup. Some Egyptians don’t see it that way, because the military has a lot of popular support right now. But historically military coups often do have popular support. And that’s very frightening. When you mix this nationalism and populism, and adoration of the army, you get a very explosive mix.
EK: And what’s happened to the rest of the Brotherhood?
SH: The key thing post-coup is that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood refuse to back down. They continue to claim Morsi is the legitimate president, and they are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend his presidency. So what we’ve seen in recent days is large-scale protests supporting Morsi organized by the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups saying they will not surrender until Morsi is reinstated. So we have a fundamental crisis of legitimacy where one part of the country considers Morsi to be the legitimate head of state and the other part considers the coup legitimate and Morsi’s term over.
EK: Which side actually has majority support among the Egyptian people? Or do average Egyptians simply wish this whole thing wasn’t happening?
SH: It’s very hard to tell. Part of the problem in Egyptian politics is everyone claims their own numbers so it becomes a war of crowds. The anti-Morsi group claims 33 million people protested last week, which defies what we know of physical spaces. A pro-Morsi speaker said their protests were 30 million strong. This is a byproduct of a failed political process. It’s a war of who can amass the most people in support of their cause and impose their will on the other.
But there is broad popular support for the military stepping in simply because people tend to cheer on military intervention after periods of economic deterioration, social instability, and political polarization — all of the negative factors that push people to give up on the democratic process were very much present in Egypt. And the military is still the most trusted state institution.
EK: So what comes next?
SH: What I would’ve hoped would happen before today is to find a way to bring the Muslim Brotherhood back into the process and give them a stake in the new order. That might not have been possible right away, and it would’ve required some really rock-solid guarantees that they could participate in and even win in elections, but there could’ve been a give-and-take in which they give up some legitimacy claims in return for participation guarantees.
But now they have at least 50 members shot down by the military this morning. They’re calling them martyrs. Now it will be much harder for them to give up these legitimacy claims because then what did those people die for?
So I think there are two options. First is the Algeria or eradication scenario, in which the military and old-regime elements simply try to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s the repression option. Then you have the referendum option. I don’t know how you would do it, exactly. The military has dug in so deep to its position, and it’s already calling the Muslim Brotherhood terrorists, so I don’t know if this is realistic. But typically what you’d do is have some vote where both sides agree to abide by the will of the people.
At least in the near term, though, I think we could just be in a continuation of this low-level civil conflict, this war of attrition between the two sides. A stalemate with violence, if you will. The short-term outlook is very dark now.
.. i chiefly posted this one for the insight re the economy, which i emphasized .. it's the first time i've seen it stated that the MB had little power over the state, stated as clearly before ..
Ps: would the army just massacre for the fun of it? .. don't reckon .. on that, did you notice early 'massacre' reports drifted to 'killing' pretty quickly ..
Taking sides: Inside the Egypt debate .. 3 pages ..
President Obama will find it impossible to avoid making a clear choice. | AP Photo
By JOHN F. HARRIS and ELIZABETH TITUS | 7/8/13 5:02 AM EDT
.. offer an outline of different groups on Egypt .. "The ‘good riddance’ caucus" .. that's clear .. the "Pro-democracy purists" .. "a coup is a coup" .. suggestion is Leahy in hinting review of US aid to Egypt leans to here, and, of course, McCain, who is always, in opposition at least, a black-'n-white 'it's all about democracy' guy .. then there are ..
The Mideast realists
These people aren’t exactly in the “good riddance” caucus, even as their views coincide in important ways. The realists are approaching the Egypt situation less from an ideological perspective than a practical one — how does the United States preserve as much influence as possible in Cairo even while acknowledging that events are largely outside Washington’s control?
Obama has not yet fully shown his hand on Egypt but his statements to date — especially in context of his general approach to the Middle East — strongly suggest that he belongs in this camp. All things being equal, he wants to be on the side of the good guys (while acknowledging that they are hard to identify), but he wants even more to be on the side of whoever can bring calm and regional stability most expeditiously.
The best example of the realist view came from former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk on the Foreign Policy website. “It’s Time to Work With Egypt’s Generals,” read the headline on Indyk’s article. He offered broad criticism of the Obama record on Egypt, including what he suggested was the administration’s clumsy moves at the time former dictator and U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was evicted from power during the Arab Spring. “We spoke out when we should’ve been working quietly to remove Mubarak; we stayed silent when we should’ve been calling out Morsy on his anti-democratic behavior.”
For all this, the realists are basically trying to back Obama and provide constructive options to him. “President Obama is right to emphasize the need for a non-violent, consensual effort to promote a prompt return to civilian rule, constitutional reform, and a new electoral contest,” Indyk wrote. “But this is not the time for a lengthy White House proclamation about liberal democratic principles. Nobody in Egypt is listening to the nuances of our statements; but all will be quick to judge whose side Obama is taking.”
"The jeering section" .. mostly conservatives, yet some from the above camps, too .. "The furrowed-brow crowd" in which they place Nancy Pelosi and lastly the "Catnip for cable" .. Bachmann, Cruz types .. heaps more inside, from more knowledgeable people .. :) ..early night zzz time .. yippee!
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