It's Friday, the traditional Day of Rage in the Muslim world, after the imams finish ginning up the crowd with their sermons. In Egypt, it's particularly intense as the military junta hasn't been able to fix Egypt's essential problem, which is how to deal with a population of 80 million that it's unable to feed or find jobs for.
Tensions between sections of the Egyptian populace and the junta have been rising for awhile now,but what's different about today's protest is that they've been largely taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Reuters article at the link is ridiculously politically correct ( 'the Brotherhood, which takes a conservative but not strict Salafi approach to Islam' - as if the Brotherhood is not the primary Salafist organization!) but if you read between the lines, you can see that the Muslim Brotherhood is finally beginning to make its move.
The banner above is an Islamist version of the Egytain flag and has the shehada, the Islamic profession of faith: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet" written on it.
As Mideast expert Martin Kramer reports, via Marc Lynch: "Most popular chants at Tahrir: demanding sharia, free Omar Abd al Rahman [first WTC bombing plotter], hang Mubarak, Muslim-Christian unity, reject US aid, anti-Israel," and "Huge chant goes up. The people want to implement sharia." Other news sources (and a friend on the ground) also heard: "Ya Obama ya Obama, we're all Osama."
I predicted this a long time ago. Thanks in part to President Obama's active role in the promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood and the fall of the Mubarak regime, Egypt will very likely be the next Iran. That means the ending of the Camp David Accords with Israel, the remilitarization of the Sinai and a decent chance of another war between the two countries.
And yet, believe it or not, the president still wants to sell Egypt millions of dollars worth of advanced US weaponry, and help them build facilities to build it in Egypt. On the other hand, given the president's hostility towards Israel, it's not so surprising at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment