Tuesday, June 24, 2014

ARAB SPRING TURNS TO WINTER OF DISCONTENT


The Egyptian judiciary’s appalling decision to sentence Peter Greste and others to seven years’ jail will be overturned and any appeals process will only delay the inevitable and give implied legitimacy to a corrupt judicial process that denies logic.

Of course Greste was empathetic to the duly elected government of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood but his comments and actions need to be taken in contemporaneous context. The Muslim Brotherhood was in government at the time.

But Morsi's Brotherhood was the inventor of terrorism. It knew nothing of democratic government and began to broaden the worst of Egypt's Sharia law, declaring women and 12 million Coptic Christians as having no rights.

It became illegal to rebuild the hundreds of Christian churches that were burnt to the ground. The systematic killing of Christians had begun 

Different shades of Islamic bigotry are hell bent on retribution for past “misdeeds” and Islam has a long memory, 1600 years of memory.

El-Sisi is about to put Morsi on trial. Why bother, why not just hang him now as Egypt's first democratically elected President? 

Egypt was once a civilised nation but contemporary Islam has changed all that. Now it is militarily top heavy due to aid from Western nations that saw it as a dependable outpost.

Unfortunately its judiciary is an arm of the government and its government is an arm of the military and at the end of the day the military always calls the tune. 

President El-Sisi is part of that military and he will now suffer massive international pressure to pardon the Al Jazeera journos. 

So far he has stood apart and allowed his judiciary to make its findings. Any appeals process will allow him to continue to stand apart for as long as it takes, which maybe years or as long as he wants. 

There should be no appeal.

A free Press is a critical pillar of the democracy Egyptians falsely aspire to. But Egypt is a long way from democracy and it will always remain imbued with an entrenched hatred for its own people only Islam can evoke. 

Murdering your already defeated enemies is ethnic cleansing and that’s something El-Sisi has planned for hundreds of arrested political foes... offering democracy to an Islamic State is akin to casting pearl before swine

The US is learning fast just how fraught with danger interfering in North African and Middle Eastern politics is and whenever you scratch the surface, there's the stench of Saudi money financing each and every uprising and each and every terrorist group.

But the West’s billions in foreign aid will carry weight now that Egypt’s economy is crippled by a lack of tourists. 

President El-Sisi's oligarchy must now choose its benefactor... the West or the Saudis. 

If it chooses the West, the journos will go free, if it chooses the Saudis, they will stay in jail and, despite his election, El-Sisi will in time become yet another military warlord on the West's hit list.

The Arab Spring has not seen a single blossom yet.

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