In the Salvador Option, the
dictatorial regime of El Salvador used stealth by employing death squads to
execute and wipe out their political opponents, kidnapping and making suspected
dissidents and their families to go missing and disappear from the political
landscape.
In Algeria of the 90’s, the ruthless regime’s brutal tactics of eradicatuer – they literally eradicated
Islamist political opponents, party leadership and rank and file membership by
drawing the democratically successful FIS into a bloody losing civil war,
wiping whole villages and settlements of suspected FIS supporters, faking the
scenes by framing militant extremists by disguising their security forces again
as death squads. This included vicious and cruel torture tactics inherited from
their French colonizers to terrorize Islamists into submission and put fear on
the general populace not to sympathize with the FIS.
Syria’s Assad simply declared
open warfare on its civilians and massively attacked large population centres which supported
his political opponents without humane consideration or callously violent
proportions killing hundreds of thousands including women and children.
Egypt’s coup de tat regime has
sought to legitimize itself by employing dubious legal means to silence
political opponents. Egypt has innovated the use of terror by using its courts
to mass sentencing to death of 529 activists. Egypt has even the gall and
notoriety to obtain its Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam to religiously endorse the
executions by signing off on the sentences. The 529 activists including the
Muslim Brotherhood’s General Guide Dr Muhammad Badie are only protestors who
resisted the illegal overthrow of a democratically elected government and are
activists in social and religious da’wah work. The Muslim Brotherhood has
always categorically and firmly renounced any form of violence in their
political struggle and they have consistently chosen democracy as the means to
power. Even though this is well known and accepted, Assisi’s regime has taken
the old Pharoanic line of action, that is, to get rid of the opposition totally
and completely, by exterminating political Islam, by killing its leadership and
members using “legal” means.
Egypt’s regime seem to have
picked up the idea for death sentences of Islamists from Bangladesh’s contemptuous
and shameful recent execution of Jamaat Islami’s Abd Qadir Mulla.
As it is well known in the
history of liberation and human struggle in modern times, the US, the West,
Russia and China seem to show tacit support for these authoritarian regimes.
Similarly for the oil rich Peninsular and Gulf Arabs who seem to ignore potential
loss of life of their kindred which they are influential in the process only because
they prefer the status quo, that is as
long as there is no democracy, popular revolutions or other threatening scenarios
of giving people their freedom or dignity to determine their future and
governance, displacing their hold on power.
What is the intention of such harsh
and incomprehensible sentencing? The world should not underestimate the
seriousness of the threat of the sentences. Some Islamists throughout recent history
will tend to conclude that the West and its allies are not only silent but are
increasingly abetting in the face of Islamists being arrested , tortured en
masse as well as being executed. Somehow someone intends to elevate al-Qaeda's
appeal in the region. Probably the intention is to drive Islamists and
political Islam into a drawn out violent struggle as in Algeria so that they
easily be taken out and destroyed as “terrorists” and not engaged as rival peace loving
politicians. This keeps all the Arab dictators safe and Israel secure. Hamas
and Gaza would then be starved to death, to be dismissed as a terrorist haven.
It sounds terrible and may seem quite incredible but regimes are indeed capable
of such deeds and even Western nations with blood on their hands have done that
before.
Another scenario, the United
States and the EU works closely with the Emiratis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, and
Bahrainis to persuade the Islamists that suppression of Islamists may stop with
the “reform” of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood can be made to be practical ,
to be more pragmatic, non-ideological and to focus on their social activism,
welfare work, and other civil society activities without trying to overturn the
Egyptian state or competing in elections on the platform of political Islam. The
rebranding of the Brotherhood would show that it no longer poses a threat to
the Saudis, the Gulf, Israel and Western interests in the region. It would be a
“kosher” form of Islamist activism.
In the sphere and realm of
ideology, Muslim scholars in the region, including Cairo's Al-Azhar University may
redirect the Brotherhood's ideology to be within mainstream “moderated” Islam,
rather than becoming reformist and political. Religion and clerical authority is used as leverage to
dissuade the Muslim Brotherhood from confrontation and opposing the regime’s
religiously sanctioned authority, even if the regime is illegitimate.
Finally, those elements within
the Muslim Brotherhood who are turned over, defected or disillusioned through
suppression, fear and threats can be recruited to attack and further break away at political Islam
and its adherents.
Indeed it is again a dark chapter
in the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and modern Egypt that its political
idealists, intellectuals, professionals and social activists, people who are
committed to reform and non-violence are being made to suffer, some have been
murdered and more may even be killed en masse just to prolong a decrepit and
corrupt Deep State Egyptian regime with the tacit consent of the world at large.
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