EGYPT: LEGITIMISING DICTATORSHIP BY LEGALISING MURDER

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.