Two national security experts took to the Huffington Post yesterday to brush aside complaints from Muslim Brotherhood supporters regarding the removal from power of Egypt’s former Brotherhood-linked president Mohammed Morsi. James Farwell and Darby Arakelian, who specialize in among other things communication and persuasion, sought to be explicit about who’s to blame for the Brotherhood’s failure. Turns out, it was the Brotherhood. They call specific attention to executive power grabs that eroded Morsi’s political legitimacy:
Morsi and his Brotherhood masters — from whom, despite being president, he followed orders — presumed a mandate to do as they pleased… Morsi tried to crush the independent judiciary through action in the Shura Council — the upper house of Parliament — to rid the judiciary of dissenting judges… He sought to silence free expression through control of the arts. He ordered the arrest of satirist Bassem Youssef. His ally, M.P. Gamal Hamed, called for banning ballet as “prohibited in Islam.”
One of the dissidents targeted by Morsi – satirist Bassem Youssef, who is known as Egypt’s ‘Jon Stewart’ and had been arrested this past spring – recently published a speculative essay musing about what would have happened if the unprecedented June 30 rallies calling for Morsi’s ouster had failed.
Morsi had already begun implying, days before the rallies and after a year of Muslim Brotherhood rule, that the time to accommodate political opponents had passed. Had the subsequent anti-government rallies failed, Youssef envisions that the following weeks would have seen literal bloodbaths:
He said it in four words that inflamed the audiences’ fervour. He said: “A year is enough!”… The president’s supporters clapped and cheered. Then they began screaming their favorite chants “purge, purge.” It’s this same chant that was repeated during all of the president’s popular conferences – “the people want to purge the media.” I now remember the angry faces who in previous conferences requested the president to begin flushing the “puging”. But he would signal with his hand to calm them and say we things like how should be patient with one another and how we should give eachother chances. But this time, “a year is enough” meant there would be no second chances…
My dear reader, in the parallel world, you won’t read this article because its writer will either be imprisoned or killed. You will switch on your TV to watch Misr 25 broadcasting live footage of the burning studios of private TV channels. The people would be chanting “it’s done, the people have purged the media.” Protesters would be raising banners that will immortalize the president’s famous sentence: “one year is enough.”
[Photo: albernameg / Youtube]