To add to Stanley’s sage observations (both today and earlier this week), I argue in this weekend’s column that elections are not democracy and, in fact, that popular elections in a sharia culture that inevitably empower Islamic supremacists are innately anti-democratic – which is why our commentariat ought to stop referring to Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s “democratically elected” president. He is (or was) the popularly-elected in an anti-democratic society.
Whether or not you choose to call Morsi’s ouster a “coup,” governance under the supervision of the Egyptian military is the only chance that Egypt has of reversing its slide into failed state-dom – it’s not a great chance, but it’s the only chance. As the editors argued this week, we should support Egypt’s armed forces. And I contend at the end of the column that, in light of the available choices – rule by Islamic supremacists or rule by the military – it is a shame that there is any doubt about where America stands.
It is going to get uglier in Egypt. Islamic supremacists continue taking their anger and resentment out on Christians, with dozens of churches having been torched and many having been killed. The Brothers are also torturing and killing suspected government informants. Meanwhile, the Arab press is reporting that Ammar Badi, the son of the Brotherhood’s “Supreme Guide” Mohammed Badi, was shot and killed Friday in the fighting in Cairo. I wrote about Badi in Spring Fever. For example:
In October 2010, just before the “Arab Spring” dominos started falling in Tunis, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi, had given a speech calling for violent jihad against the United States. Specifically, Badi admonished that Muslims must remember “Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme and the infidels’ word will be inferior.” Applying this injunction, Badi exclaimed that jihad, or “resistance,” “is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny.” On went the invective: The United States had been wounded by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan; thus, Badi gleefully surmised, America “is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.”
How could the Obama administration allow things to get to a point where authentic Egyptian democrats – who are a besieged minority – would justifiably believe, to their stunned dismay, that the United States is aligned with Badi and the Brothers, committed enemies of America and the West?