“And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbor; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.” (Isaiah 19: 2)
The same Hebrew prophet who beheld the “thrice Holy God” once envisioned desperate times with disparate measures throughout the Middle East, not just for his homeland, but for neighboring states as well.
Regarding Egypt, what Isaiah recorded then is now being reported now.
Mohammed Morsi, the “democratically elected” President of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood puppet-parasite, has been deposed. The public outcry against his corrupt regime, calculated to enshrine a fundamentalist Sharia virulence on the country, expanded from Facebook to face-to-face, to crowds swarming in the millions in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout once more, but this time with greater vehemence than in two years past.
These “Arab World” revolutions of power all started with a wronged fruit vendor in Tunisia, a young intellect with no hopes of success in his stagnant nation. State officials had robbed him for not paying a massive fee (read, bribe), then beat him for seeking redress. Lighting himself on fire outside of the “Ministry of Justice” in his home town, he cried out: “How do you expect me to make a living?!” His self-immolation sparked public outcry, followed by rallies and protests from lawyers, state officials, and then every Tunisian tired of the state oppression. The fall of “President” Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali in “moderate, stable” Tunisia then sent three more regimes toppling: Libya, Yemen, and Egypt, the largest Muslim state in Arab world.
The kleptocracy of Egypt’s rulers could not maintain its corrupt clutch on its citizens forever.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak fled from power in 2012, followed by his incarceration, with a public trial in a hospital bed to follow. Nationwide elections ensued, with the Muslim Brotherhood winning top seats, including President Mohammed Morsi. His administration, then regime, shut down free speech, shuttered dissent, and oppressed religious and ethnic minorities.
Another military coup has brought down the Morsi administration one year after its installation, and two years after the downfall of Mubarak, ironically enough a military strongman who was ushered into power following the assassination of Israeli-friendly military strongman Anwar Sadat. The Arab Spring of 2011 turned Islamist Winter of 2012 has become a Chaotic Summer in 2013. The budding revolution has ripened into a bloody mess. The most populous Arab nation, fraught with ethnic divisions and religious discord between Christian and Muslim, and among Muslim sects, has exploded into factions of secular, sacred, free, dominating.
No one is more pleased with this outcome than military-secular dictator of Syria Bashar al-Assad, who has held back a secular-religious-terrorist civil war/uprising for two years. With the armed power, with international connections, with feckless non-intervention from Obama (one of his few wise foreign policy moves), Assad is having his say (and stay) in Syria.
The tumults which have arrested Syria, and Egypt, into inner conflict should give pause as well as elicit praise from Western States, and their one ally Israel. As long as dictatorships expend time and money, blood and iron, keeping their own people in line, as long as terrorists target Muslim clerics or Islamic frontmen, then the Jewish state, and all those who pray for the peace of Jerusalem, can breathe a little easier.
In contrast to the sighs of relief for long-standing yet embattled dictators, no one is more displeased with the deposition of Morsi than Hamas, Gaza instigators, and the terrorist groups surrounding Israel. Morsi had brokered a cease-fire between the Jewish nation and their Islamist hatemongering neighbors, yet now he has been fired from his own post. For his role in fomenting Islamist uprisings throughout the Middle East, Morsi was more than an eyesore, or a thorn in the side, but an outright cancer in the Middle East, a dictator whose preeminence was marred from the beginning with tyrannical power grabs. The Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization dedicated to the global spread of Sharia law, dominated the new statehouse, reworked the Constitution, and through Morsi’s massive influence attempted to purge the military. This poison was corrupting the well-meaning interests of Arabs seeking greater economic and political freedoms, without compromising their core values or crushing their opponents.
From the toppling of Mubarak to the present day, the Egyptian military, with all of its corruption and compulsion by force and fiat, has remained the one instrument of power and legitimacy in Egypt, a nation which had prided its Pharaohs as “gods on earth” in the past, where God Almighty had wiped out every crop and couple with plagues, from bloody water to dead firstborn children. A nation which had been the birth place of gods, has given birth to chaos and destruction. The end of the world seemed nigh to evangelical Christians or Wahabist Muslims, but the uncertainty of revolution, plus the marginalization of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, should grant some solace to those who feared the emergence of terrorist bases throughout Arab North Africa. The final flourishing bloom of the Arab Spring still remains to be seen.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a teacher-turned-writer on topics both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A life-long Southern California resident, Arthur currently lives in Torrance.
