Sectarian hatred unmasked among pro-Morsi protesters

on July 5, 2013

This disturbing footage (published on YouTube on July 4) is taken from a pro-Morsi demonstration in Egypt the day after the Egyptian military intervened July 3 on behalf of the millions of Egyptians who demanded an end to the increasingly authoritarian rule of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

While addressing the main executor of the military action against Morsi, the armed forces’ commander-in-chief General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, one visibly furious man who supports Morsi vows that the ex-president’s supporters will become ‘martyrs’ and a ‘new Taliban’, suicide bombers that will target secularists, Christians, Shiites (whom the man refers to as non-Muslims), and all other perceived enemy forces.

Later on in the video, an equally furious woman covered in a black burqa and niqab vowed to burn her fellow Christian citizens, to whom she ascribes a collective responsibility for the widespread support the action against Morsi enjoyed from the Coptic Orthodox community, Egypt’s largest religious minority. Evidently this woman who completely hides her face and refuses to reveal her name feels comfortable venting her fury, threatening her Christian fellow citizens, “We will set you on fire!”

If the views put forth by the two raving psychopaths shown in this video bear any resemblance to typical Muslim Brotherhood supporters of ousted Egyptian President Morsi, which I hope very much is not the case, then this faction is openly threatening mass murder. The two individuals featured in this video are inciting terrorism and treason without shame or fear of any consequence. I hope that the transitional Egyptian police and military authorities will take measured, deliberative actions to contain them.

Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters are unsurprisingly angry that the military ousted him with the unified support of a majority of their fellow citizens. There is no question that, from a prima facie reading of Egypt’s suspended constitution, the army’s move was illegitimate. Yet the legitimacy of the constitution, which bears heavy Islamist influence, has never been a given, and many Egyptian citizens never accepted it as legally binding.

Rather than behaving like uncivilized brutes, threatening mass suicide bombings or railing against the Christian minority whom they despise, angry Morsi supporters would do well to ask themselves: why was Egypt’s first democratically elected president so incompetent or so hated that he was not permitted to complete one term in office? Why, furthermore, was Morsi overthrown with broad support from across the Egyptian political and religious spectrum?

By threatening to blow up and set fire to their fellow (Christian) citizens, Morsi’s more fanatical supporters validate their opponents’ portrayal of them as a violent, terrorism-supporting group. Wildly claiming that Morsi’s opponents would somehow bear the blame for having incited them to such mass violence, Morsi’s radical supporters sound like abusive spouses and parents (or children with anger management problems) who blame their victims for inciting them. If their words weren’t so deeply troubling, when one thinks of the possible actionable violence which may come from them, they would be laughable, dismissed as the ravings of madmen.

The logic of would-be terrorists and their supporters (a vocal minority among ousted Egyptian President Morsi’s more extreme partisans) seems to be something in this vein: Egyptians elected Morsi at the ballot box during a political revolution, and somehow this means that Morsi, who ruled with arbitrary power, repeatedly clashed with parliament, and was unwilling or unable to stem sectarian violence directed mainly against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, could only be removed through the ballot box.

It seems to me as though the Brotherhood is far more upset to have lost its political power than it is at the thought of an Egyptian president having been deposed before he could serve out his first term.

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