Egypt's military detaining journalists for nothing, imposing mass death sentences

I feel sorry for the Egyptian people.

 

You may feel sorry, but our government supports this with 100s of millions of dollars ($500MM just yesterday).

I feel sorry for them too.

 

What crap. I wish the Egyptians could shake that yoke of injustice and oppression off themselves for good.

 

But at least they support Israel...

 

It's hard to shake off a yoke weighed down by a mountain of your tax dollars.

America. **** yeah.

 

Amurica! That's what they deserve for voting for the wrong people and having the wrong religion.

 

This is not right. But it is noteworthy that when the Muslim Brotherhood was doing worse things, Northside Storm was not outraged at all.

 

We understand your Muslim obsession, but you are incorrect here.

Why not bs about your support for democracy?

Just another example of how when the US assists either explicitly or implicitly in overthrowing democratically elected governments this does not lead to good things.

 

So you think people were better off when the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge, yes?

 

Yes, overall it was better than returning to the military dictatorship. Note the "overall" I realize that you only seem to be able to engage in black and white thinking on these issues.

I think many Egyptians especially those involved in the Arab Spring realize this now.

I understand Muslim Brotherhood is all you need to know.

By driving the Brotherhood underground we will be creating another Al Qaeda.

Haven't we had enough of that type of thing?

 

You are confusing cause and effect. The Muslim Brotherhood is indeed part of the ideological roots of Al Qaeda.

 

Yes and no. They were moderating, but now that we have returned to Mubarak style military dictatorship and outlawed them and imprisoned them they will inevitably turn to resistance and perhaps terrorism.

Though you probably view Ergodan as just a "terrorist" as well as a dictator the Brotherhood were becoming more like him and that is a far cry from Al Qaeda.

 

Ergodan has direct ties to Al Queda & Hamas and more fwiw.. so I can see where people get that idea.

 

There have been 3 constants in Egypt:

1) The military has been ruling Egypt for decades. Pre Mubarak, with Morsi and now with Sisi. This did not change, despite the blood Egyptians gave to make it happen. Once upon a time, they thought they had their guy in Mubarak. Then, they thought despite the corrupt filtering process in the elections they MAY have someone in Morsi who can be coaxed out of his fanatic ways. Now, it's back to Mubarak 2.0 with Sisi. The truth is, the military was unsure for a a very very brief period, but then....

2) Money money money stopped showing up during that brief period of time. Very significantly from the US, but it would be unfair to say that it's the only country shovelling dollars into the pockets of an otherwise poor and therefore vulnerable military. It became real clear very quick that the money coming in has strings attached, and not any kind of string that a citizen of any paying country would accept having in their own country. The money says: I don't care what it costs Egyptians, your domestic policy has to make my foreign policy happy. Don't care how you do it. Don't do it, the money is gone and we'll find someone else who would love to have that money.

3) The final all important constant in this context: Egyptians get screwed. Very critical to note that Americans are getting screwed here too because all the benefits of this arrangement will go to a small percentage of Americans, and you are not part of that. Virtually no Americans are part of that. But you are paying for it. You are paying out from America to Egypt, and then a lot of it exits from Egypt into the very same pockets that turn around and disrupt your political process back home.

Moral of the story: whether the MB or Mubarak or a Coptic Priest or Santa Claus is ruling Egypt, we should all be able to agree that funding another country's military is not really helping anyone who needs help. Things are messed up in Egypt, and they have been for a long time. We need to start evaluating the roots of this problem from when it started. It is idiotic to pin Egypt's problem's on the so-called election of Morsi - which was a horrible and chaotic thing - when Egypt's problems predate Morsi by decades.

Morsi's reign just brought to the surface the rotting zombie corpse of what was long ago simply a political party seeking some form of sovereignty. The Republican party has some (just to reiterate, not all/most obviously) crazy people in there, and they sometimes say things that are ideologically scary. Like about rape. About education. About abortion. About war. About immigrants. About foreigners. But imagine if the Republican party were sent underground for decades by sheer force, torture, brutality, violence, propaganda and with the help of foreign money going to the torturers. When the Republican party is "released" again decades later, what is that party going to look like? That's what oppression does. It's not going to end well. Sadly it will clearly all blow over once the greedy hands are out of the pot, and neither you nor I will have to deal with the equal opposing force. Like in Iraq right now with those maniacs. It's Egyptians who are going to have to pay and bleed and suffer.

The journalists are not the first and they're not the last people who'll suffer from this new chapter. I wish them luck, but I'm afraid the timing of incidents between Arab states has really really not favored them. No one seems to want to do Qatar any favors.