The Egyptian judiciary’s
appalling decision to sentence Peter Greste and others to seven years’ jail
will be overturned and any appeals process will only delay the inevitable and
give implied legitimacy to a corrupt judicial process that denies logic.
Of course Greste was empathetic to the
duly elected government of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood but his comments and
actions need to be taken in contemporaneous context. The Muslim Brotherhood was
in government at the time.
But Morsi's Brotherhood was the inventor
of terrorism. It knew nothing of democratic government and began to broaden the
worst of Egypt's Sharia law, declaring women and 12 million Coptic Christians
as having no rights.
It became illegal to rebuild the
hundreds of Christian churches that were burnt to the ground. The systematic
killing of Christians had begun
Different shades of Islamic bigotry are
hell bent on retribution for past “misdeeds” and Islam has a long memory, 1600
years of memory.
El-Sisi is about to put Morsi on trial.
Why bother, why not just hang him now as Egypt's first democratically elected
President?
Egypt was once a civilised nation but
contemporary Islam has changed all that. Now it is militarily top heavy due to
aid from Western nations that saw it as a dependable outpost.
Unfortunately its judiciary is an arm of
the government and its government is an arm of the military and at the end of
the day the military always calls the tune.
President El-Sisi is part of that
military and he will now suffer massive international pressure to pardon the Al
Jazeera journos.
So far he has stood apart and allowed
his judiciary to make its findings. Any appeals process will allow him to
continue to stand apart for as long as it takes, which maybe years or as long
as he wants.
There should be no appeal.
A free Press is a critical pillar of the
democracy Egyptians falsely aspire to. But Egypt is a long way from democracy
and it will always remain imbued with an entrenched hatred for its own people
only Islam can evoke.
Murdering your already defeated enemies
is ethnic cleansing and that’s something El-Sisi has planned for hundreds of
arrested political foes... offering democracy to an Islamic State is akin to
casting pearl before swine
The US is learning fast just how fraught
with danger interfering in North African and Middle Eastern politics is and
whenever you scratch the surface, there's the stench of Saudi money financing
each and every uprising and each and every terrorist group.
But the West’s billions in foreign aid
will carry weight now that Egypt’s economy is crippled by a lack of
tourists.
President El-Sisi's
oligarchy must now choose its benefactor... the West or the Saudis.
If it chooses the West, the journos will
go free, if it chooses the Saudis, they will stay in jail and, despite his
election, El-Sisi will in time become yet another military warlord on the
West's hit list.
The Arab Spring has not seen a
single blossom yet.
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