I am not so vain or foolish that I would go on to practice what I have complained of. All I am saying instead is that I did not understand the verdict against former President Hosni Mubarak. To be sure, Judge Ahmed Rifaat talked about false witnesses who appeared before him, and said that the prosecution did not bring evidence to the court that condemns the former president. Despite this, Mubarak was sentenced to life in prison, for what he didn't do, rather than what he did do, if I understood the text of the verdict correctly. Judge Ahmed Rifaat's talk condemns him. Indeed, it is political talk and not a legal verdict, with the Judge appearing as though he was with one side against another, as he was lacking in the neutrality presupposed in a renowned judge as himself. For example, he spoke about Mubarak's era and described it as an era of ‘pitch black darkness' and spoke about a ‘new morning having come" on Tuesday January 25, 2011. This is a political discourse. I am noting my personal opinion on the Judge and the Verdict, without necessarily calling for him to be taken off the case as he is on his way to retirement, or for the Verdict to be annulled because the Egyptian judiciary no doubt knows more than I do. The above was an introduction for my subject today, namely the lack of democracy in Egypt. While the revolution's first and foremost demand was democracy, the youths of the revolution scattered into more than a hundred different groups, organizations and parties. Nowadays, they are complaining of the failure of the revolution, but they do not see that they, before anyone else, are to blame for it. Yet they call for million-strong protests after protests, sometimes against the judiciary as though they know more than the judges of Egypt do, and others against election results. I said that I expressed an opinion regarding the Verdict but without demanding anything. However, I found that Mohammed Morsi, who may become the President of Egypt this month, had said that the blood of the martyrs is his responsibility (why so?) and called for a retrial in which proper incriminating evidence is presented to the court. However, he did not explain why he did not provide said evidence when the trial had begun back on 3/8/2011. Mohammed Morsi even called in a second occasion for the ‘holdovers' of the Mubarak era to be stomped upon and trampled under the feet. Essam el-Erian, whom I had preferred as the candidate for the Muslim brotherhood given his broader experience and moderation relative to Morsi, also spoke in a similar tone, and said that the evidence that condemned Mubarak was not presented to the court, so I ask him too, why did he not present this evidence? There was a call for another million-strong demonstration in Tahrir Square to protest the results of the first round of the election, and for Mubarak being spared the death sentence, but only a few thousand people attended. Then there was another call that attracted many times more people than the first one, attended by the Muslim Brotherhood, with the participants claiming that they know more than what a veteran judge does. What the protesters in the million-strong demonstration are saying, in other words, is that they don't want democracy, but want to replace the dictatorship of the previous regime with their own. Indeed, they only accept their own opinion and nothing else, even if it was made by a prominent judge. In the meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood continue their attempt to seize all the institutions of the state through their control of parliament, and many political factions and parties have criticized the criteria observed in the formation of the Constituent Assembly, charged with drafting the new constitution as it was approved by the Committee on Legislative and Constitutional Affairs in the parliament, and considered it an attempt to monopolize how the Assembly is formed. Moving on from the legislators to the voters; the protests against Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik's victory in the first round of the presidential election mean that the protesters are rejecting the votes of about ten million voters who voted for these two candidates. Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, despite his usual moderation, continues to call for the exclusion of Ahmed Shafik as though he knows more than the judges and the Supreme Commission for Elections. Meanwhile, unknown assailants burned down the headquarters of Ahmed Shafik's campaign, which is an assault on democracy before being an assault on the candidate himself. In the meantime, the Mufti of Egypt Dr. Ali Gomaa called for participation in the elections as a national duty, and warned against attempts to influence voters in the name of religion or through bribery. By doing so, he was reiterating a declared stance by Al-Azhar Al-Sharif. However, the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood in the elections remains quintessentially of a religious nature, and the Islamic Association of Rectors of the Quran and Sunnah endorsed Morsi, while Sheikh Muhammad, the son of Dr. Omar Abdel Rahman, that his father supports Morsi as a representative of Islam and the revolution. Meanwhile, Sheikh Mohammed Khatib Mahlawi, the sermonizer of the revolution in Alexandria, said that those who had voted for a different candidate than Morsi in the first round committed a sin punishable in religion, and need to repent by voting for Morsi in the second round. This, in addition to the daily fatwas made in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, is not democracy, but is an attack on its simplest manifestations, i.e. the freedom of opinion. [email protected]
