The Muslim Brotherhood will not return to power in Egypt. It will not return tomorrow, or the day after, or in a year, or a decade. What is needed now is for the Brotherhood to believe that its role in power has ended, and for it to work to stop terrorism. This will let it politically rehabilitate itself, to enter Parliament as a non-religious party that defends its ideology. I do not have to list here the terrorist acts that Egypt has witnessed since the fall of the Brotherhood. I will say that the terrorists began as members of the Brotherhood and then split off, to carry out terror. It remains terrorist, even if its victims are Christians or Jews. How can the terrorists in Egypt claim that they are Sunni, then kill civilians or soldiers who are Sunni? Their God will hold them to account. I call on Hamas to sever ties with the Brotherhood, and I call on the Egyptian government to stop dealing with the Nur Party, which is a type of Muslim Brotherhood. The one year of Muslim Brotherhood rule was a curse on Egypt. The economy was destroyed, or nearly so. Chaotic security conditions became much worse while the Brotherhood was trying to turn the country into a copy of itself. It had no allies or friends, except Israel and the United States government. Thus, I read the editorial of The New York Times, written by its editorial board, namely a group of pro-Likud Israel supporters. It talked about the "dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak." The term dictator cannot be applied to him, because he did not kill anyone. The security measures in his day were a response to the terror of groups that split off from the Muslim Brotherhood. Hosni Mubarak did not impose a state of emergency, but rather inherited it. The law is nearly as old as the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, but when the transitional government imposed the law for a short period of time, the White House immediately objected, as did the supporters of Israel in the editorial board of The New York Times. The editorial was brazen enough to mention the arrest of a journalist, while the Brotherhood attacked correspondents from Egyptian Television and stole their equipment. It accused the military of trying to take over the judiciary. I remember that the Brotherhood won in Parliamentary elections and Mohamed Morsi won the presidential election (I insist that his win was not completely confirmed) and immediately started trying to take over the judiciary. Democracy rests on the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and the Brotherhood tried hard to dominate these three branches, which does away with democracy. Even so, The New York Times editorial did not write editorials criticizing the Morsi government. Now, it criticizes the "coup," but I do not see it that way when millions of Egyptians demonstrated against the rule of the Brotherhood; their numbers exceeded those who demonstrated against the rule of Mubarak on 25 January 2011 and 11 February 2011. I would not have mentioned all this about the editorial were it not for the fact that I know it reflects the opinion of Israel, which wants Egypt to be a "broken-down" country ruled by the Brotherhood, so that the Egyptians drown in poverty and ignorance and cannot assume a leading Arab role, which the country deserves. I thank Gulf countries because they supported Egypt, and again because this stance was against the wishes of Washington. I thank them for a third time because they realized the danger of Brotherhood ideology to the process of reconstruction and progress in all Arab countries. Egypt requires action, not theories. The Global Competitiveness Report ranks Egypt very low in terms of education, production and the role of women in the work force. I say to Egyptian readers: read it. Perhaps General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi can lead Egypt to safety, if he is elected president. He enjoys the support of most prominent Egyptians in and around the transitional government in the coming presidential elections, since the majority of Egyptians support him. If I were Egyptian I would vote for him. And if it were up to me, I would work against any attempt to isolate or ban the Brotherhood from political life. The Brotherhood should be able to form a non-religious party that represents its ideology. It has considerable remaining popularity in Egypt and perhaps it will benefit from its experience in power and not repeat the mistakes that did away with it. [email protected]
