The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has called for a massive day of rage to protest their defeat at the hands of the army yesterday. Which is guaranteed to lead to more bloodshed, seeing as many of their members are armed, and others are Libyan and Tunisian agent-provocateurs.
What it also means is that a huge number of churches in Egypt will go up in flames, because torching churches is something Muslim Brothers do exceptionally well.
They can't run a country, or keep their hands off women in public, but oh boy can they burn churches.
Expect the violence and arson to begin as soon as howling mobs leave their places of worship after Friday prayers. Angry khatibs and imams will have whipped them into a frenzy, and all the necessary gasoline will have been stocked up in advance.
They're experts at burning churches.
Did I already mention that?
Meanwhile, the governments of the Western World are wringing their hands over the crowd-control techniques that the Egyptian authorities are using. Because live ammo is no way to deal with murderous mobs of peaceful protesters. Who rape, loot, and pillage. Then shoot at police officers, firefighters, and soldiers from rooftops.
Besides setting fire to churches.
It's just not done.
By the way, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has the financial and tactical support of the Qataris and the Turks. Who obviously have no problem with the regular destruction of churches. After all, it's what Muslim Bros do best.
They're opposed by the Saudis, who have clearly grasped that encouraging insanity is likely to prove risky in the near-term, and deadly in the long run.
The U.S. administration and the European governments should take note.
And advise Navi Pillai to shut her pie hole. Seeing as she. Can't. Say. Bugger. All. About. The. Burning. Of. Churches.
Here's wishing a 'happy and productive Friday' to the Egyptians.
And the Qataris. And the Turks.
As well as all the concerned individuals from Libya and Tunis.
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8 comments:
The New York Times has not been reporting on said "murderous mobs" and their "raping lootin and pillaging"; or if they have I missed all of it. Can you refer me to more information on this, specifically related to the recent sit-ins?
The NYT is not the only news source out there. Search the internet, and you will discover any amount of interesting material.
One cautionary note: pay attention to the bias of the blog or paper, and take some things with a grain of salt. Any reading of Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and several other sites (Holger Awakens, Docs Talk, Wake Up America, Monkey in the Middle, et alia) will show that some authors exaggerate for a cause, in addition to spewing the most hideous "reportage" based on the slimmest of evidence.
I suggest visiting the Reuters, AFP, and Khaleej Times websites, in addition to the BBC.
Avoid Fox.
Your sanity depends on avoiding Fox.
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Note: according to the BBC, quoting Bishop Angaelos, General Bishop of the Coptic Church in the UK, about 50 churches have been attacked since Wednesday morning.
Many of them have been destroyed.
As have a number of Christian homes and businesses.
I know there's loads that the nytimes doesn't cover, I was asking for specific articles on the subject.
6:22 AM, Saturday August 17, 2013.
I have no desire to go back and reread, then copy urls, all the news articles that I have already read. That could take days, and events have already moved on.
I encourage you to do your own reading. The news keeps developing anyway.
The Egyptian gov't has already started noting the bad press from the church burnings -- which do not seem to have been part of yesterday's programme, by the way -- and it also looks like attacks on Christians may have peaked for the time being. Not that there is no chance of resurge.
But what I cynically predicted two days ago does not seem to have come to pass. Yet.
I'm beginning to doubt the effectiveness of tanks and armoured vehicles as a means of crowd control. Where are the water cannons? Where is the application of crowd movement strategies? While I despise the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the casual violence applied by the authorities is both unacceptable -- the random and unselectively haphazard force IS killing unarmed and probably entirely innocent civilians -- and completely counterproductive.
Events are moving on. The question is not who controls the streets -- that, clearly, is the side with the armoured vehicles and weapons -- but how to scale action and reaction back to normalcy.
Example: Gunfire heard at mosque siege.
It is evident that the majority of the people in that mosque (who have "refused to leave, fearing for their safety") are caught between a very small number with guns shooting at the military, and the military using "heavy gunfire" and "firing at the mosque's minaret".
The article cites "live ammunition fired by both sides". Admittedly gunfire from one side (the people in the mosque) presents a legitimate reason for the soldiers to shoot back. But it would be wiser and more humane to cordon off the area and wait the situation out. Unless all or the majority of the people in the mosque are armed, a typical 'shoot back 'coz they shot first' approach is heavy handed, idiotic, brutal, and entirely counter-productive in the long run.
I despise the Muslim Brotherhood and its ideas, and would gladly see them destroyed. But attempting to do so by heavy handed, idiotic, brutal, and counter-productive means, will not be effective, will leave too many dead in its wake, and have exactly the same result as Hafiz Assad's leveling of Hama in 1982. Tens of thousands of innocent dead, enduring hatred of the regime, and justification for opposition, resistance, and revolt.
This cannot end good. The chance for that to happen has passed.
Note, by the way, my heavy handed use of cynicism.
Cynicism is as sharp (or blunt) a rhetorical device as a feigned lack of guile.
Oh crap!
As a splendid example of heavy handed, brutal, counter productive, and idiotic, view the video embedded in this article: http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/21817878/__Demonstrant_neergeschoten__.html
Note TWO things: the apparently unarmed demonstrators are moving slowly in a non-threatening way towards the line of tanks, and secondly the gentleman who at the thrity-sixth second starts moving toward the tank on the right with both hands up.
He gets shot at the forty-fourth second.
To repeat. Unarmed. Hands raised. Calmly and deliberately shot down.
Yeah, that's an effective and common sense approach to crowd control. The guys in the tank must've been scared out of their wits by an unarmed man with his hands raised just standing there. So after thinking it over for several seconds, they decided that the wisest course of action was to shoot him, before he spent even more time just standing there with his hands raised.
I don't think I understand why they're doing this. Are they trying to upset the muslim brotherhood, maybe trying to incite some doomed-to-fail revolt?
I doubt that there is any complex thought behind it. The Egyptian government is not given to subtly thinking things out, it's more likely a typical ham-handed approach. Rather than thinking ahead, they're thinking at the moment, for the moment.
A doomed to failure revolt will always guarantee a problem that crops up again. Especially in the modern age, when the events of today do not disappear and fade, but gain electronic immortality.
Nothing disappears. Nothing get forgotten anymore. Nothing fades into plausible shading and overglossing.
Not anymore.
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