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| Photograph: Cairo, Egypt. Tarek Wajeh/Almasry Alyoum/EPA |
March 25, 2014
Tony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer Report
The unprecedented sentencing of over 500 Muslim Brotherhood members to death in Egypt for their role in the attack, torture, and murder of an Egyptian policeman, is the culmination of a lighting fast, all encompassing security crackdown across the pivotal North African Arab nation. The move has created a chilling effect that has left the otherwise violent mobs of the Muslim Brotherhood silent and the streets they generally sow their chaos in, peaceful and empty.
The New York Times reported in its article, "Hundreds of Egyptians Sentenced to Death in Killing of a Police Officer," that:
A crowd gathered outside a courthouse in the town of Matay erupted in wailing and rage on Monday when a judge sentenced 529 defendants to death in just the second session of their trial, convicting them of murdering a police officer in anger at the ouster of the Islamist president. Here in the provincial capital just a few miles away, schools shut down early, and many stayed indoors fearing a riot, residents said.The move by the Egyptian courts has attracted the predictable condemnation of the US State Department. The Washington Post's article, "Egyptian court sentences 529 people to death," stated:
But the crowds went home, and soon the streets were quiet.
The United States was “deeply concerned, and I would say actually pretty shocked,” about the mass death sentences, said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman. “It defies logic” and “certainly does not seem possible that a fair review of evidence and testimony, consistent with international standards,” could have been conducted over a two-day period, she said.While the US continues to feign support for the government in Cairo, it was fully behind the Muslim Brotherhood-led regime of Mohamed Morsi, its mobs in the streets, and the networks of NGOs inside Egypt supporting and defending their activities.
The most recent of these NGOs on display is the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) cited by the above mentioned New York Times article which claimed:
“We have never heard of anything of this magnitude before — inside or outside of Egypt — that was within a judicial system as opposed to a mass execution,” said Karim Medhat Ennarah, a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights who specializes in criminal justice.
“It is quite ridiculous,” he said, arguing that it would be impossible to prove that 500 people each played a meaningful role in the killing of a single police officer, especially after just one or two short sessions of the trial. “Clearly this is an attempt to intimidate and terrorize the opposition, and specifically the Islamist opposition, but why would the judge get so deeply involved in politics up to this point?”
EIPR is funded by among others, the Australian Embassy in Cairo, and carries out the same familiar role that other Western-funded NGOs did during the "Arab Spring" in 2011 - the covering up of the opposition's violence and atrocities, and the leveraging of "human rights" to condemn the subsequent security crackdowns carried out in return by the state.
How Egypt Got Here
Egypt's current turmoil is a direct result of the 2011 so-called "Arab Spring." While nations like Libya lie in ruins with the "revolution" a "success" and the Libyan people now subjugated by pro-Western proxies, and Syria as continues to fight on in a costly 3 year conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives, Egypt has taken a different path.
