Egyptian Forces Massacre Morsi Supporters, Hundreds Dead
Hundreds are dead as Egypt's military government crack down on supporters of the democratically elected government they ousted.
Hundreds are dead as Egypt’s military government crack down on supporters of the democratically elected government they ousted.
Sky News (“Egypt: ‘Hundreds Die’ In Raids On Morsi Camps“):
Hundreds of people have reportedly been shot dead by Egyptian security forces who tried to clear two protest camps loyal to deposed president Mohamed Morsi.
Sky’s Middle East Correspondent Sam Kiley, reporting from inside the Rabaa al Adawiya camp in Cairo, said it was “under very heavy gunfire” and was a “massive military assault on largely unarmed civilians in very large numbers”.
He said government forces were using machine guns, snipers, M16s, AK-47s and were firing into the crowd.
Kiley added: “There are machine gun rounds, and snipers on the roof, that are preventing people from getting any closer to the field hospital (in the camp).
“I haven’t seen any evidence yet of any weapons on the side of the pro-Morsi camp. The camp is very full of women and children.”
He said it was a scene of “extreme chaos and bloodshed” and “many hundreds of troops and interior ministry police and special forces are involved”.
“The dead and dying are on the steps of this improvised field hospital. The scenes here are absolutely graphic.
“I have covered many wars and this is as severe a battlefield as I have witnessed, with the exception of scenes in Rwanda. There are dozens and dozens of people who have been shot in the head, neck and upper body.”
Shadi Hamid is almost certainly right that this is the beginning of something even worse rather than a bloody crackdown that will restore order: “After today’s events, there can’t be an inclusive pol[itical] process. There will be no nat’l reconciliation. Its early days, and this will be long.”
The Brotherhood and its supporters are already calling for counter-action:
The National Alliance to Support Legitimacy has called on “all Egyptian people” to take to the streets “to stop the massacre” after police attacked its two sit-ins in Cairo’s Nahda and Rabaa El-Adaweya squares early on Wednesday.
The alliance, an Islamist group led by the Muslim Brotherhood in support of ousted president Mohamed Morsi, asked their supporters to head to the sites of the sit-ins.
They determined a number of gathering points including El-Istiqama Mosque in Giza, El-Fath Mosque in downtown Ramses, El-Nour Mosque in Abbassiya, Assad El-Furat Mosque in Dokki and Al-Alf Maskan Mosque near Heliopolis district.
[…]
Meanwhile, vice-chairman of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party Essam El-Erian condemned the attacks, saying Morsi supporters will remain defiant.
“Hundreds of martyrs will fall and our determination will never be broken … So we shall live freely in a free country,” he said.
Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Hadad wrote on Twitter, “You will not bend our will or break our resolve with your audacity to kill. We will always stand high in face of any tyranny.”
The Brotherhood holds Defence Minister Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and interior minister Mohamed Ibrahim “fully responsible of every blood drop and any life lost,” the group’s spokesman Ahmed Aref said.
There are gruesome pictures going around on Twitter of bodies stacked like cord wood. The pile is certainly going to grow. The likely result is civil war.
![Military Coup Underway In Egypt [Update: Morsi Deposed]](https://otb.cachefly.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/egypt-flag3-512x256.gif)
This will not end well.
guess it took a high body count for the media to pick this up, AP even said it was a “coup”! who knew?
So what is the US reaction to this? Are we still going to give money to the Egyptian military dictatorship? I’m no fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, but how’s this different than Tiananmen Square?
I notice the Muslim Brotherhood’s so-called leaders are leading from behind, well actually, across town.
Wow, a “democratic coup” followed by a “democratic massacre”. I was a assured that the moderates illegally ousting the legally elected president was good. Was the legally elected president ousted for massacring people? No, he was ousted because he said mean things.
Would one of the “democratic coup” supporters remind me why it was a good idea.
@DC Loser:
The Muslim Brotherhood won an election?
This is Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s dream come true. The Muslim Brotherhood had broken with him over the use of violence against the state. Now Al-Zawahiri has been proven correct in his assessment of the Egyptian government and its anti-Islamic character. Many Muslims will come off the fence now, I fear. Egypt will have the same fate as Algeria after the military coup in 1992. Al Qaeda may find itself back in business there.
Here’s hoping this results in more pressure on our government to ditch the deal whereby we give Egypt ~$1B a year to stay nicey-nice with Israel. Israel can handle itself and we’ve no business helping to prop up this regime (nor did we have any business propping up prior ones either, though as noted, at least the [pretty loathesome] Muslim Brotherhood was elected).
Certain ideologies have been determined to be utterly incompatible with elective democracy. Nazism, Communism, other forms of fascism and totalitarianism, imperialism (such as in Imperial Japan). It’s now being proven what a lot of us have said for some time — add Islamism to that list.
@JKB:
While I’m no supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, how is this different from where US leaders are situated when the US is at war? Aren’t the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, the leaders of Congress, etc all leading from behind too?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
It’s not just Islamism, you can also add every other example of interjecting religion into government, including Christianity.
You know, separation of church and state….
So will Obama call it a coup now?
I realize there were political reasons for wanting to avoid the truth but if this isn’t a coup-what is a coup?
I don’t see things improving in Egypt any time soon.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
The Egyptian MIlitary are not Islamists. So what are you talking about?
@michael reynolds: I’m talking about the “Morsi supporters” — the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. They attempted to pull the classic “one man, one vote, one time” ploy, and the military shut them down. And now the “mostly peaceful” (meaning, somewhat violent) protesters are finding out what being “mostly peaceful” means when confronting people with weapons and training gets them.
If I need to elaborate: “mostly peaceful” was a term used to describe many of the not-quite-fully-peaceful Occupy protests. Odd how not a single Tea Party event was correctly described as “entirely peaceful.”
I have a question – if things get bad in Egypt, where would refugees go? Egypt is surrounded by desert and collapsed regimes. It’s a popular location for refugees to flee to. The rich will find a way out of Egypt if things collapse, but if you’re a hungry Egyptian in the middle of a civil war, what are you going to do other than find a gun and shoot your neighbors?
@Jenos Idanian #13: @michael reynolds: @Jenos Idanian #13: The Morsi government was duly elected and took no steps to eliminate other parties or curtail future elections. The secularist military is now massacring civilians who are protesting the ouster of the democratically elected government. It’s not the Brotherhood who’s the problem here.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So duly elected Islamists are crushed by a military coup and your takeaway is that Islamists are to blame and that it proves they can’t be democrats — despite being the democratically elected victims in this case.
Right.
Today’s Quiz.
Who Said:
Morsi got into office by making a lot of promises and pledges, many of which he and the Muslim Brotherhood immediately started violating. They were going gung-ho into oppressing any who weren’t Muslim enough for their tastes. Here’s a pretty good account of just how Morsi was carrying out the duties to which he was democratically elected.
The Muslim Brotherhood is, at its core, a radical Islamist movement and, as such, has no place being allowed to participate in elective democracy. Nazis aren’t allowed in Germany, Communists are banned in many former Communist states, and the same principles ought to apply to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Which, considering how closely the Muslim Brotherhood was allied with the Nazis during World War II, seems entirely fitting.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
Thank God that never happens here. We are just so amazingly superior.
@James Joyner:
Indeed. However, since it’s fundies being killed, don’t expect there will be much American public support to
dosomething beyond vigorous hand wringing.@Pinky:
Southern Europe, Cyprus, Malta, and Turkey could be refuges but grabbing a gun or a brush hook is more likely.
@James Joyner:
I suggest giving up on that argument. Once certain posters catch even the slightest wiff of “Islamism” or one of their other hot button issues, they tend to blindly ignore any counter facts that dare to complicate their cartoon view of geo-politics.
This makes them immune to discussion, as to have an actual discussion, one needs to be willing to both concede points and change their view. Histories teach us that this is about as likely as other commenters ceasing ranting about the single party authoritarian future of the US.
All you can do is start taking bets until same said people will make their final turn to explaining why all the fault for the current situation rests on Obama and the current Democrats.
Well, the tea party is basically a lapdog for billionaires, and the teas were told they could spew all the hat they wanted, but not break things.
@Matt Bernius:
I have always found it funny how those who promote the spreading of democracy the loudest are the same people who are quickest to delegitimatize the elections when the **right people** don’t win.
** “Right people” defined as our preferred lapdog.
@OzarkHillbilly,
Look what happened after the “right people” lost the election in Gaza.
Wow, yeah, blaming the Brotherhood here is pretty strange.
I don’t like ’em, and certainly wouldn’t vote for ’em if they were on my ballot, but they won an election that was, IIRC, generally believed to be free & fair or as free & fair as you get in Egypt (see also: US elections in the 19th century).
Like DC Loser says, it’s like the Gaza situation again. Hold an election! Be Democratic! Oh, you elected THOSE GUYS? You’re obviously not ready for democracy.
*eyeroll*
@DC Loser:
We have a BINGO! and it only took 5 mins. You may need to get psychologically evaluated. You are thinking way too much like me.
@OzarkHillbilly: I have always found it funny how those who promote the spreading of democracy the loudest are the same people who are quickest to delegitimatize the elections when the **right people** don’t win.
What I find odd is how people seem to think that “winning an election” whitewashes a group’s past — and present — actions. Hamas was a terrorist group. Now they’re a terrorist group that won an election. The Muslim Brotherhood is former (and unrepentant) Nazi ally that has as its stated goal the imposition of Islamist rule wherever they can spread to. That they won an election didn’t change one bit of that.
My opinion of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood hasn’t changed one bit since they won their respective elections. Did your opinions change with the ballots, or were you always sympathetic to them?
Sec. Kerry and Hagel need to go back over there and set things straight.
@James Joyner:
It’s a bit more complex than that. You should read Pat Lang and Amatzia Baram.
The Obama administration has been quite supportive of the new leaders, and now that this has happened, I think they have to reassess the relationship with Egypt’s current government.
I’d suggest using the $1B as a stick, except violating the Camp David accords has the likelihood of inflaming anger in all of Israel’s neighbors and it leaves us few other comparably sized sticks. So, something smaller for now. Education visas? Limiting the supply of spare parts to the weapons they buy with that $1B?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
How about your opinion of the Irgun? Also known as Likud?
What’s your opinion of the South Korean government whose predecessors were collaborators with the Japanese occupation and used paramilitary auxiliaries to commit horrifying atrocities and mass murders against innocent civilians?
How did you feel about the Nicaraguan Contras? You know, the guys Ronald Reagan financed by selling weapons to the terrorists in Iran:
How about the current Mormon leadership which follows from the time of The Mountain Meadows Massacre? Or for that matter, the Pope whose predecessors committed a whole bunch of atrocities. And ditto the Lutherans and Calvinists?
How consistent are you in applying your once-a-terrorist-always-a-terrorist beliefs?
Time for some denouncing, come chin-stroking and some empty gestures.
We do not rule Egypt. If one expressed in percentage terms the degree to which we can influence events in Egypt I doubt seriously it would break 1%.
@michael reynolds: Tu quoque. You won’t defend a position, you just counterattack.
Not playing that game.
The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas were terrorist groups. That didn’t change one bit when they won elections. They didn’t renounce violence, they didn’t apologize for their past actions, didn’t say that they would find new ways of achieving their goals.
The Muslim Brotherhood were loyal allies of the Nazis, who also won elections.
Hamas has targeted and killed American citizens.
Oh, and Godwin’s Rule doesn’t apply when you’re talking about actual Nazis.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
The reason that Arab countries and Turkey faces problems with Islamists is precisely because since the Ottoman Empire the only answer for them was authoritarianism. The main model of “Secular” state in the Arab World and in Turkey is the Military regime where religion excesses are curbed by brute force – it´s the Turkish model of secularism, that bans many religious garments by force.
A reason that many Arabs are reticent toward the Islamists is precisely because they saw the horrible job that they did on places like Iran. Islamists needs to participate in the Democratic Process – it´s true that you need institutions and rule of law to ban excesses, but the Islamists should participate. Even if they are going to fail.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
So, you got nothing. You can’t even slightly defend your position.
Thank God we don’t employ violence. Just ask the civilians in Iraq who were blown to bits in the “shock & awe” bombings. Or the defeated army we slaughtered from above on “the highway of death” (one of Jenos favorite massacres, BTW) for no reason but to make a point. Or the countless peasants we blew up in Viet Nam.
@michael reynolds: I stand by my position: that Hamas and The Muslim Brotherhood are unrepentant terrorists who have chosen to add electoral politics to their repertoire of schemes to gain power, and winning those elections has not changed those goals — or my opinion of them.
You won’t to change the subject? Not surprised. Were I in the position of having to defend Nazi collaborators, I’d want to as well.
@anjin-san: Or the defeated army we slaughtered from above on “the highway of death” (one of Jenos favorite massacres, BTW) for no reason but to make a point.
I have absolutely no effing clue where you dug up your latest harping point. I don’t recall even thinking about the “Highway of Death” incident in several years — when Iraqi soldiers were fleeing Kuwait and attacked by the US. And under the rules of warfare, fleeing soldiers are legitimate targets — if they don’t want to be attacked, they can surrender.
But that’s yet another diversion — the Muslim Brotherhood is an unrepentant Islamist organization that was a proud ally of Nazi Germany. I don’t particularly feel like re-evaluating my dislike of them simply because they won an election. If other choose to feel differently and choose to defend these Nazi allies, that’s their business.
Well, just give us the names of the brotherhood members in Egypt that were in the deposed government who collaborated with the Nazis and we will be good to go.
Perhaps you have forgotten that we were allies with the Soviet Union during WW2. Does that make you responsible for the gulags?
There are legitimate reasons to have qualms about the brotherhood. Do the hystrionics serve some purpose?
It’s not my fault you are weak minded. You referred to it in a post, and it was clear that you got off on the whole thing.
@anjin-san: The Muslim Brotherhood is extremely proud of its past, its origins, and its early leaders. It has never expressed the slightest bit of remorse for siding with the Nazis. And they still carry out some of the same policies — Mein Kampf is still readily available, and they also distribute The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.
As far as your “Highway of Death” fixation… whatever. You obviously care more about it than I do, as I can’t recall any such discussion. I don’t think it was a “massacre” or any kind of war crime, but I don’t feel any particular glee about it — just the slight satisfaction I get when bad things happen to bad people. The Iraqi army committed a LOT of atrocities in Kuwait, and their flight was partially slowed down by the loot they were carrying off.
But again, you’re tap-dancing away from the subject at hand, and that’s how you want the US to ally itself and support a group that was a staunch ally of Nazi Germany just because they won an election. Is that all it takes to rehabilitate them for you?
@Jenos Idanian #13:
The South Korean regime was composed of strong allies of the Japanese militarists – who also, you may recall killed a few Americans, and were allies of the Nazis. Do you slash the tires of Hyundais?
Actually, bright boy, you’re the distraction. You want to turn a slaughter of unarmed Morsi supporters into a generalized attack on Muslims. You can’t even begin to make a consistent argument, so you want to shout down every example of terrorists who in fact did morph into small ‘d’ democrats.
Typical of you. Conclusion first, evidence never.
I’m just waiting for Jeno’s condemndation of the Japanese government’s worship of their Class A war criminals at the Yasakuni Shrine that comes up every year to piss of all her neighbors.
@ Jenos
So what you are trying to say is that since you can’t muster a coherent argument to support your position you are going to summon the shades of long dead nazis, invent positions for other commenters, and indulge in low-lever hysterics…
@michael reynolds:
We do not always agree, but I think you nailed it here.
I don’t think is it useful to go back 70 years and claim some group are Nazi sympathizers or collaborators. If one wants to play that game, then our post WWII allies in Germany could be considered allies of the Muslim Brotherhood. Not a few pre-WWII Americans (Lindbergh comes to mind) and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were Nazi sympathizers. I suspect the MB were Nazi allies because they were anti-British not that they cared one bit for the Nazis.
I think the larger issue is that the path to democracy is not a smooth one. A lot new democracies think that just voting establishes a democracy. Many of these new governments don’t even have a Constitution to govern by. Constitutional (and institutional) protections are not established and ingrained. So we do have situations where sides will used democratic action to undermine and kill democracies.
Bad things happen. Some countries will mature and some will self-destruct. Egypt seems to be on the path to self-destruction.
Leave it to Jenos to be able to type of bunch of words, but still have no understanding of what’s going on. It’ would seem the fact that Egypt was under British control during WWII is a pretty key part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s history. (Why Jenos conveniently forgot to bring up that point is up for debate.)
Jenos was wrong to cite this as proof that Islamism is a governing failure. The rest of your guys are wrong to be swarming him, stumbling over yourselves to list wonderful people who collaborated with criminal regimes. Let’s face it, the Muslim Brotherhood are some lousy people, and while you can make an argument for their right to rule Egypt, it’s crazy to depict them as lovable puppies.
Kindly show where anyone here came within a light year of doing that.
@Pinky:
But the problem with this analysis is that it suggests that there are only two options:
– Muslim Brotherhood = Hitleresque Evil
OR
– Muslim Brotherhood = Lovable Puppies Innocent
Not only did no one suggest the later characterization, no one remotely suggested it.
This argument style — common to talk radio — forces us into the cartoonish discussions that miss the far more complex aspects of what led to this moment. And ultimately it prevents people from dealing with the more difficult facts of this situation: that the MB did renege on some of its promises AND that a lot of forces in Egypt, in particular Technocrats and some members of the Military, did everything within their power (including gutting the Country’s infrastructure and slowing down Egypt’s already slow economy) to ensure that the democratically elected government failed.
@Jenos Idanian #13: You might want to do a little research before stating uncategorically that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is a terrorist organization. The US does not list it as such and the Brotherhood’s leaders have actually denounced terrorist violence since the 1970s and taken part in elections. You might want to look at this as well as this.
@Matt Bernius:
A political opposition doing everything in its power to slow a government purely in the hopes that it fails, in the process dramatically hurting the nation they are supposedly protecting.
Where have I seen this before…
Perhaps I’m exaggerating the Muslim Brotherhood’s ties to Nazi Germany. I mean, it’s not like the Brotherhood’s founder met Hitler, and they sent divisions to fight under the SS banner…
Oh, whoops, they did.
And to repeat my earlier point, Morsi and the Brotherhood were well on their way to taking that election and making damned sure that there wouldn’t be another — or, at least, another where any non-Brotherhood candidates would have a prayer of winning. They were ramping up the persecution of the Copts, allowing the resumption of attacks on Israel from the Sinai, and going after non-Brotherhood groups that were part of the government.
The Egyptian military — regardless of their motives — headed that off.
And I repeat my prior challenge: does simply winning an election whitewash organizations? Does that veneer of respectability make them suddenly not terrorists? Hamas is still a terrorist group, the Brotherhood is still an Islamist supremacy group.
@ Jenos
It’s a fairly good bet that the atrocities were committed by a relatively small percentage of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait. The majority of their army was like the majority of most armies – poor slobs who desperately wanted to be back home. A lot of those soldiers were simply more of Saddam’s victims.
But, this is too complicated for you. Keep it simple. You saw brown people dying, and it made you feel kinda good.
@Jenos Idanian #13:
You’ll have to have slightly better links than that to be taken seriously. If anything, you just undermined your point.
@Dave: Make that “before stating categorically.”
@Jenos Idanian #13:
There is no requirement for a political party to be respectable. In the US, the Nazi party has run candidates, and many consider the opposition party to be illegitimate.
Terrorist status is attained by committing, funding, directing, or organizing terrorist actions. If the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas meet this criteria, they are terrorist organizations, and if they are using the government for these activities, the state is a terrorist state.
@David M: I picked that one because it was the first Google result for “Muslim Brotherhood Nazi” that included actual photos. Feel free to do your own search — I’m coming up with more links from Wikipedia, Front Page, American Thinker, and a host of others.
Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini (Yassir Arafat’s uncle) were proud allies of Hitler, meeting with him and supplying him with troops and other support. It’s all established history.
And Hamas still uses the Nazi salute.
Um, the Waffen SS 13th Mountain Division was formed in Yugoslavia (not Egypt).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_of_the_SS_Handschar_(1st_Croatian)
Clearly the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not part of Jenos cartoon view of history.
@anjin-san: Clearly the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not part of Jenos cartoon view of history.
That sort of realpolitik was behind the US backing of a lot of very unsavory people during the Cold War, and I don’t recall very many liberals applying it to Somoza, the Shah of Iran, or a host of other bad people…
@ Jenos Idanian #13
Well I was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazis – sorry, I will diagram with crayons next time so you can keep up. The Brotherhood were probably not terribly enamored of the Nazis, more likely they just wanted help fighting the British.
And yes, many liberals were opposed to the US climbing in bed with murdering scum, even in the context of the cold war.
@anjin-san: The Brotherhood were probably not terribly enamored of the Nazis, more likely they just wanted help fighting the British.
“Probably?” They’re still selling Mein Kampf (Translated into “My Jihad”) all over the Middle East. And, as I said before, Hamas is still using the Nazi salute.
That wasn’t a matter of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It was “hey, these guys are out to kill the same people we are! We should totes hook up with them!”
One of the more macabre and amusing things out of the Middle East is trying to follow the logical convolutions the Islamists come up with. One of my favorites is how they argue that Israel is inflicting a Holocaust on the Palestinians — which, by the way, never happened and the Jews totally deserved it. That takes some serious mental flexibility.
@Jenos Idanian #13: http://www.amazon.com/Mein-Kampf-Adolf-Hitler/dp/0945001193/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0
OH SHIT WE”RE NAZIS TOO!!
@Jenos Idanian #13: “@michael reynolds: I’m talking about the “Morsi supporters” — the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. They attempted to pull the classic “one man, one vote, one time” ploy, and the military shut them down. And now the “mostly peaceful” (meaning, somewhat violent) protesters are finding out what being “mostly peaceful” means when confronting people with weapons and training gets them.”
So “Islamist” protestors are being killed by the non-“Islamist” military, and this proves to you that “Islamists” are incapable of democracy.
I don’t know why people thought you and Pinky were the same person. Compared to you, he’s a brain surgeon.
@Jenos Idanian #13: “The Muslim Brotherhood is, at its core, a radical Islamist movement and, as such, has no place being allowed to participate in elective democracy. Nazis aren’t allowed in Germany, Communists are banned in many former Communist states, and the same principles ought to apply to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
So your vision of democracy is that a nation’s people should be able to elect their own leaders, provided that some anonymous internet troll thousands of miles away approves of them?
@wr: Oh, sorry, completely misstated little Jenos’ ideology:
…as long as some AMERICAN anonymous internet troll thousands of miles away approves of them.”
Forgot the bit that turns what Jenos said from rank stupidity to FREEDOM!!!! WOLVERINES!!!
@anjin-san: yes, they “hate” paying more taxes than necessary. other than that i don’t see them as “hating” anything aside from not getting enough sleep.
@ bill
Taxes are at historic lows. I suggest you check out the rates under that noted communist, President Eisenhower.
PS, keep your grubby government hands off my Medicare 🙂
Ah, so you missed the rabid, frothing at the mouth hatred directed at Obama?
@anjin-san: “dissent” doesn’t equal “hate”, “hate” requires effort. what are you doing on medicare anyway?