For those who supported the coup in Egypt, do you still support it?

[cali]

After the suspension of all rights and the crackdown on liberals and labor, do you still think overthrowing Morsi was a good thing or justifiable or however you want to put it?

[Recursion]

1. Things often look different in the beginning

Crowds of young people going back to Tahrir square trying to take their country back was hard not to get swept up with at the time. This is the problem with revolutions.

[cali]

2. I think it was obvious from the moment it happened that it couldn't be a

worse turn of events.

I gather you no longer support the coup.

[Recursion]

3. I was never a fan of this round

I was never a fan (toppling a dictator is a lot different from toppling an elected government you don't like), but I understand why people were when it started.

[jessie04]

4. Put it all into context.

The MB was a the very opposite of a democracy...ask the copts.

The vast majority of people couldn't take it anymore.

The coup has had its drawbacks ,no doubt.

My 2 cents...they need to draw up a new constitution with checks and balances and a full democracy and have elections.

[cali]

6. what the military under Al-Sissi has done eclipes what Morsi did

by a huge amount.

And anyone who thinks anything like a new constitution and full democracy has a chance under these fucks, can't think at all.

Drawbacks? That's just incredible.

Do you have the faintest clue of what's going on in Egypt? Do you understand that ALL rights have been "suspended"? That they're cracking down on liberal groups?

[jessie04]

8. And that is why they need a new constitution and a new vote.

that's the only way out.

[FarCenter]

5. A military dictatorship is more reformable than an islamic theocracy.

[cali]

7. evidence for that? Anything?

The year under Morsi had much more hope for that judging by both the tenure of Morsi and what's happened over the last few weeks.

[jessie04]

9. I know some Copts who would give you an argument there.

.

[cali]

10. really? You do realize that the violence against Copts didn't

explode until after the mass murders by the military, right?

Do you grasp that all rights have been suspended? Or is that just some little inconvenience to you like the mass murders? How about the arrests of liberals and labor leaders? All good with you? Better than Morsi?

[jessie04]

11. C'mon....you are being disingenuous.

Does Coptic Christian persecution under Morsi signal Egypt's collapse?

http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2013/4/15/does-egyptian-religious-violence-under-morsi-point-to-an-impending-collapse



In an unprecedented move, the head of Egypt’s 2,000-year-old Coptic Christian Church, Pope Tawadros II, recently slammed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi for what he called a weak response to violence that left several Christians dead and its religious institutions violated. Pope Tawadros’s statements come at a time of increasing political deadlock and the threat of economic collapse in Egypt.

Halim Meawad, co-founder of Coptic Solidarity, a U.S.-based international Coptic Christian human rights organization, told JNS.org that Pope Tawadros’s statement was “very significant” and had far-reaching implications.

On April 5 in the village of Khosous, north of Cairo, a local dispute between youths escalated into violence that left four Christians and one Muslim dead, according to Time Magazine. Two days later, during a funeral for the four Christians at St. Mark’s Cathedral in central Cairo, Christian mourners were attacked after leaving services. One Muslim and one Christian were killed, and another 89 were injured. Police responded late to the attacks and fired tear gas into the Cathedral’s grounds, terrifying the Christians there.

During a subsequent interview with the Egyptian TV station ONTV, Tawadros said that the Egyptian state was “collapsing” and described the attacks on Christians at St. Mark’s Cathedral, which serves as the seat of the Coptic papacy, as “breaching all the red lines,” the Associated Press reported.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Copts Under Morsi: Leave Them to the Church

http://www.mei.edu/content/copts-under-morsi-leave-them-church


Emblematic of this approach is how Copts are referenced in Egypt’s recently enacted constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood insists that the constitution, despite the resignation of all Copts from the constituent assembly, represents a concession to Coptic sensibilities in the form of a provision that dictates that all personal status affairs of Christians, such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody, are to fall exclusively under the purview of relevant church officials. The principle of equal citizenship under the law is effectively abandoned, and the Coptic Orthodox Church is empowered to rule on the most sensitive matters in Copts’ lives‑‑regardless of the particular individuals’ commitment to the Church. One almost gets the sense that the Brotherhood would prefer to “leave Copts to the Church” in much the way that the Ottoman Empire left the rule of Christians to their respective Churches under the nineteenth-century millet system.

The lot of those Copts who took a chance on the Brotherhood in the presidential runoff is ridicule and humiliation. More broadly, though, the sense of political immobility that now pervades Egypt as a whole will leave Copts with a particularly acute sense of the futility of voting when the elections eventually take place. Sadly, this is just the sense that they had about voting under the Mubarak dictatorship.

[cali]

12. No, you are and you're using far right wing sources to do it. Inexcusable and disgusting.

this is a liberal site and not a wing nut one. and those are both far right sites. Ugh.

[jessie04]

13. You know...you are right as always.

Its difficult to discuss with you when you

a.dismiss the facts
b. change the goal posts
c. if all else fails , hide behind "I don't like your source".

And out of respect, I will give you the last word and I promise not to respond.

[cali]

14. lol. wow. that's some projection you have going on there

I've given YOU the facts over and over over.

Here. Again:

The military that perpetrated the illegal coup massacred over a thousand largely unarmed men, women and children

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-egypt-protests-idUSBRE97C09A20130814
http://www.france24.com/en/20130814-egypts-army-carrying-out-massacre-morsi-supporters

Got that?

Now how many protesters did Morsi have slaughtered?

Uh, none.

Egypt Widens Crackdown and Meaning of ‘Islamist’

Having crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian authorities have begun cracking down on other dissenters, sometimes labeling even liberal activists or labor organizers as dangerous Islamists.

Ten days ago, the police arrested two left-leaning Canadians — one of them a filmmaker specializing in highly un-Islamic movies about sexual politics — and implausibly announced that they were members of the Brotherhood, the conservative Islamist group backing the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi. In Suez this month, police and military forces breaking up a steelworkers strike charged that its organizers were part of a Brotherhood plot to destabilize Egypt.

On Saturday, the chief prosecutor ordered an investigation into charges of spying against two prominent activists associated with the progressive April 6 group.

When a journalist with a state newspaper spoke publicly about watching a colleague’s wrongful killing by a soldier, prosecutors appeared to fabricate a crime to punish the journalist. And the police arrested five employees of the religious Web site Islam Today for the crime of describing the military takeover as a coup, security officials said.

<snip>
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/world/middleeast/egypt-widens-crackdown-and-meaning-of-islamist.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0



Your posts are apologist paeans to brutal right wing murder and oppression. It's a sad thing to see on a liberal sit. You refuse to condemn murder, oppression and brutality. It is despicable.

Your sources are right wing crap. period. I use real sources. You know, reputable news organizations unlike YOUR wingnut source.

So go ahead with this defense of the indefensible. It couldn't be clearer what your politics are.

[oberliner]

22. What are some good leftist sites that have covered what is happening to Egypt's Christians?

Can you recommend a few links?

[socialist_n_TN]

24. The international site for the League for a Fifth International......

has SEVERAL really good and on a timeline articles on the Egyptian situation.

[FarCenter]

17. Chile recovered from Pinochet faster than Iran has recovered from Khomeini

[burnodo]

15. I didn't support it, per se

but with the thousands of people protesting in the street before the coup, they were headed for a violent crackdown on the protestors or a civil war...something tells me the waves of history aren't finished with Egypt yet

[KG]

16. I didn't think the revolution was over when the MB got the upper hand in the elections.

[SoCalDem]

18. Whether the west supports it or not, these regime changes happen

The old-guard dictators that we installed.supported, all age and die , and a whole new crop of formerly oppressed people step up..

Unless we want to be world-cop extraordinaire , we can only watch and hope for the best..

[socialist_n_TN]

19. Didn't support the coup and I didn't support the MB either.....

And this development was expected by myself. I even posted about it a few days ago. It's the same thing that Erdogan did in Turkey. It's the same thing that ALL capitalist toadies do. Arrest and bust the commies and working class organizations first thing after consolidating power.

There were approximately 17 million people demonstrating against the MB in June. If the military hadn't took out the MB the people would have and Egypt might have flirted with a worker's democracy. International capitalism couldn't allow that to happen, so the military took over to "restore order". IOW, to allow capitalism to continue to function.

It's not over in Egypt by a long shot.

[BOG PERSON]

20. it's complicated

on the one hand, i'm glad the mb weren't able to send volunteers to syria (maybe they should focus on the log in their own eye). i think the egyptian masses have pretty good political instincts that they are forced to express in an incoherent way due to decades of political repression. we might not know this here in the greatest democracy in the world but winning an election does not give you carte blanche to ram through as many unpopular policies as you can for the duration of your term.

on the other hand, yes, it was unequivocally a coup, and i feel bad for the egyptians who are sacrificing their lives for a party that really has nothing to offer their country.

[oberliner]

21. Push poll?

Is there really any way anyone can answer in the affirmative the way you've framed the question?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

23. I never supported it, and I'm still not absolutely 100% sure it was the greater evil.

I've thought all along that it was very probably, but not absolutely certainly, the greater of two evils.

Morsi was an unpleasant leader whose interpretation of democracy was the tyranny of the majority, and far-right positions on social issues, but he was democratically elected and had a mandate to govern, and the whole point of democracy is that if the bad guys get the most votes then they get to govern.

The military coup strikes me as almost certainly worse than that, but I wouldn't claim absolute confidence in that position unless 1) I was an expert in Egyptian politics, and 2) I had a crystal ball.

But yes, certainly, "worse" looks like definitely being the way to bet, probably "a lot worse".