#1322: "Sisi's Incompetent Anti-Islamist Campaign" – NRO blog

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Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader: For a follow-up on my problem with the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, see the three updates here.   Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Sisi's Incompetent Anti-Islamist Campaign by Daniel Pipes Mar 24, 2014 Cross-posted from National Review Online, The Corner http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2014/03/sisi-incompetent-anti-islamist-campaign Print Send Comment RSS Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. An Egyptian court in short order sentenced some 529 people to death today for the killing of a single police officer. News like this gives one pause. Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the strongman of Egypt. Very tough treatment of Islamists is needed to repress this totalitarian movement, including rejection of their efforts to apply Islamic law, keeping them out of mainstream institutions, even excluding their parties from the democratic process. But Field Marshall Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's extra-legal crackdown on Islamists will likely backfire and help the Islamist cause by winning them broad sympathy. Even if today's absurd judgment gets reversed on appeal, it and others like it are doing real damage. Sisi is riding high now, with out-of-sight popularity ratings, but he appears as unprepared to rule Egypt as another military man, Gamal Abdul Nasser, was 60 years ago. Two factors in particular – the dismal economy and the hostility between pro- and anti-Islamists – will likely bring Sisi down fast and hard. When that happens, Islamists will benefit from his incompetence no less than Sisi exploited the failures of Mohamed Morsi. The cycle continues, the country falls further behind, and the precipice looms. More broadly, because the expected Egyptian failure in suppressing Islamism will have global ramifications, Sisi's mistakes damage the anti-Islamist cause not just in his own country but internationally. The stakes in Egypt these days are high indeed. (March 24, 2014) Related Topics:  Egypt, Radical Islam This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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