Supporting Egypt’s generals

The worst violence since Mubarak was toppled in 2011 was met with what amounted to a shrug from the U.S.

America is aiding and abetting the massacre of Muslims in Egypt, said Ali H. Aslan in Today’s Zaman (Turkey). Last weekend, the Egyptian security forces gunned down scores of supporters of ousted President Mohammed Mursi at a peaceful sit-in outside a Cairo mosque. It was the worst violence since Mubarak was toppled in 2011, yet it was met with what amounted to a shrug from the U.S. John Kerry, the secretary of state, expressed “concern” and said all sides should pull back—as if the unarmed Muslim Brotherhood victims were just as much to blame as the police who shot them. But then, anyone who “cannot call a coup a coup can certainly not call a massacre a massacre.” And the U.S. still won’t condemn the Egyptian military because that would mean Congress would have to cut off aid—and that would hurt Israel. Washington provides the Egyptian military with $1.3 billion a year “in exchange for an implicit guarantee not to threaten Israel.”

The U.S. was behind the coup in the first place, saidthe Frontier Post (Pakistan) in an editorial. It couldn’t tolerate an Islamist-leaning government neighboring its precious Israel. So it had Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi engineer the coup “in cahoots with the famed American stooge, Mohamed ElBaradei,” who for more than a decade led the International Atomic Energy Agency. That’s the body that “snoops for signs of atomic activities in underdeveloped countries, especially Muslim countries,” at America’s behest. ElBaradei calls himself a liberal and a democrat, and yet he supports a military coup to oust the democratically elected government merely because it is Islamist. “This is how the U.S. policy works for the Muslim world: Submit or be gored.”

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