Don’t Look at the Sphinx—or the Muslim Brotherhood—Through Rose-Colored Glasses

Mohamed Morsi

While we all recoil from the death toll in innocent lives in Egypt—including unreported numbers of Coptic Christians killed while defending their spiritual patrimony from arsonists who burned down 52 churches in one day—there are some hard facts that need to be addressed and questions that need to be answered by those who seem to think that Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime should never have been overthrown or should now be reinstalled:

• The Muslim Brotherhood has a long history, dating back to 1928 when it was partly modeled on Mussolini’s Squadristi. It was among Hitler’s Muslim’s sympathizers and agents during World War II. It sent true believers to fight against Palestinian Jews even before the outbreak of the 1948 War for Independence. The destruction of Israel by martyrdom operations—which the Morsi regime, it now appears, abetted in the Sinai—has been and remains its unchanging goal. It was planning a violent coup to seize power in Egypt in 1952 that might have succeeded had it not been preempted by Colonel Nasser’s putsch. It had nothing but contempt for democracy until shortly before Morsi was elected, when it discovered that talk of democracy could cover its pursuit of Islamic dictatorship. And it showed nothing but contempt for democracy again during Morsi’s ruthless, incompetent reign (a combination most Egyptians could not tolerate).

• One man, one vote, one time—or even a few times—does not make a democracy. And repeated assertions that Morsi was “democratically elected” do not make it so. Just ask the Coptic Christian voters—at least 10 percent of the country’s electorate—many of whom were intimidated from voting in a close presidential election.

• Would Germany and the world have been better off if President Hindenburg in 1932-1933—instead of pampering and privileging the Nazis—has used his emergency powers under the Weimar Constitution to put Hitler again behind bars, as had been the case after the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923?

• Would Iran and the world have been better off if Ayatollah Khomeini’s plane—returning from Paris to Tehran in 1979—has engine trouble, and the Shah, a relatively benign autocrat, remained in power, avoiding the million dead in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and other numerous horrors including the imminent prospect of nuclear missiles aimed at Tel Aviv?

How nice it would be to have a democratic Egypt, governed under law with majority rule and minority rights both guaranteed! How nice it would be—if not Napoleon, erroneously blamed by legend for shooting off the nose of the Sphinx—but the medieval religious fanatic who actually committed that crime against Egypt’s past glories had never got the idea in his head? Unfortunately, history is what is, blemishes and all—and so is politics—and the only choices Egyptians have at least for now are “least bad” ones.

The Egyptians will have to live with the consequences of their actions. But so will we including those among us who substitute ignorance and naivety for a tragic view of history and politics like that of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who—without rose-colored glasses—properly assessed the Nazi threat prior to 1933 and would now look the Sphinx squarely in the face rather than make believe that Egypt can escape terrible choices.

POSTSCRIPT: I should have also addressed the challenge of democratic transition. We have a number of historical case studies. Both Chile and South Korea–which at their worst had military regimes harsher than the Shah of Iran–ultimately evolved into democracies. The picture is quite different with Islamist regimes. Iran remains under the iron grip of the ayatollahs after almost 45 years. Gaza, after Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005, had an election won by Hamas which then crushed the Fatah opposition whose leader, President Abbas, cannot even safely visit the Strip. Turkey, a favorite of the Obama Administration, has undergone a slow motion Islamization gradually chocking off democracy, most recently by show trials convicting hundreds of journalists and judges as well as military professionals deemed not sufficiently loyal to the Neo-Ottoman Sultan Erdogan.