Chronicle of a Coup Foretold: Egypt's Millions Rebel

Whatever the outcome, history will record that June 30^th not only lived up to its hype but wildly exceeded it. As Egypt’s millions marched into the streets and the squares of every major city in the land on Sunday, stunned observers estimated that the human tide blackening every public space represented the largest demonstrations in history.

The most powerful grievance against the Morsi regime seem to stem from the sense of betrayal expressed repeatedly by the protesters from all walks of life. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood came to power not through ordinary elections- their specious claim to legitimacy- but through an extraordinary revolution for which hundreds of martyrs sacrificed their lives. The Islamists who had not sacrificed for the revolution reaped its fruit, and then they proceeded to betray the sacred trust handed to them by the Egyptian people. Instead of ruling for the good of Egypt and all Egyptians, the Morsi administration in its first year in office pursued a single-minded agenda of concentrating power in the hands of Islamist cronies, sidelining the opposition, emasculating the judiciary, and ramrodding through a controversial constitution.  It ignored the crashing economy and alarming insecurity that afflicted citizens at large while trying to impose a regressive, sectarian ideology that resonated with few outside of its base.

The blatant disconnect between the Morsi administration and public opinion is highlighted, during the current demonstrations, by Brotherhood supporters’ choice of green flags and bandanas with ‘Islamic’ slogans, while the opposition waved Egyptian flags. The very name, ‘Islamic Alliance’, adopted by the Islamist coalition supporting Morsi, confirms a widespread suspicion that the Muslim Brotherhood are unpatriotic, an organization that puts its international ideology before its Egyptian nationalism. There have been rumors for months that the Brotherhood were planning to give over parts of the Egyptian Sinai for settlement by non-Egyptians, and that only the military stood in the way.  

Today, the military gave the Morsi administration an ultimatum of forty-eight hours to get the country under control or else the Generals will intervene. Ironically, that pronouncement by General El-Sissi was greeted with cheers by the same protesters who a few months ago had demonstrated against a military takeover of power. But June 30^th has been the chronicle of a coup foretold; for the past year, as some lamented the deterioration of the economic and social fabric of the country under the Morsi administration, others advised them to be patient, that further deterioration, indeed a complete breakdown, would be necessary to bring about a welcome intervention by the military and the ousting of Morsi.

Yesterday’s enemies are today’s allies, and vice versa. The anyone-but-Mubarak coalition is now the anyone-but-Morsi coalition. The irony is symptomatic of the desperate situation in which the country finds itself: in a game of shifting alliances, it is no longer civilian society against the military, or even against the loathed police, but secular Egypt against the Islamists.

As for U.S. policy, it is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. If it supports Morsi on the principle of the inviolable legitimacy of elections, it will be seen as supporting an undemocratic, incompetent, ideological Islamist regime rejected by the majority of Egyptians, as the millions on the street attest. If it supports the ouster of the Morsi administration, it will be seen as supporting a military coup against a democratically elected president. President Obama, on tour in Africa, felt he needed to address the events himself. It is not clear whether or not his uncomfortable balancing act was helpful, as he tried to simultaneously 'press for peace' on all sides while 'supporting democracy' but 'not counting heads in a protest.' 

But the real significance of June 30^th goes beyond Egypt, and beyond these protests. This is how the Arab Spring might play out: not a confirmation of the hoary conventional wisdom that, in the Middle East, it is either the rock of an autocratic strongman or the hard place of an Islamist takeover, but rather a protest-driven process of trial-and-error, as countries try out and reject one form of autocracy and incompetence after another. Perhaps, as the joke making the round in Egypt these days goes, the Muslim Brotherhood are like the measles, you have to catch it once to never get it again. In the long run, the convulsive process might actually lead to a democratic compromise on a reasonably competent form of governance, but  it will be, undeniably, a long ordeal.

Tamarod Today

A Clash of Two Egypts: Tamarod Tomorrow

Tomorrow, June 30^th, is the fateful day for the showdown between the Islamists, and the rest. The stakes couldn’t be higher: a battle for the very soul of Egypt. Who speaks for Egypt?

The Tamarod, or Rebellion, movement claims to speak for the real Egypt: an Egypt of all Egyptians, regardless of sect; perhaps pious in private but secular in politics; moderate, forward-looking, eager to rejoin world economy and culture. Their critics say they speak only for the Egypt of tourist resorts and gated communities; megamalls and ballet at the Opera House; and Jon Stewart on the Bassem Youssef show. Not so, retort their defenders, they also speak for the millions of Egyptians whose livelihood depends on work in the tourism sector and on the construction sites, for the increasingly desperate man in the street who is suffering most from an economy in free fall. Tamarod is counting on them to flood the streets and the squares tomorrow; twenty million Egyptians are reported to have signed the petition withdrawing confidence from the Morsi administration and demanding that the president and his cabinet step down, paving the way for new elections as soon as possible. 

On the other hand, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood Party, along with their extremist allies the Salafis, have mobilized massive demonstrations of their own, to bolster their claim to speak for the real Egypt. An Egypt of bearded men and veiled women professing an ideology that rejects the separation of state and religion and demonizes westernization, secularism and all sects and religions other than their own. It is an ideology, their defenders say, they share with millions of like-minded fundamentalists across the Islamic world; and a party, the Muslim Brotherhood, that came to power through relatively legitimate elections and has no intention of ceding that power to pressure from the street.

In other words, what we are witnessing is an immovable object confronting an irresistible force. The resulting confrontation can only be brutal. Already, the day before the scheduled June 30^th protest, thousands upon thousands of demonstrators have flooded public spaces in cities across the country, both in revolt against Morsi and in his support. Clashes between them have already led to several deaths, including the tragic, senseless stabbing of an American college student who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on a street in Alexandria.   

The two sides of the conflict have this in common: both sides profess not to trust the role of the U.S. Rumors and counter-rumors abound, about American policy directives in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. The Morsi administration does not trust the police, with good reason; it has officially devolved police peace-keeping duties to the armed forces. But what role will the military play? That is the real question. Who speaks for Egypt? Perhaps, in the final analysis, the tank does.

Egypt's Last Chance Revolution: June 30th

When I told an American friend recently about the millions-strong revolt against President Morsi’s Islamist administration planned for June 30^th, she asked: “And does the regime know about it?” “Of course,” I retorted, “it’s been advertised for weeks!” In Egypt as elsewhere these days, revolutions are not only televised, they are advertised weeks ahead on social media to build momentum and pressure. The entire strategy is built on mobilizing a public response so massive it would overwhelm any attempt by the regime in power to thwart it.

That strategy worked in ousting Hosni Mubarak in January 2011, and many of the same elements that organized that successful revolt are now making a last ditch effort to reclaim their revolution from the Islamists who seem to have hijacked it when Muslim Brotherhood candidate Morsi was elected president a year ago on June 30^th.  Fifteen million people, by some counts, have pledged to participate in the demonstrations to force the abdication of President Morsi. The plan has already been released on social media: sit-ins are to begin two days earlier, on Friday and Saturday, and Tahrir Square is no longer the focus, the Presidential Itihadiya Palace is. Other key locations for launching demonstrations- Egypt’s Supreme Court, the Ministry of Defense, and the syndicate headquarters of the Judges, Lawyers, Journalists, and Police- represent groups with long-standing antipathy to the Muslim Brotherhood in general and more recently inflamed conflicts with the Morsi administration in particular.  

Marching orders are clear: protest only against Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood Party, and its ideological ‘Guidance Bureau’. Protest in the name of Egypt only, not in the name of any person, party, candidate, sect or group. Peaceful protest only: no incitement against police or military or engagement in any altercations with either or with any opposing demonstrators. Women to march only in the center of a demonstration, where they can best be protected. That last instruction is necessary given the alarming record of increased assaults on women demonstrators during the past two years. This time, the call-to-arms on Face Book stresses, this is the Last Chance Revolution. We must dig in for the long-haul; we must go into it with the mindset of ‘in it to win it.’ Failure means rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, forever and ever.

To an outside observer in the West, this might seem like hyperbole. Morsi was elected in a relatively free election, these observers point out, and ‘elections have consequences’ if democracy is to be respected. And yet, the notion of post-election, postmortem protest seems to be gaining ground right here in the United States, indeed right here in my backyard of North Carolina. The ‘Moral Monday’ movement  protests against what it perceives as regressive social and economic policies launched by the conservative Republicans who were elected in 2012 and now control the state- from the Governor’s mansion to the Legislature. ‘Moral Monday’ stages civil disobedience every week in which as many people as possible, and as many public figures as possible, try to get themselves arrested protesting against the reversal of civil rights and other issues.

Granted, trying to get arrested is not a problem for the Egyptian protesters taking their lives in their hands when they take to the streets on June 30^th. But the analogy holds: in some cases, election results, and their consequences, are deemed to be too disastrous to wait for the next round of elections. The stakes are infinitely higher in Egypt, where the consensus seems to be that the next elections, if they take place with the Muslim Brotherhood in power, will be a sham.

The big question, of course, is whether Morsi will resign in response to public pressure, however intense. And the answer seems to be that he will not, unless the military intervene to force his hand. That intervention, even a few months ago, would have been seen as a regression to the military dictatorship of the past sixty years; today it is seen by many as the lesser of two evils. The last straw, for many, was the shocking Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence two days ago that left four Shiite men dead. Shiites are so rare in Egypt today that most Egyptians are unaware of their existence, even if the more educated remember from their schoolbooks that the Fatimid Caliphate that ruled Egypt for two centuries, a thousand years ago, was Shia. Such sectarian conflict is unprecedented, and signals an extremist Salafi mindset that makes ‘infidels’ not just of Egyptian Copts but Shia Muslims as well.   

The fact that President Morsi tolerated a tirade against the Shia by a Salafi extremist during a recent rally days before the murderous attack adds fuel to the fire of the opposition in Egypt, already banking on despair over the worsening living conditions of the average man in the street. On the other hand, the plight of Coptic Christians seems to have turned the tide of Western public opinion against Morsi’s administration abroad.  With internal and external pressure mounting against the Islamists in power, it remains to be seen if June 30^th turns out to be the Chronicle of a Coup Foretold, or a bloody mess.  

Egypt: The Most Dangerous Moment of a Revolution

The most dangerous moment in a revolution, history teaches us, is not when the new rulers first come to power, but later when they are faced with their first serious opposition. That is when the new ruling forces are likely to turn most violent in repressing dissent, and often give way to more radical, bloodier elements. The French Revolution, the Russian, all followed that seemingly inexorable dynamic, leading to their form of ‘the Terror.’ Right on time, right on target, two and a half years after the January 25^th revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is set to face a major attempt at a countercoup. This time, the revolution will be televised. The Vendee is on!

June 30^th has been announced, for weeks now, as the date when fifteen million Egyptians who have signed the ‘Tamarod’ (Rebellion) petition have vowed to take to the streets to force the ouster of President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party rule. Whenever you talk to anyone living in Egypt today, you get the impression that their lives are on hold as they brace for the fatal day. June 30^th marks a year to the day when Morsi was inaugurated, the first president elected in relatively free elections against actual opposing candidates. His narrow margin of victory in that election is largely attributed to the anathema that prevented the secular/liberal revolutionary forces from voting for Morsi’s opponent, Mubarak loyalist and hardliner General Ahmed Shafiq. 

In an ironic reversal, today that same secular/liberal coalition that had organized the January 25^th uprising, toppled Mubarak, and- holding its nose- voted for Morsi over Shafiq, is preparing to attempt to force the resignation of Morsi and his cohort. The way the secular opposition see it, they are trying to win their revolution back from the Islamist forces that hijacked it. But as Doctor Frankenstein could attest, second thoughts may come too late.

It may or may not be too late already, the opposition forces argue, but it will certainly be too late if they wait until President Morsi comes up for re-election in another three years, and try to oust him at the ballot box. By then, the opposition believes, not only will the power-grabbing, judiciary-gutting Islamist party be too firmly entrenched to dislodge by peaceful means, but the deterioration of the country will be too far advanced to stanch the bleeding and reverse course. The economy is in free fall, and the daily life of the average citizen is plagued by power and water shortages, traffic nightmares and rampant insecurity. The boiling discontent will be harnessed, the organizers of June 30^th hope, to put pressure on President Morsi to resign.  

Beyond that point, the plans are not clear for the post-Morsi transition until a new round of early presidential elections yields a new president. The interim government, according to the opposition, might be a council broadly representing the opposition coalition but also the Islamist elements in the country, a sort of Directoire, headed by the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court. To ensure that this governing council oversees free and fair elections, any member who agrees to serve on the council forfeits his right to run for presidential election, and that includes Nobel Prize winner Mohamed Baradei.

But even the most optimistic are not counting on Morsi resigning in response to street pressure alone, so the intervention of the army and police will be crucial, particularly since the Islamist parties have also vowed their own counter-demonstrations, so violent clashes between opposing street protests are guaranteed. At the moment the roles of the army and police, those two historically quasi-independent forces, are unclear. The minister of the interior, responsible for the police, has made ambiguous pronouncements about who and what the police will protect. The Muslim Brotherhood has vowed to take into its own hands the protection of the president and the party headquarters. The military is known to have serious issues with the Islamists in power, and might intervene, but on the other hand, it might choose to stand on the sidelines.

If June 30^th sounds like January 25 redux, it is because the same scenario seems to be preparing to play out, with changes in some of the principal actors. Except that this time, after the success of the first revolution, the hopes may be higher, but so are the stakes, and, in the current desperate state of national polarization and economic meltdown, the danger is even greater.

Egypt's Jon Stewart Bassem Youssef

The Emperor had no clothes. Or rather, the Emperor was wearing one too many, according to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated administration. The last straw that got television comedian and chat show host Bassem Youssef arrested was a satire on President Morsi wearing an outsize ceremonial hat bestowed on him during an official visit to Pakistan recently.

Youssef’s avowed idol and inspiration, Jon Stewart, pointed out on The Daily Show that he spent much of the eight years of the Bush administration making fun of the President wearing big funny hats- cowboy hats. But Egypt is not the U.S., and never has been. Bassem Youssef would not even have been allowed to go on air with his show under Mubarak, let alone make fun of the President and the Muslim Brotherhood Party week after week. After the revolution of January 2011, Youssef went from doing ten minute video clip spoofs on YouTube to hosting a two-hour, must-see TV show every Friday night, with millions around the Arab world tuning in.

As the popularity of his show grew exponentially every week, Bassem Youssef, a practicing heart surgeon by profession who first started producing his skits in his own basement, went on to host on glossy studio sets on the most widely-watched cable channels in Egypt. He self-consciously modeled himself on his idol Jon Stewart: from Stewart’s mannerisms and self-depreciation to the format of the show to the host’s trademark irreverence and lewd innuendos- par for the course for an American comedian but shocking in a socially conservative country like Egypt.

And like Jon Stewart, Bassem Youssef at his best could be excruciatingly funny while debunking false claims and exposing the hypocrisy of the party in power with the deadly precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Until the authorities, forced to acknowledge the power of ridicule, were no longer able to ignore him. More than once, he was warned and ordered to cease and desist, to no avail. If, once or twice, his program seemed to be pulling its punches, dissatisfied viewers threatened to tune out in droves, and he returned in full force. Finally Youssef was arrested last week and interrogated, while thousands stood vigil outside the Attorney General’s office and millions more stood vigil on the social media. Even the U.S. Embassy in Egypt tweeted about the topic. And in the U.S., not only Jon Stewart but NBC, CBS, and television world-wide reported on the Bassem Youssef cause celebre.

 No doubt domestic and international pressure played their part in the decision of the Attorney General to release Youssef. That same night, Bassem Youssef put on a show that pulled no punches. But he was the first to acknowledge that he had the luxury of relative impunity on account of his celebrity, and if that were lifted, so would his immunity. And he acknowledged, by name, the many dissident media figures now in jail who were victims of the public’s fickle span of attention. If you forget them and don’t speak out for them, he said, one day no one will speak out for you. He seemed to be speaking for himself.

The Plagues of Egypt

One of Egypt’s nicknames, along with ‘mother of the world’, is al-mahroussa, « the protected », as if the Almighty keeps a special eye on the country. Lately, though, Providence seems to have cast a malevolent eye on Egypt, raining down plague after plague. Most recently there was an actual plague of locusts sweeping in from Africa and decimating crops before moving on to Egypt’s biblical neighbor, Israel. That same week, the terrible accident of the hot air balloon going up in flames over Luxor made sure to drive away the last diehard tourists who had braved endless revolution and instability to visit the unique monuments of the country.

But acts of God or ineptness of Man are not the worst plagues of Egypt: the worst wounds are self-inflicted. Egypt today has turned into a Tower of Babel where no one understands the language of the other. Islamist and secular, army and police, leftist and rightist, each group speaks its own language and neither hears nor is heard by the other. In a country that long prided itself on its cohesiveness and its sense of historical unity, artificial schisms are breaking out along the fault lines of religion, sect, ideology, and even, unbelievably, regionalism. That the Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Ismailiya and Suez are in open revolt against the central authority of Cairo is mind-boggling. Even more so is the cause of that civil disobedience: the trial and sentencing of Port Said football fans who are accused of causing the deaths of seventy plus fans of the rival, Cairo-based team Ahli during the horrific ‘soccer massacre’ in Port Said in February of 2012.  

Today, the court sentenced 21 Port Said fans to death, and also sentenced the two top generals responsible for security and police to fifteen-year jail sentences. Wherever the responsibility lies for the terrible events of the soccer massacre, the truth is now the victim of political football and tug of war between ‘Cairo’ and the Suez province.

Even the last bastions of national solidarity and security, the army and the police, have now turned into power centers and special interest groups who stage ‘million-man’ marches of their own to support their ‘cause.’

Yet this terrible state of affairs is not enough in the eyes of many who wish to see the Muslim Brotherhood dislodged from the positions of power they are grabbing hand over fist, often illegitimately in the eyes of their opponents. Today, a broad coalition of opposition to the Brotherhood sees no alternative to defeat their encroaching monopoly of power but for there to be even greater turmoil, greater civil disobedience, more bloodshed in the streets, and complete collapse of the economy. When will the plagues of Egypt end?

  

Friday of Salvation rather than Friday of Anger?

Enough is enough. Finally that seems to be the consensus of everyone with a modicum of sense of responsibility in Egypt. The liberal opposition initiated a national dialogue to which the Islamists were invited to participate- under the aegis of the Azhar, with the support of the Coptic Church. The Azhar? That was unexpected! The traditional Muslim religious establishment of Egypt, the Azhar, influential well beyond Egypt around the Muslim world, has kept such a low profile recently, and kept its distance from its historic antagonists, the Botherhood. Interesting development, bears watching.
But the real relief is that today's demonstrations are announced to be peaceful rather than violent- if, that is, the unpredictable and ungovernable angry young men in the street follow the scenario.

Egypt Burning: Back to the Future?

Beyond the worst violence of the revolution of January 25^th, beyond anything in living memory, what is going on in Egypt today is shocking, horrifying, catastrophic. Beyond words. Egyptians killing Egyptians- over what?

A year after the Port Said soccer massacre in which seventy-some supporters of the Cairo-based Ahli team lost their lives a year ago, Egypt braced for the verdict of the court trying the Port Said hooligans who were allegedly behind the violence. If they were acquitted, the Ahli ‘Ultras’- diehard fans- threatened massive disruption and violence. When twenty one of the Port Said accused were sentenced to death, their families and friends saw the verdict as bowing to the pressure of the Ahli and vowed in return to show ‘Cairo’ the mayhem that Port Said could wreck. The numbers of the dead in the ensuing fighting between natives of those three cities and the police has nearly equaled the number of original victims of the soccer massacre. Meantime other cities far and wide in the country are up in arms, and Cairo itself is the scene of rioting and traffic-stopping street protests.

How can this be happening in a country where civil war is unknown, where regionalism and secession are unheard of, where the control of the central government has been the overpowering paradigm of the past five thousand years? Three eastern port cities with a history of patriotism against invaders- Port Said, Ismailiya, Suez- are in bloody revolt against ‘Cairo’, and the Morsi government has called in the army and imposed a thirty-day martial law and curfew crack down.

To complicate matters, no one really knows who or what is behind the scenes, or who is being manipulated and by whom. Is this the counter-revolution so long threatened or promised? Is this chaos a calculated, necessary preliminary to the intervention of the military and a military take-over, this time for good, openly, and with no opposition? Is it a repeat of the scenario of January 26, 1952, when Cairo was set aflame, and Colonels Nasser and company staged their coup the following July, setting the stage for uninterrupted rule by military men for the next sixty years? January 25, 2011, was in a sense a revolution against the regime that came to power in 1952. Two years later, in 2013, is it back to the future? For so many Egyptians disgusted and terrified by the power grab of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, that scenario may be the lesser of two evils.

Regardless. Enough. Enough is enough. Enough of the madness of Egyptians destroying each other, destroying their country, destroying their revolution, destroying their economy. Enough. They should take a step back to sanity and behold what they have wrought.

Egypt's Morsi: Forget Planet of the Apes

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi has been in the international news nearly every day for the past week or two. First it was the positive press coverage of his cooperative role in defusing the breakout of Israeli/Hamas hostilities in Gaza. President Obama himself took calls from Morsi at 2 a.m.! What a power trip for an obscure engineer, a Muslim Brotherhood party bureaucrat who was catapulted into the limelight to pinch hit for his party’s original candidate when the latter was disqualified from the presidential elections. At the time of his election, I wrote that Egypt had a history of obscure ‘second men’ who come to power accidentally and then entrench themselves in power for surprisingly long periods. Sadat was Nasser’s yes-man vice-president till he became his own man and turned Egypt around 180 degrees from East to West; Mubarak became president unexpectedly when Sadat was assassinated, and went on to rule for thirty years.

True to historical form, the mild-mannered Morsi showed his teeth soon after taking power. He managed to outmaneuver the Generals and force the resignation of the Supreme Military Council that had been running the country and pulling the strings. Today, though, the same liberals who had applauded Morsi’s ‘coup’ against the military last summer are now flooding the streets in outrage against his move to arrogate to himself powers even Mubarak did not claim. Yet Morsi does not seem to have forfeited support from the United States. What is going on?

As Sadat did before him, Morsi is now check-mating one ‘center of power’ of the old regime after another as they challenge his newfound authority. After having successfully foiled the Military, he is turning his guns against the Judiciary, claiming that the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Court that dissolved the Islamist-dominated but democratically-elected Parliament last summer was now about to dissolve the Islamist-packed Constitutional Council charged with drafting a new charter for the nation. In a breath-taking power grab, Morsi put himself and the Constitutional Council above the reach of the highest court in Egypt, in effect above the reach of the law, while he attempts to railroad through a half-baked constitution, even after a quarter of the Council’s members, namely liberals, women, and Copts, resigned.

In a lengthy interview in the latest issue of Time Magazine with his face on the cover, Morsi tries to explain his actions as ‘pushing Egypt through a bottleneck’ of crisis, in other words, till the Constitution is ratified by referendum, after which he would retract the absolute powers he has seized by decree. No one in Egypt, however, forgets that Mubarak ruled for thirty years under cover of ‘emergency laws’ announced right after Sadat’s assassination.

Much commented on in the U.S. media is a rambling reference Morsi makes in the Time interview to the Sci-Fi kitsch classic, Planet of the Apes. Morsi compares what is happening in Egypt today to the struggle between a subjugated human played by Charleston Heston and his Ape masters in a post-apocalyptic world. Regardless of the intended meaning behind the confused analogy, it is a clever piece of public relations. It is Morsi attempting to bridge the gap with the American public, to remind them that this bearded, bespectacled, card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood is also a U.S. educated engineer who received his degree from the University of Southern California, lived and worked in the States, fathered a couple of U.S.-born children, and apparently watched his fair share of cult classic movies. By sharing a reference to the ‘Planet of the Apes’, he clearly hopes to score a point on relatability.      

Are the Obama administration and the U.S. media buying this? Why is criticism of Morsi’s overreach so muted? Is it that he was democratically elected, by all accounts? Or that his role in brokering the Israeli-Hamas truce has earned him residual good will? Or is there a darker scenario at play?

In Egypt, of course, conspiracy theories rule. The Sinai hypothesis, if you can call it that, has been floating around since summer, but now it is no longer being dismissed as preposterous. According to the conspiracy theory, there are secret negotiations to cede territory from the Sinai, Egyptian territory, as part of a U.S.-sponsored master-plan resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

The Egyptian press, still largely dominated by anti-Islamist Nasserists or liberals, is mute or muzzled when it comes to this particularly treacherous scenario. Several editors, journalists and television personalities have seen their careers ended abruptly in recent weeks. One television chat show host closed her final episode days ago with a lamentation over the death of democracy, holding her own funeral shroud up in her arms.

Forget the Planet of the Apes. Watch the Sinai.