Romany Melek
For the Maine Campus
As happens with any new official, people wait a couple of months before they start questioning and criticizing the performance of that new official. These months were the only that Mohamed Morsi enjoyed in office. After that, the situation started to get worse.
The “Economist” in August of 2013 said: “There is no doubt that Muhammad Morsi’s performance as president was a disaster. He won about a quarter of the eligible vote and proceeded to flout every sort of democratic norm.”
The straw that broke the camel’s back was an event organized by the Egyptian presidency supposedly to support the Syrian people. Morsi invited his fans and a number of Islamic figures; most of them are “retired terrorists.”
The event was supposed to support and discuss the Syrian cause. However, most of the talk — in the presence of the president — was about the opposition and they, the Islamists, described the anti-Morsi protesters as “non-believers and hypocrites who deserve death.”
The continuous playing of this clip during prime time was a gift to Egyptian news channels.
After this event, people felt that the president they elected was using terrorists to threaten them and make them back off and stop protesting against him.
All these political catastrophes were more than enough to change the compass of Egyptian politics and push people to lose faith in the Islamic trend that has always preached the name of God in all times.
That year under Islamic leadership even made many people in Egypt lose faith in Islam itself. This conclusion was drawn from many phone calls from laymen to talk shows saying that they stopped believing in Islam. More importantly, numbers of atheists have increased significantly.
The U.S. was not prepared for this change and, as a result, the White House decided to use its media, especially CNN, to support Morsi and provide some balance after they noticed that the Egyptian media turned against him at the end.
The U.S. allied with the Islamists in Egypt when they seemed to be the winning card. So, the White House believed that any financial support for the Islamists would be a kind of investment. Every penny Uncle Sam pays for the Islamic government will be paid back with generous and invaluable favors for the U.S. in the Middle East.
The winds, however, blew where the ship didn’t wish to go, and the Islamists were forced to step down before Uncle Sam received the expected payback.
As a consequence, we’ve seen conflict and contradiction and sometimes discrepancies between the U.S. media and the Egyptian media over the past six months.
As I said in part one of this serial, the Egyptian media see opposing Islam as the ultimate reason for their existence, so they make very big issues out of any minor mistake the Islamists make, and much bigger issues if the mistakes are really consequential. On the other hand, the U.S. media, as a weapon in the hands of the American policy makers, saw the Islamist president as a servant for their interests in the Middle East and supported him as much as they could.
I previously discussed how the Egyptian army allied with the private media to be able to get rid of their mutual enemy, the Islamists. But now another alliance — Qatar — also saw Islamists as a strategic ally in the Middle East, as the U.S. did. Qatari Al-Jazeera, therefore, and the U.S. CNN have come to be on the same page — a Qatari-U.S. ally in their foreign policy regarding Egypt.