“The judge who sentenced to death more than 720 alleged rioters on a single day in Egypt in April has justified his decision on the grounds that some of the accused were “demons” adherent to Jewish scripture.
In May judge Saeed Youssef sentenced 37 men to death for the murder of a policeman – and then in a separate trial gave preliminary death sentences to 683 others. Youssef said the first 37 were “demons who came out of the depths of hell disguised in the cloak of Islam, who aimed to seize the reins of power in Egypt, loot its wealth and enslave its people”. According to several local newspapers, Youssef then described the men as “enemies of the nation” who used mosques to promote “the commandments of their holy book, the Talmud”……………”
Even Baathist Iraq, in its worst repressive days, did not hand out hundreds of death sentences in one day like this. All this gives us an idea about the low quality of judges and courts that have been common in Egypt over the past few decades, and still are.
I had thought that over the past couple of decades the main threat to Egypt had changed. That it is now the Shi’a threat, something that Mubarak bureaucrats, Al-Azhar, Muslim Brothers, Salafis, and Wahhabi liberals all have been warning us about, especially after the failed 2011 uprising. Now with Saudi-inspired Al Sisi replacing Saudi-inspired Mubarak, the Egyptian door is even more wide open to the Wahhabi interpretations of everything from history to culture to religion.
As for the Jewish threat, this should be old stuff. There are only a
few hundred Jews left in Egypt, the remnants of a once vibrant community
that was prominent in the arts, culture, and business. But they mostly left as
soon as they saw a hint of a familiar recent history: they did not
appreciate that concentration camps and mass extermination are an
exclusively European invention (they are). That the Europeans had been honing their gruesome skills at mass murder over several centuries to reach the level of efficiency of 1933-45.
Given that the Holy Quran itself borrowed heavily from the Old Testament, which is also Jewish (but probably not demonic scripture).
Cheers
mhg
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