Sarah Carr (who is not a Morsi supporter but voted for him to keep out Ahmed Shafiq) writes: [M]y position on events pre-30 June has not been changed by events since: the Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high. It has created a generation of Islamists who genuinely believe that democracy does not include them. The post-30 June fallout reaffirms this belief, especially with Islamist channels and newspapers closed down as well as leaders detained and held incommunicado, apparently pursuant to an executive decision. For thirty years, Mubarak told them that due process is not for them, and a popular revolution is confirming that. It is Egyptian society that will pay the price of the grievances this causes, and the fact that, with a silenced media and no coverage from independent outlets they have been left with virtually no channels to get their voice heard.
I will not weigh in on the coup/revolution debate other than to say millions of Egyptians were on the ground demanding Morsi be removed while military jets drew hearts in the skies above them and then Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi announced that Morsi had (forcibly) buggered off. Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.
In any case the debate is semantic and tedious and the nomenclature will not be decided now. The only aspect of the wider argument that interests me is the notion that an elected president’s legitimacy falls when millions take to the streets. If this is a precedent, then it means shaky times ahead when the masses’ interests do not coincide with those of the army.
Zenobia Azeem writes: It may be a stretch, but after the removal of President Mohammed Morsi by a popularly instigated coup, there was a small window of time where the army and the opposition could have adopted a genuinely reconciliatory tone, since they had the upper hand in how events were going to play out. While the nature, history and general interests of the army can be blamed for preventing the army from doing so, the opposition — or at the least the “revolutionary core” of pro-democracy youth activists — could have struggled harder to push the new military and civilian leadership to begin shaping the new order on democratic values.
This is not to say that anything can appease the Muslim Brotherhood at this point and push it to reintegrate into the political system, nor to ignore the fractures in the loosely strung-together opposition.
If this is truthfully a continuation of the revolution, and not just an attack on the vilified Brotherhood, where are the continued cries demanding protection of human rights, rule of law, political freedom and political pluralism?
