Al-Monitor reports: In a statement issued June 21 addressing the upcoming June 30 nationwide opposition protests, the Salafist al-Nour Party illustrated its guarded, line-straddling position in the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s liberal opposition forces.

While the Nour Party expressed support for the controversial constitution and recognition of the legitimacy of the embattled president, it inconspicuously rallied behind efforts to destabilize the current regime. It called on protesters to adopt peaceful measures to change the balance of power, criticized the partisanship of the president and rejected attempts to portray Egypt’s political stalemate as an Islamist-secular struggle.

“They want to say they are not against secular parties,” Khaled Dawoud, a spokesperson for the National Salvation Front (NSF), told Al-Monitor. “The point that continues to cause problems between us is the constitution.” Opposition groups hold that various articles in Egypt’s constitution challenge religious and social freedoms, whereas al-Nour staunchly opposes removing the debated articles.

Al-Nour has long been wary of attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to amass power and marginalize its competition. After leaving the Brotherhood-dominated Democratic Alliance for Egypt ahead of the parliamentary elections, the former head of al-Nour told Reuters that the group would not operate in the shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood, and spoke of the acrimonious experience of other parties in the alliance.

Al-Nour, the largest of several Salafist parties, boasts more than 180,000 registered members, and, as an organized political body, is second to the Muslim Brotherhood in size and political strength. “They have ambition to govern, banking on their wide popular base,” said Ahmad Ban, head of the Social and Political Movements Unit at the Nile Center for Political and Strategic Studies. [Continue reading…]

Shadi Hamid writes: Supporters of the Tamarod (“rebel”) movement are taking to streets on June 30th in what is likely to be a massive show of force. Their goals are deceptively simple — pushing President Mohamed Morsi out of power and holding early presidential elections. When asked, however, how they plan to do this, the answers acquire a certain vagueness. Egyptians have every right to call for Morsi to resign — and that right must be protected — but he is obviously under no obligation to heed their calls. So, then what?

There is no legal or constitutional mechanism through which Morsi, who was elected with 51.7 percent of the vote just a year ago, can be ousted. Realistically, there is only one way he falls – if mass violence and a total collapse of public order provoke the military to step in. In this sense, for Tamarod to “succeed,” Egypt must fail. For some in the opposition, this short-term cost — as devastating as it might be — is justified because the alternative of continued Muslim Brotherhood rule will fundamentally alter the very nature of Egypt.

Opposition figures have been flirting with the possibility of various kinds of coups against an incompetent, unpopular — though democratically elected — president. Some, like April 6th’s Tarek al-Khouli and human rights activist Dalia Ziada, have explicitly called for military intervention. Others, like Mohamed ElBaradei and Ahmed el-Borai have taken to issuing what the journalist Evan Hill calls “non-request requests” for the army to step in. Still others, including leaders of Tamarod, have called for the judiciary to intervene and “annul” Morsi’s presidency. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: Egypt suffered renewed outbreaks of violence on Friday as Muslim Brotherhood offices were attacked in at least four provinces two days before the scheduled start of mass protests against the president and Brotherhood associate Mohamed Morsi.

Two people were killed in Alexandria on Friday – one an American bystander who was watching an attack on local Brotherhood offices – and 70 were injured. Clashes were reported in several other cities between Morsi’s often secular-minded critics – who seek his immediate resignation – and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, who defend his democratic legitimacy.

Six people have now been killed in the renewed violence this week. According to Brotherhood officials, a former MP from their political wing was among the dead on Thursday.

Egypt Daily News reports: On Friday thousands of protesters vowed to remain in Tahrir Square in their call for the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, and many started erecting tents in preparation for mass demonstrations on 30 June.

Marches from various locations in Cairo, including Talaat Harb Street, Mostafa Mahmoud and Sayeda Zeinab, brought in thousands of protesters into the square in the afternoon.

“We are staying for the long run, we are not leaving before [Morsi] does,” yelled one protester in the square.

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s largest opposition bloc on Saturday reached out to former members of the deposed president’s party, ahead of mass protests on June 30 demanding the ouster of his successor.

The opposition’s move came a day after some 100,000 supporters of current President Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist and the country’s first elected leader, packed a main square in Cairo to support him and challenge the largely liberal opposition that demands he step down.

Morsi won a four-year term as president with some 52 percent of the vote in a run-off last June against Ahmed Shafiq, the last prime minister of now-ousted Hosni Mubarak. Shafiq is now contesting the election results.

“I can’t isolate millions of Egyptian people because they were part of the National Democratic Party,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, a top leader of the opposition National Salvation Front, referring to Mubarak’s now-dissolved party. He said the invitation to Mubarak supporters did not extend to those who had been convicted of crimes under the old regime.

“The masses of Egyptian people are calling for change,” he said, adding that the plan now was to discuss national reconciliation. He made his remarks during a two-day conference entitled “After Departure,” which aims to draw up a road map in case Morsi resigns as the opposition demands.

Hamdeen Sabahi, leader of the leftist Popular Current opposition group, said a six-month transitional period would start the day Morsi steps down, during which a new constitution would be drafted and a new president elected. Others proposed that the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court should become the country’s transitional leader until new elections.

Shadi Hamid writes: Many Americans — and many Egyptians — are souring on the Muslim Brotherhood. Some are rather smugly saying, “I told you so.” From the American and Arab liberal perspectives, the Brotherhood seems run by hyper-charged Islamists bent on imposing their will on the Egyptian people. Like most things in politics, though, it depends on what exactly you’re comparing them to. More than two years into the Arab revolts, Islamists are weighing the virtues of moving more aggressively to implement their agenda versus the benefits of proceeding cautiously in an attempt to placate their critics and opponents.

There is little doubt that the Brotherhood has veered to the right. The real debate within the group is whether they’ve veered far enough. With Egypt as polarized as ever, the country’s largest Islamist movement has effectively given up on reaching out to liberals and leftists, focusing instead on closing ranks and rallying its base. During the presidential race, Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s original candidate, chose a Salafi-leaning council of scholars for his first campaign event, where he affirmed that the application of sharia law was his ultimate goal and that he would form a committee of scholars to help parliament achieve that goal. After Shater’s disqualification, Mohammed Morsy — a weaker, less convincing candidate — doubled down on Shater’s back-to-basics message. “Needless to say,” Morsy said, “[I am] currently the only contender who offers a clearly Islamic project.”

After winning the presidency, Morsy took a brief stab at rising above his partisan origins. But the tragic events of Dec. 4, when anti-Brotherhood protesters and government supporters clashed outside the presidential palace, rendered such efforts moot. The violence of that night — provoked by the Brotherhood when it called on supporters to confront protesters — claimed “martyrs” on both sides. For many in the opposition, this was the point of no return — blood had been spilled.

For the Brotherhood, it had much the same effect. As one Brotherhood official told me, “there was a return to the mentality of mihna [inquisition]” after that day. The subsequent months saw the presidential office hiring a steady stream of Brotherhood members. The Brothers had no one to turn to — not even the Salafis — but each other. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The U.N.’s human rights chief said on Wednesday Egypt risked betraying the ideals behind the 2011 revolution and slipping into authoritarianism with a new civil society law.

The Arab country was at a “critical moment” more than two years after the uprising that ousted autocratic President Hosni Mubarak, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said, citing a range of social and political rights concerns.

She singled out a law backed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) that she said risked making non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worse off than they were under Mubarak by imposing curbs including funding restrictions.

The Guardian reports: Last weekend, the owners of the 4Win hotel in Hurghada uncorked the entire contents of their drinks cabinet, and poured it down their stairs. Attended by a Salafi sheikh, and by supporters chanting “Allah is great”, the event was a first for Hurghada. It marked the opening of the first hotel in the Red Sea resort – a westernised tourist town where much of the signage is in English and Russian – that promises to cater for religiously conservative guests.

“At the moment, many Middle Eastern men won’t come to Hurghada because they won’t get the privacy they require,” said 4Win’s manager and co-owner, Abdelbasset Omar. “We’re trying to fill that gap in the market.”

Omar said female guests will stay on a segregated, women-only floor guarded by female security personnel, and will also have the option of swimming in a segregated pool. The bar is alcohol-free, while images of musicians Elvis Presley and Shakira – the residue of the hotel’s previous life as a conventional establishment – have been removed from the walls. But the transformation is not entirely complete: paid-for pornography channels have not yet been removed from the hotel’s televisions.

“It gives me the chance to enjoy tourism in my own country in a way that does not contradict my beliefs,” said one of the hotel’s first guests, Abdel Rahman – an electronics engineer from Cairo. “Especially the privacy for women – they can enjoy swimming now with no problems.”

“I’m very glad that this hotel has been opened,” said Sheikh Khaled Saeed, who spoke at the hotel’s opening. “It helps better reflect a real image of Egyptian society.”

Western tourism in Egypt has fallen since the 2011 uprising – one local hotelier said his hotel’s occupancy was down by 50%, while nationwide numbers have fallen by over a fifth in the past two years. In this light, 4Win’s existence is partly seen as a clever attempt to make up for the shortfall with a different kind of tourist. “It’s a smart move,” said Adel Ibrahim, the owner of Canary Hotel, another Hurghada inn. “It’ll attract conservative guests – both from the Gulf countries and from Egypt.” [Continue reading…]

Jenna Krajeski writes: In 2010, I moved to Cairo to try something new. I had taken a job with an education N.G.O., and saw the work—which I knew from friends to be frustrating but fulfilling — as a fresh start. Development, I thought, was useful; I wasn’t sure I could say that about journalism. It took about a week in Cairo for me to change my opinion. I quit the N.G.O.

For the next year, and through months of the revolution in Tahrir Square, I was on the staff of Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, the online-only version of a local Arabic-language newspaper. The papers shared a name and the same management, but they didn’t have a lot else in common. The staffers of the English edition were young — mostly under thirty — and around a quarter of them were foreign; their paper was both a platform for news and a protest against the journalistic old guard. They saw the established Egyptian media as rife with flaws—a rigid hierarchy, sexism, laziness, nepotism, and self-censorship among them — which impeded the free society they wanted to live in.

What the journalists at the English Edition lacked in mentors, they made up for with camaraderie, determination, and optimism. Earlier this month, when the management of Al-Masry Al-Youm announced that the English Edition (now called Egypt Independent, and weekly in print) was closing, they derided that optimism as naïveté.

Egypt Independent’s bosses cited a lack of resources—a believable claim, given the business situation for most newsrooms today. But there was more to it. A letter signed the “Al Masry Al Youm Institution” (the media company, Al-Masry Al-Youm, owns both the Arabic paper of the same name and Egypt Independent) and posted on Egypt Independent’s Web site reads “…the false hopes that the print version of ‘The Egypt Independent’ will create the desired impact on the Egyptian society were nothing but a huge waste of financial resources, labor, and time.”

For the young journalists, it was a blow. Since January, they had been learning to keep themselves afloat. They raised money, courted investors and advertisers, and canvassed for subscribers. The management “disregarded everything we’d done and completely killed the operation,” said the editor Lina Attalah, when I reached her on Monday via Skype. “The facade is financial, but there are politics in economic moves.” Attalah was tired; she had spent the day arguing for severance pay for the staff. (Al-Masry Al-Youm maintains that the decision is purely financial, and plans to publish English translations of their Arabic content online under the name Egypt Independent.)

Egypt Independent isn’t just a newspaper in English; it’s a crucial, local voice at a time when Egypt needs trustworthy representatives. An article intended for the last issue of Egypt Independent, by Dina K. Hussein and Dalia Rabie, explains the value of “allowing Egyptian journalists to tell Egypt’s story to the world, not as fixers who might or might not get their due credit, but as primary storytellers.” They speak the language and know the customs; they have sources. Perhaps most important, they truly — not just intellectually — care. When one of these news sources closes, it’s not only Egyptian society that rocks off balance. Independent, reliable news on Egypt will be harder for English-speakers in the rest of the world to find. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: The yellow horse-drawn gasoline tank is out in the open, on a busy highway that snakes along a poor slum in eastern Cairo. Trucks and cars stop to fill up. Pedestrians come by, too, with plastic containers to fill.

The yellow tank isn’t alone. Mini-tankers and canisters of illegal diesel fuel have become ubiquitous in Egypt. Vendors hawk the fuel in crowded neighborhoods, next to shops and idle police officers who do little to stop the sales.

Egypt’s rapidly expanding black market for fuel — and for foodstuffs, other commodities and U.S. dollars — may be the most tangible illustration of just how badly the economy of this vast Arab nation is failing, two years after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

The prices of most basic goods, like fuel and flour, have been fixed for decades, with Egypt pouring roughly a quarter of its GDP into a bloated and deeply inefficient national subsidy system each year.

But after two years of political turmoil, weak governance, a devastated tourism industry and sapped investments, the government is quickly running out of money to foot the bill.

Egyptian economists say the government, confronted with reduced purchasing power, is buying less wheat and diesel from abroad. But they said it is unclear whether that is the main cause of the shortages, or whether the scarcity is driven mostly by the growing black market and the hoarding of goods by ordinary Egyptians who are anxious about the unstable economy.

One way or another, the supply of subsidized goods is drying up, breaking down the long-standing subsidy system and pushing those who can afford it to the black market. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: The United States on Monday accused Egypt of muzzling freedom of speech after prosecutors questioned the most popular Egyptian television satirist over allegations he insulted President Mohamed Mursi and Islam.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also suggested the Egyptian authorities were selectively prosecuting those accused of insulting the government while ignoring or playing down attacks on anti-government demonstrators.

Bassem Youssef, who rose to fame with a satirical online show after the uprising that swept autocrat Hosni Mubarak from power in 2011, turned himself in on Sunday after the prosecutor general issued an arrest warrant for the comedian on Saturday.

The New York Times reports: The sheer number of women sexually abused and gang raped in a single public square had become too big to ignore. Conservative Islamists in Egypt’s new political elite were outraged — at the women.

“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

The increase in sexual assaults over the last two years has set off a new battle over who is to blame, and the debate has become a stark and painful illustration of the convulsions racking Egypt as it tries to reinvent itself.

Under President Hosni Mubarak, the omnipresent police kept sexual assault out of the public squares and the public eye. But since Mr. Mubarak’s exit in 2011, the withdrawal of the security forces has allowed sexual assault to explode into the open, terrorizing Egyptian women.

Women, though, have also taken advantage of another aspect of the breakdown in authority — by speaking out through the newly aggressive news media, defying social taboos to demand attention for a problem the old government often denied. At the same time, some Islamist elected officials have used their new positions to vent some of the most patriarchal impulses in Egypt’s traditional culture and a deep hostility to women’s participation in politics.

The female victims, these officials declared, had invited the attacks by participating in public protests. “How do they ask the Ministry of Interior to protect a woman when she stands among men?” Reda Saleh Al al-Hefnawi, a lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, asked at a parliamentary meeting on the issue. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: A fuel shortage has helped send food prices soaring. Electricity is blacking out even before the summer. And gas-line gunfights have killed at least five people and wounded dozens over the past two weeks.

The root of the crisis, economists say, is that Egypt is running out of the hard currency it needs for fuel imports. The shortage is raising questions about Egypt’s ability to keep importing wheat that is essential to subsidized bread supplies, stirring fears of an economic catastrophe at a time when the government is already struggling to quell violent protests by its political rivals.

Farmers already lack fuel for the pumps that irrigate their fields, and they say they fear they will not have enough for the tractors to reap their wheat next month before it rots in the fields.

United States officials warn of disaster unless Egypt soon carries out a package of tax increases and subsidy cuts tied to a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. That would persuade other lenders that Egypt was creditworthy enough to obtain billions more in additional loans needed to meet its yawning deficit. But fearful of a public reaction at a time when the streets are already near boiling, the government of President Mohamed Morsi has so far resisted an I.M.F. deal, insisting that Egypt can wait.

Those who say Egypt cannot afford enough fuel are “trying to make problems for Dr. Morsi and his party,” said Naser el-Farash, the spokesman for the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade and a fellow member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm.

Mr. Farash placed blame for the shortage of fuel on corruption left over from the government of Hosni Mubarak, combined with hoarding inspired by fear-mongering in the private news media. “They are against the revolution,” he said.

Independent analysts say that the growing shortage of fuel and the fear about wheat imports now pose the gravest threats to Egypt’s fragile stability. “It has the potential to make things very, very bad,” said Yasser el-Shimy, an analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Egypt has held two years of unsuccessful talks with the I.M.F., and the current government is still balking at the politically painful package of overhauls — even as rising prices and unemployment make those measures more difficult with each passing day.

“They are operating on the notion that Egypt is too big to be allowed to fail, that the U.S. and the West will step in,” Mr. Shimy said. “They think Egypt has a right to get the loan, and I think they will probably keep pushing all the way.”

Officials of the Morsi government have indicated that they prefer to wait until the election of a new Parliament, which might demonstrate broader public agreement on the need for changes. But a court decision striking down the election law has postponed the vote until at least the fall, and many economists say Egypt cannot endure the delay. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s public prosecutor on Saturday ordered the arrest of a popular television satirist on charges that included insulting President Mohamed Morsi and denigrating Islam, a state news agency reported, a move that amplified criticisms that the Islamist government is moving aggressively to silence its critics and stifle freedom of expression.

The satirist, Bassem Youssef, who hosts a widely watched show modeled on “The Daily Show,” has been the subject of numerous legal complaints filed by Islamist lawyers and citizens who took umbrage at Mr. Youssef’s skewering of Egypt’s political class, including Mr. Morsi, his loyalists and the opposition.

But the arrest warrant seemed to represent a sharp escalation of the campaign against Mr. Youssef, with the public prosecutor appointed by Mr. Morsi lending official credence to the complaints. In the nine months since Mr. Morsi took office, his government has been accused of employing the same harsh measures against dissent as did the previous authoritarian leaders, including prosecuting critics, confiscating newspapers and placing sympathetic journalists in state news media organs.

Last week, the public prosecutor, Talaat Ibrahim, ordered the arrest of five anti-Islamist activists on charges that they had used social media to incite violence against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Associated Press reports: Egypt’s president delivered a stern warning to his opponents on Sunday, saying he may be close to taking unspecified measures to “protect this nation” two days after supporters of his Muslim Brotherhood and opposition protesters fought street battles in the worst bout of political violence in three months.

Nearly 200 people were injured in Friday’s violence, some seriously, outside the headquarters of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s dominant political group.

“If I have to do what is necessary to protect this nation I will, and I am afraid that I may be close to doing so,” a visibly angry Morsi said in an animated speech to the opening session of a conference on women’s rights.

“I will do so very, very soon. Sooner than those trying to shake the image of this nation think,” said the Islamist leader who took office in June as the country’s first freely elected president.

“Let us not be dragged into an area where I will take a harsh decision,” he warned.

While not naming any one opposition group or critic in particular, his comments were the strongest hint to date that he believes the parties and politicians grouped in the National Salvation Front, the main opposition coalition, were directly behind the violence.

His comments were initially released in a series of tweets on his account but state television later aired extensive excerpts from the address.

He also warned that “appropriate measures” would be taken against politicians found to be behind Friday’s violence, regardless of their seniority. Anyone found to be using the media to “incite violence” will also be held accountable, he added. His comments came just hours after dozens of Islamists staged a protest outside studios belonging to independent TV networks that are critical of the Egyptian leader.

Amira Howeidy writes: The euphoria that erupted in Gaza minutes after Hosni Mubarak stepped down on 11 February 2011 probably came second only to Egypt’s. The ousted dictator was Israel’s “strategic asset” for good reason. He secured the blockade of the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian side, sided against Hamas and proved a reliable ally.

Even during the 22-day Israeli war on Gaza at the end of 2008, Mubarak kept the Rafah border crossing firmly shut, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which binds Egypt, as a signatory, to protect civilians during times of war and foreign occupation.

Egypt’s dictator was removed but his legacy continues to influence realities on the ground in Gaza and around the Palestinian question in general. It does not help that his successor, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi, has done little to prove — thus far — that his policies will change course. Of course nothing is that simple. Morsi, willingly, inherited a difficult legacy of a mammoth, corrupt bureaucracy and questionable sovereignty after decades of subservience to the United States.

But judging from their discourse and performance during the past year, it’s evident that the Brotherhood — including their Freedom and Justice Party and the president — are too eager to prove their power-worthiness by demonstrating “pragmatism” and flexibility to the international community. [Continue reading…]

Dina K. Hussein writes: “It is always the fixer who dies,” is the title of a seminal article by George Packer that appeared in The New Yorker in 2009 to mourn the death of Sultan Munadi, a local fixer who lost his life in a commando raid in Afghanistan. The raid that ended Munadi’s life took place in order to free foreign journalists who were captivated by the Taliban. The foreign correspondent was freed, the fixer died, and the operation was deemed a success. This tragedy and Packer’s dramatic title are fitting curtain raisers to the struggle of local English-language media in Egypt.

For decades, local journalists who had the necessary language skills helped foreign correspondents working for Western news organizations to tell Egypt’s story to the world. Yet, as Packer remarks, this fixer-foreign correspondent relationship has always been tense, punctuated by a power imbalance. This imbalance in the journalistic establishment pays homage to the classical inequalities of power that dictate who gets to produce knowledge. A plain analysis of this condition speaks of a Western journalistic establishment that possess the power and money to send its correspondents to gaze at the troubled Middle East and provide the world with the knowledge base of this part of the world through narrating the story of the locals.

The local English-language media, however, have played a vital role in partially mending this power imbalance by allowing Egyptian journalists to tell Egypt’s story to the world, not as fixers who might or might not get their due credit, but as primary storytellers.

Local independent English-language media outlets, such as Cairo Times, Daily News Egypt, and Egypt Independent have provided local journalists with an opportunity to tell their country’s narrative in their own voice. Additionally, these media outlets have created a unique space for local and foreign journalists, editors and translators to interact and work together to report critically and with integrity, breaking away from the rigidity of foreign/local dichotomies and the associated power imbalance.

In the process, these outlets became a go-to source for international media organizations interested in covering Egypt, mediating complex realities about the country to the world. Often, they acted as transitional platforms for young foreign journalists hoping to better understand the story ahead of getting opportunities in international outlets. But more importantly, they produced a journalism that informs media practice in Egypt in the way stories are covered and issues are represented.

These local English-language outlets, however, have faced numerous challenges over the years. While many of those challenges are financial in nature and pertain to the viability of their business models, there have also been critical political restrictions.

Independent journalists in general have long struggled against the Egyptian state’s oppression. Even though English-language publications have enjoyed a higher ceiling of freedom compared to Arabic media outlets, they have often been intimidated by censors. Cairo Times, the leading English-language paper in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was a pioneer in criticizing Hosni Mubarak’s regime and often grappled with the censors physically removing the paper from the market in heightened points of confrontation. One of the legacies of Cairo Times is that it groomed many of the leading journalists and media experts on the Middle East today. But its unfortunate closure due to financial hardships is not a distant memory since the state’s stifling of freedom of expression has not subsided with the revolution. [Continue reading…]

Al Ahram: The possibility of armed militias and vigilante groups run by the Muslim Brotherhood and other hard-line Islamist groups has raised the spectre of a possible confrontation between such militias and the military.

Already the “power-of-attorney” drive calling on the army to replace the Muslim Brotherhood government, conductedagainst a backdrop of sharply escalating political tension, police strikes, rioting and angry protest demonstrations in many cities, fuel shortages, rising prices and the clear inability of the current government to cope with on-going crises have caused strains between the army and Islamist groups.

As the Minister of Defence headed to the podium to deliver a speech during Military Academy graduation ceremonies several days ago he was visibly surprised by the number of bearded faces and niqabs in the audience. Perhaps this is what prompted General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to speak at length on how difficult it would be to “Brotherhoodise” the military and insist that anyone who entered military service best forget any allegiances they may have other than their primary allegiance to the nation. Conveying a similar message, other military sources insisted that the chances of ideological infiltration are minimal. [Continue reading…]