Western media reacted with outrage at the preliminary death sentence passed Saturday by an Egyptian court on ousted president Mohamed Morsi and 100 others, most of whom in absentia, in connection with the prison break case in 2011. The court has referred its preliminary ruling to the country's grand mufti, and is expected to issue its final sentence on 2 June 2015. Among those convicted are members of the Hamas Movement and Lebanon's Hizbullah. Human Rights Watch as well as Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the sentencing in strong terms, saying that the trial was politically motivated. Meanwhile, three judges were killed near Al-Arish by gunmen connected with Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, a terrorist group based in northern Sinai. Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis is mounting a campaign of terror against army, police and judicial officials, one that seems to escalate in reaction to the government clampdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, giving credence to claims that Beit Al-Maqdis and the Muslim Brotherhood are closely linked. The Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, which swore allegiance to the Islamic State, also known as Daesh or ISIS, has mounted various attacks on Egyptian installations, power plants, and security services since the government dispersed Muslim Brotherhood gatherings in Rabaa and Nahda squares in Cairo on 14 August 2013. Much of the Beit Al-Maqdis bloodletting seems designed to punish Egyptian officials and the public for the ongoing campaign to rein in the Muslim Brotherhood, dry up its finances, and prevent the campaign of sabotage waged by its followers. The court ruling is not final, and even if it is supported by the mufti. The defendants are entitled to challenge it in least two higher courts. In recent months, the mufti reviewed 1,200 death sentences on Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers, but only endorsed 35 of those, including 28 passed in absentia. Qatar and Turkey were particularly outspoken in their condemnation of the death sentences, and officials in both countries still consider the 30 June 2013 Revolution, which ended Muslim Brotherhood rule, as a coup d'état. The Muslim Brotherhood's yearlong rule, featuring a constitutional declaration that gave Morsi full dictatorial powers, brought the country to the edge of civil war. So when millions took to the streets on 30 June 2013, the army was forced to remove Morsi from power. Since then, the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters have waged a war of attrition, including attacks on members of the public, the police, the army, and the judiciary. But that's not something that Egypt's critics in Doha, Ankara and the West pause to consider. What the army did on 30 June 2013 was exactly what it did on 25 January 2011: it removed a dictator and his associates from power to avert wide-scale bloodshed. But the Western media, which applauded Mubarak's ouster, was quick to condemn Morsi's removal. You don't hear many people denouncing the Egyptian judiciary for trying Mubarak, his family and his associates. But there is no shortage of pundits to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood trials. This may seem puzzling, but not if one considers that the West, as well as Ankara and Doha, had its heart set on the Muslim Brotherhood. The plan was to create a sectarian reality in the Middle East, one in which Sunni would turn against Shia, while Israel would be justified in its quest to be a purely Jewish State. The Muslim Brotherhood knew about this scheme, and was willing to play along. But there was only one problem, which is that Egyptians didn't agree to be governed by a power-grabbing faction that has no respect for pluralism, and that is in cahoots with various jihadist outfits, including ones that the West wouldn't hesitate to call terrorist. So Egypt brought down the Muslim Brotherhood, placed its members on trial, elected a new president, and continued its quest to establish a democratic and modern country, not the archaic one the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies had in mind. Morsi and his co-defenders were not sentenced to death for escaping from prison during the revolution, but for collaborating with the Hamas Movement and Hizbullah in breaking from prison in an operation during which dozens of prison guards lost their lives. This, not politics, is the reason for the stiff sentences they received. They were tried for murder and treason, not for botching their year in power, and not even for pushing the country to the edge of civil war. During the prison break, nearly 45 prison guards were killed, weapons and ammunition were seized from the police, illegal border crossings were made, and police stations were attacked in several locations in Sinai. To this day, there are three Egyptian police officers still missing, believed to have been abducted and taken to Gaza. Just as Egyptians risked their lives on 25 January 2011 to bring down a corrupt dictatorship, they rose again on 30 June 2013 to bring down an autocratic elite with extensive ties to the jihadists who continue to wreak havoc on various parts of the region, and who are determined to bring us back into the 7th century through their skewed interpretation of Islam. This is not the legacy Egyptians want to uphold. Instead, they opted to continue what they began on 25 January 2011, which is to build a state that recognises common human values, international norms and promotes democracy and human rights. Turkey and Qatar, and some people in Washington, may go on shedding tears on the collapse of political Islam, on which they had pinned so much hopes. They may go on ruing the fact that their Muslim Brotherhood friends didn't have the political savvy to stay in power after the collapse of the long-running dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. The plan, one has to surmise, was to scare the Arab people with the lunatic fringe of political Islam, the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, so that we may endure the quaint politics of the Muslim Brotherhood. But this plan didn't work. And that, not the death sentences, is what irks Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers, inside and outside this region, the most.
