Looking back at the very beginning of the revolution, I remember us chanting against Habib El-Adly the former minister of interior for the horrendous police brutality and I am sure that if then-President Hosni Mubarak had responded on the same day and made some changes in the government he would have stayed in power until the end of his term. From my point of view, Mubarak's stubbornness was the main reason that caused his fall. Less than two years ago, Mubarak held his famous emotional speech that was followed by the bloody Wednesday 2nd of February 2011 when Mubarak's supporters stormed Tahrir square on camels and horses aiming to evacuate us from the area. Basically, Mubarak thought that everything was under control, but his lag when taking decisions gave us the strength and determination to topple him; and now, for Morsi by not expecting our response to his lag and stubbornness, is acting as if he had never witnessed the revolution and the revolutionaries in action. The past two weeks were nothing but a repetition of a small chapter from our modern history that I, myself, witnessed firsthand on the streets of Cairo. Now, despite being away I can see the events unraveling as if the regime has decided to keep Morsi in power in the exact same manner of support that lead to Mubarak's fall. The fact remains that the president who called to respect the judiciary system is the one who decided that his decrees should be above the judicial oversight and called for his supporters to lay siege the Supreme Constitutional Court last week. The president is refusing the court's ruling on both the constituent assembly and the parliament's lower chamber, but he is fine with the judiciary to monitor the referendum he called for. He is the same president who called for a dialogue with the opposition this Saturday while, on the other hand, he never gets to have a dialogue with his own advisors, which lead to the resignation of Rafiq Habib from the FJP after Morsi turned a blind eye on the blood that has been spilling on the streets of Cairo for the past two weeks just because he keeps refusing to cancel his declaration that gave him God-like powers. We have reached a point where it has become obvious that any dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood will be pointless after the hundreds of injuries and the seven martyrs who died because of the president's stubbornness. Hamdeen Sabahi, who is a member of the National Salvation Front – along with Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa – was denied appearing on the TV channel CBC. CBC has claimed that the channel's directors were threatened. It comes while 16 political Islamic parties and groups mobilized to lay siege to the Media Production City to “end the media instigation against the MB.” The supreme guide of the MB, Mohammed Badie, described everyone standing against Morsi's declaration as Mubarak's supporters, which has become the most used excuse for the MB to take whatever decisions they see necessary in the name of “protecting the revolution" forgetting about the day when they were sitting at the table with Mubarak's Vice-President Omar Soliman negotiating deals while we were chanting against Mubarak all over Egypt. ElBaradie perfectly described Morsi's actions, comparing it to Israeli politics when they impose something and then call for negotiations afterwards. Mohammed al-Beltagy, who is a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, asserted that the opposition should accept a dialogue without any predetermined conditions, which was enough for the National Salvation Front to refuse any dialogue without withdrawing Morsi's declaration and cancelling the call for the referendum on the worst ever written constitution in the history of Egypt regarding freedoms and human rights. According to the lawyer Marwa Farouk, who went to help the 154 protester who were arrested at the sit-in during the clashes, the prosecution is under pressure from “unknown higher authorities" to keep them detained despite the absence of any evidence against them as well as their testimonies that the Muslim Brotherhood supporters tortured 49 of them. Morsi's speech yesterday described the clashes as the “minority trying to take over the majority" and the speech was described by Harvard associate professor Tarek Masoud as “schizophrenic." The situation now can be simply described as thus: Morsi didn't apologize for causing the turmoil that has seen Egyptians losing their lives; he kept on talking about some alleged conspiracies in the same way Mubarak used to do in an effort to plant fear within the society; he never gave a clear reason for his declaration that sets him as a dictator and he never condemned the Muslim Brotherhood supporters for going to the Presidential Palace intentionally to kill the peaceful protesters there during their sit-in. The president used the constitution as an excuse to force the referendum on the 15th of December as the constitution says that the referendum should be held 15 days after approving the final draft but it was fine with him to prolong the assembly's allowed time for two additional months, which violates article 189 of the constitution that the people voted on 9 of its articles on the 19th of March 2011. The president never learned that Egyptians will never accept another dictator and that Egyptians were testing him, hoping to be responded to with respect and dignity, but Morsi apparently chose to try becoming another Mubarak with his declaration by trying to convince the people that this is “democracy." The people are smarter than that, the power of the people will prevail and within a few days I will be back in Cairo to witness that myself. ** The author is a blogger and a networking engineer who studied at the GUC in Egypt. He has been an influential commentator on all things Egypt and blogs at justanegyptian.com. Follow him on Twitter.
