Shuffling Backward In Time

In this April 30, 2011 file photo, Egyptian Muslim brotherhood Shura council members gather to be photographed outside the new Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo, Egypt. An Egyptian court on Monday, Sept. 23, 2013 ordered the Muslim Brotherhood to be banned and its assets confiscated in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown by the military-backed government against supporters of the ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File) 

"The military talks of negotiations with the Muslim Brotherhood on one hand and on the other hand they kill, detain and torture thousands. (The) junta is trying to silence anyone who opposes them. (The) dissolution verdict is politically motivated, part of (a) continuous crackdown", charged the Muslim Brotherhood following the verdict of Egypt's special Court for Urgent Cases.

Correct on all counts, if in fact also rather purply-prose hysterical. The Muslim Brotherhood should resign itself. It had the opportunity to regain part of its previous position within the government when it was offered a conciliatory attempt at mending fences. And it haughtily chose to slam the offer, insisting that it must be returned to its previous position without further ado, and Mohammad Morsi restored to the presidency.

As if that was on, as though that could be remotely considered. And it chose to incite disobedience to the new order by its followers, urging them to flood the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and beyond to make it abundantly clear that they would not tolerate the fall in authority of their chosen party. Which the temporary government and the Armed Forces hierarchy accurately judged for what it promised.

If killings have taken place, and they have, it has not only been by government forces. The Muslim Brotherhood has pulled out all stops to try to distract, challenge, create unrest and critical disturbances within the country through calling out its faithful. And in the Sinai, the Brotherhood faithful include Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Salafist Bedouin, and they too have been pleased to demonstrate their unwillingness to accept the new status quo.

The storming of police stations, the killing of police and security personnel have represented a marker of the capability of the Brotherhood to wreak its own kind of revenge, along with Brotherhood types storming towns and villages, and wreaking vengeance upon Egypt's Copts, destroying churches and looting them of their sacred objects.

They should have been satisfied to observe the conditions laid upon them by former President Hosni Mubarak who extracted a pledge from them to forgo violence and refrain from seeking political power to earn partial acceptance. All of which is now moot, and effectively so. Taking the Brotherhood back 85 years to its state of illegality.

No compromise possible now on the part of the government; Brotherhood activities guarantee that.

Its assets have been seized, and it has been ordered disbanded. Its non-governmental organization illegally registered, now in the dustbin of implacable history. Illegal along with the Brotherhood, "any institution branching out of it or receiving financial support from it"; confiscation of "all the group's money, assets and buildings". Homeless and penurious.

A condition they in fact earned for themselves.

The ultra-religious, anti-West organization is now, basically, an institutional ghost of its former self. No resemblance whatever to the majority status it eked out for itself in the parliament. Its supreme leader Mohammed Badie, his deputies and Morsi's advisers along with international spokesmen, and Morsi himself, imprisoned. But then, they're accustomed to that drear condition.