The saving grace in Egypt, King Abdulla of Jordan said, was that Mursi seemed too unsophisticated to successfully pull off his vision. “There’s no depth to the guy,” he said of Mursi. The king compared him unfavorably to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist prime minister of Turkey. Like Mursi, the king asserted, Erdogan was also a false democrat, but one with patience. “Erdogan once said that democracy for him is a bus ride,” Abdullah said. “Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off.”
Unlike Mursi, however, Erdogan was masterful at manipulating a system that didn’t trust him, the king said. “Instead of the Turkish model, taking six or seven years — being an Erdogan — Mursi wanted to do it overnight.” Recent events in Turkey, including the government’s miscalculated response to mass protests, have shown that perhaps even Erdogan isn’t an Erdogan anymore.
Had the military not intervened, though, the Muslim Brotherhood may have tried, over time, to make sure that Egypt’s first free and fair election was also its last. A number of Egyptian friends have written me in the past day, arguing that what the Egyptian people did — or, more to the point, what the Egyptian army, responding to the will of the people, did — was to forestall the rise of a new Hitler. If the Germans, who chose Adolf Hitler in a democratic election, had turned on him a year later, well, you know the rest. The analogy is overdone for so many reasons, but it is absolutely true that the Muslim Brotherhood is a totalitarian cult, not a democratic party.
via Good Riddance to Brotherhood’s Fake Democrats – Bloomberg.
The King of Jordan rules over a system that is undemocratic, and has reason to dislike any emerging democracy near him as it weakens his position as an effective dictator.
The Moslem Brotherhood whatever you dislike about them were elected democratically in fair elections, they were then removed by the army which has in effect restored dictatorship, arresting people, shooting people and closing down many of the media.
If it is the desire of people in the West and their rulers to support the removal of democratically elected governments by soldiers all because they dislike their policies then you may as well throw democracy down the toilet and have dictatorship.
I agree with you, but the Political Islam conundrum is how do you respond to a democratically-elected government that only wants “one vote, one time”?
The issue is that the moment of “one vote, one time” had yet to manifest, it was only a possibility. There would be legitimate reasons for removing rulers if they had become a dictatorship, but doing it whilst it was still democratic obliterated the basic foundations for democracy, and set an example for every other nation to follow, especially those in Africa.