The Tea Party and the Muslim Brotherhood

How can they support hundreds of people being killed by the military?

I am just wondering how come it seems the military over there has so much power.

Truth is very hard to come by

both sides are quite prepared to lie about the other.

No ****, Izzy. How come no mention of the US supporting a brutal military dictatorship for how many years?

The military is making sure there isn't a repeat of what happened in Iran.

Following the overthrow of the Shah's government on 11 February 1979 (22 Bahman 1357), members of the old regime, including senior generals, were executed by revolutionary leadership.

If it is so important that this war be ended where is the rest of the world and the U N.

Let the middle east sort itself out without us. All the middle east.

I've mentioned it loads of times, maybe not on this thread,

Everyone on this thread is fully aware of the amount of military aid given in the past.

to give the appalling loss of life in Egypt a moment's thought.

You're all dancing around the elephant; some are even pretending to care.

And nobody's pretending as much as you.

It's very easy to blame everything on America, whilst ignoring the legacy of the cold war. We're in the here and now, some of us are saying the West should just back off, stop all military aid, (humanitarian is fine,) and urge talks and an end to violence.

Former Egyptian vice president Mohamed ElBaradei will be sued for breaching "national trust" by quitting the military-led interim government after a bloody crackdown on members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The complaint against ElBaradei was filed by Sayed Ateeq, a law professor at Cairo's Helwan University who accuses the Nobel Peace Prize winner of committing "high treason" and damaging Egypt's image by quitting his job.

According to the court complaint, ElBaradei's resignation gave the wrong impression to the international community, suggesting that the Egyptian government used excessive force against protesters. "[This] contradicts reality," the complaint said.

ElBaradei faces a misdemeanor charge that could carry a $1,430 fine if he is convicted, according to a report from the state-run news agency Al-Ahram.

who accuses the Nobel Peace Prize winner of committing "high treason"

And the maximum penalty is a 1400 dollar fine? Smile

Khaled Dawoud, a former spokesman for the National Salvation Front, which ElBaradei co-founded, told Al Jazeera that the prosecutor general's decision to refer the case to court was probably a consequence of the atmosphere of polarization in the country.

"This is a reflection of the atmosphere in Egypt right now. You cannot take your independent stand, or otherwise you will be considered breaching national trust" Dawoud said. "The complaint against ElBaradei is ridiculous. I just could not believe this kind of case will be filed."

CAIRO — Two of Egypt's former militant groups are offering an initiative to halt the country's political violence, in which supporters of the ousted Islamist president will stop street protests if the military-backed government stops its crackdown on them, the groups' leaders said Monday.

The initiative led by Egypt's Gamaa Islamiya and Islamic Jihad movements, which waged an insurgency in the 1990s, aims to bring dialogue between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, from which toppled President Mohammed Morsi hails. Morsi was overthrown by the military on July 3 after millions took to the street demanding that he step down.

Morsi's allies had previously insisted that he be restored to power as starting point for any talks, but Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed Abu Samra told The Associated Press that negotiations had no "red lines."

The groups do not speak for the Brotherhood, but the initiative is a new sign of flexibility from the pro-Morsi alliance of mostly Islamist groups. It comes as the Islamists' protest campaign wanes and numbers at their formerly massive rallies dwindle. Hundreds of Brotherhood leaders and organizers have been arrested in the crackdown.

Egypt's worst bout of violence in its 2 1/2 years of turmoil was set off when security forces backed by snipers and armored vehicles moved in to break up two sprawling pro-Morsi protest camps on Aug. 14. More than 1,000 people were killed in the raids and other violence over the next several days, mostly Morsi supporters.

"We are paving the way for talks," Abu Samra said over the phone. "We can't hold talks while we are at the points of swords in the midst of killings and crackdowns." He said the groups were "extending their hands" to avoid a bloodier confrontation with the military.

He said that the Islamists will stop demonstrations so long as the military halts its crackdown and stops defaming the Brotherhood in mosques and in the media. Asked if Islamist groups would accept talks without demanding Morsi's reinstatement, he said, "Blood is more valuable than the seat of power."

But what makes such large swaths of Egypt seemingly cheer the army to this state? It doesn't work to suggest, as some have done, that the majority was always awaiting an opportunity to let the old regime back in. If that was the case, why didn't they vote in ex-regime man Ahmed Shafiq as president in 2012? Voters beyond the Brotherhood's support base told us at the time they backed Morsi as the better option. Certainly there were concerns, but Egyptians gave the Brotherhood a chance and the benefit of the doubt.

The organisation blew both. It failed to govern by consensus or work towards unifying the country. Its power-grabbing and the unrepresentative constitution it imposed (approved by a revealingly low-turnout referendum) sparked protests, which the Brotherhood sent the security services to crush – measures that, post-revolution, were seen as a terrible betrayal. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented that police use of torture and violence continued under Morsi as it had under the loathed Mubarak regime.

Meanwhile, strikes doubled under Morsi, as factory and public workers alike concluded that the Brotherhood was no better than Mubarak when it came to labour rights: the protests, aggressively dispersed, were over the targeting of trade unionists, mismanagement and corruption, as well as the lack of a minimum wage amid spiralling energy and food prices.

The sum of all these component parts was that the Brotherhood was tearing at the threads that bound Egyptian society – and at every turn, analysts warned about the potential consequences of being so recklessly divisive.

CAIRO -- A week and a half before they put her under investigation for espionage, Egypt's military-backed government couldn't have asked for a better advocate than Esraa Abdel Fattah.

Since the revolution that swept the dictator Hosni Mubarak from power, Abdel Fattah distinguished herself as one of the most articulate and outspoken proponents of the democratic uprising. But after a year of rule by the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi and the military coup that brought him down, Abdel Fattah put her abundant energies to a different use: endorsing the military's actions, and especially its handling of the Brotherhood.

"I don't agree that there is a risk of being too close to military," she told The Huffington Post the night before the government ordered the police to storm a pair of Brotherhood sit-ins, resulting in hundreds of deaths.

The impending decision to storm the camps, she added at the time -- rather than to take a more staggered approach to shutting them down, as some had suggested -- was both wise and essential. "I hope they can do it gradually, but what's happened there makes it hard to imagine it can be possible anymore."

"We first need to make transitional justice, we need to make the rule of law first," she went on. "And then after that we can talk about a role for the Brotherhood in the future government."

On Saturday, the new regime's notion of transitional justice came for her. Together with a fellow activist, Asmaa Mahfouz, Abdel Fattah found herself being referred by the prosecutor's office for a state security investigation. The charge is that they had "received funds from abroad" -- evidence, supposedly, of spying, but a common and specious charge in the Mubarak era. On Sunday, Abdel Fattah could not be reached by phone or email.

Whatever the fate of Abdel Fattah and her colleague, it's a sign of the convoluted times in Egypt, where a spate of arrests and prosecutions by the newly empowered military-backed government has swept up a wide array of supposed threats, allies and antagonists alike.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been caught in the crackdown, the vast majority of them leaders or affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamists.

But as The New York Times noted on Sunday, lately the net has been cast even more widely. A pair of Canadian journalists, in Cairo on their way to report on Gaza, were arrested and accused of being members of the Brotherhood involved in a terrorist plot. An attorney for the pair has characterized the case as simply a matter of being "in the wrong place at very much the wrong time."

And after a journalist for a state-run newspaper was killed while driving through a military checkpoint after curfew last week, a colleague of his who was with him in the car at the time was later arrested when he publicly contradicted the military's version of events.

Meanwhile, the Abdel Fattah case may demonstrate the furthest extent of the state's fear of former revolutionaries, regardless of their more recent viewpoints.

When Ahmed Maher, who co-founded with Abdel Fattah the revolutionary youth movement known as April 6, expressed early misgivings about the military's plan following the coup, Abdel Fattah was one of his most vicious and public critics.

"When terrorism is trying to take hold of Egypt and foreign interference is trying to dig into our domestic affairs, then it’s inevitable for the great Egyptian people to support its armed forces against the foreign danger," she wrote in a newspaper column at the time, according to the Times.

In her exchange with HuffPost, Abdel Fattah said she was no longer a member of April 6, and that she saw little downside in her newfound alignment with the military.

"The only risk we face is how we can stop the actions of the Muslim Brotherhood, who have weapons inside their protests and use them to torture people," she said. "That is the only danger."