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ISIS Whacks Egypt’s Chief Prosecutor
Assassins killed Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s Prosecutor General, with a massive explosion that targeted his convoy in Cairo.
ISIS’ Egyptian branch, the so-called State of Sinai, is taking credit for the hit.
Barakat is part of a gangster regime that sentences people to death for their political affiliation, so one might say that what comes around goes around, but if the alternative to Egypt’s military dictatorship is a “state” that beheads journalists and aid workers and crucifies children as ISIS does in Syria, the government is spectacularly unlikely to fall.
Egypt is an emergency room case, but it doesn’t have the kind of sectarian tensions that ISIS can exploit in Syria and Iraq or the geographic divisions and post-totalitarian meltdown it can exploit in Libya.
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made few friends when he toppled an elected government, but an ISIS insurgency only heightens the contradictions, as Marx put it. Who would you rather be ruled by? Soldiers or theocratic psychopaths?
If you worry that Egyptians might go with the theocratic psychopaths—they elected the Muslim Brotherhood, after all, before suffering spasms of buyer’s remorse—you might be surprised. According to a poll conducted last year, only three percent of Egyptians support them.
ISIS will continue whacking people, but that’s no way to win friends and influence people who aren’t already on side.
Assassins killed Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s Prosecutor General, with a massive explosion that targeted his convoy in Cairo.
ISIS’ Egyptian branch, the so-called State of Sinai, is taking credit for the hit.
Barakat is part of a gangster regime that sentences people to death for their political affiliation, so one might say that what comes around goes around, but if the alternative to Egypt’s military dictatorship is a “state” that beheads journalists and aid workers and crucifies children as ISIS does in Syria, the government is spectacularly unlikely to fall.
Egypt is an emergency room case, but it doesn’t have the kind of sectarian tensions that ISIS can exploit in Syria and Iraq or the geographic divisions and post-totalitarian meltdown it can exploit in Libya.
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made few friends when he toppled an elected government, but an ISIS insurgency only heightens the contradictions, as Marx put it. Who would you rather be ruled by? Soldiers or theocratic psychopaths?
If you worry that Egyptians might go with the theocratic psychopaths—they elected the Muslim Brotherhood, after all, before suffering spasms of buyer’s remorse—you might be surprised. According to a poll conducted last year, only three percent of Egyptians support them.
ISIS will continue whacking people, but that’s no way to win friends and influence people who aren’t already on side.
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