Thursday, April 14, 2016

Moscow finds its new Nasser

During Vladimir's Putin's wide-ranging news conference today --

As for [tourist] trips to Turkey and Egypt, it didn’t depend on us. While the reasons behind the restrictions were different in these two cases, the results were the same. Why different? In Egypt, the current authorities are fighting radicals, but it’s not always easy. We see what’s happening there. Hostilities take place on the Sinai Peninsula almost daily. The former government, which was removed from power by the current president, and its supporters are quite active in this respect.

So he's blaming the Muslim Brotherhood and the former Morsi government for Islamist terrorism when in fact the most lethal groups pre-date the Morsi overthrow, although they were certainly energized by the discrediting of the electoral path for Islamism.

As in Syria therefore, Putin's theory of Egypt, which he shares with the current government, is to brand opposition as Islamist terrorism. Which is what Nasser used to do as well, especially when he needed to scare the middle class.

No comments: