Egypt descends further into chaos (updated)

From Reuters:

An explosion hit an Egyptian pipeline on Saturday in the lawless Sinai Peninsula following a series of attacks the last several days on security checkpoints, state TV and witnesses said.

The fire caused by the explosion was under control by early Sunday morning, state media reported.

The pipeline, which supplies gas to Jordan, has been attacked more than 10 times [Reuters Arabic says 15] since former autocratic president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 during the Arab Spring uprisings.

Five security officers were killed at their checkpoints in Sinai on Friday and four other checkpoints were attacked on Saturday.

A priest was killed at one checkpoint by a group of militants, according to security sources.

This means that the pipeline to Jordan was attacked at least as much as the pipeline to Israel used to be!

More details on the murder of the priest and the Sunni desire to use violence to get back into power:

Gunmen shot dead a Coptic Christian priest in Egypt's lawless Northern Sinai on Saturday in what could be the first sectarian attack since the military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, security sources said.

The priest, Mina Aboud Sharween, was attacked in the early afternoon while walking in the Masaeed area in El Arish.

Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood has fiercely criticized Coptic Pope Tawadros, spiritual leader of Egypt's 8 million Christians, for giving his blessing to the removal of the president and attending the announcement by armed forces commander General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi suspending the constitution.

The Brotherhood has also been slammed, however, by the militant Islamist organization al-Qaeda, as the group's leader, Ayman Zawahiri, said that "many senior Islamists... forget their ideology, their way of behavior and their history. The Islamists should have revolted against them, but in the end they surrendered to the secularists and gave up their identity."

In a video posted on the website of the world's number one Sunni terrorist organization, Zawahiri insisted that the "battle in Egypt is far from over, it has only just begun. The revolution in Egypt must continue and the responsibility is on the Islamic nation to give more martyrs."

But that's only the Sinai. In Egypt itself, things aren't much better.

An investigation says that the Muslim Brotherhood recruited Syrian refugees and Palestinian Arabs to shoot at anti-Morsi protesters.

A Cairo prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Al Jazeera'S news channel director in Egypt, saying that the network was "threatening public peace and national security through broadcasting incendiary news."

In an ironic twist, the Muslim Brotherhood - which was registered as an NGO a few months ago even though it is as political as any organization can be - may become illegal under the same provision that allows the state to dissolve NGOs!

Oh, and there's also this. Islamists seem to love throwing people off of roofs.



It seems that the current military leaders in Egypt have no more idea of what democracy means than the Muslim Brotherhood before them did. Egyptians are now conditioned to the idea that if they are unhappy, they just need to protest and the government will fall. Whoever is in charge can criminalize their opponents.
No one is talking about the prerequisites for true democracy - freedom of expression, freedom of the press and other basic freedoms from which people can be exposed to all ideas.

It also seems unlikely that Egypt will recover from its economic problems that were exacerbated by the incompetent MB leadership, and without any chance for an economic recovery there will not be any stability.

The jihadists in the Sinai are already talking about establishing their own mini-state there.

Things will not get better in the foreseeable future.