Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Israel was behind last month’s military coup in Egypt.Who is this "French Jewish intellectual"?
Erdogan told a meeting of the provincial chairs of his ruling Justice and Development, or AKP, party that he has evidence that Israel was involved in the July 3 overthrow of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the Turkish Hurriyet news service reported.
“Who is behind this? Israel. We have evidence,” the prime minister said, according to Hurriyet.
He cited as proof a statement by a French intellectual he identified as Jewish, who told the Israeli justice minister during a visit to France before Egypt’s 2011 elections, “The Muslim Brotherhood will not be in power even if they win the elections. Because democracy is not the ballot box,” Hurriyet reported.
Almost certainly it is Bernard-Henri Lévy, the rock-star philosopher of France.
Here is what he wrote in the Huffington Post after the Egyptian elections:
Let's not tell ourselves any stories.Levy's antipathy towards the Islamists is obvious, and almost certainly Erdogan is twisting his words (not to mention that the idea that a conversation between Levy and an Israeli official is an absurd proof of Israeli actions) but Levy believes that revolutions are not one-time moments but a continuous, time-consuming process, and that the process includes elections but is not exclusive to them.
The Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidate just won the presidential election in Egypt, is not a democratic organization.
They were not at Tahrir Square, in Cairo, at the beginning of the revolution.
Engaged in a curious game where, as long as they were left free to do their (economic, financial and other) trafficking, the army had already handed over an entire part of the prerogatives (concerning health and education, for example) that are normally those of a State, they began by doing everything they could to curb the movement.
I remember, on February 20th, at their headquarters in El-Malek El-Saleh street, an edifying encounter with Saad Al-Hoseiny, a member of the strategic leadership of the Brotherhood, whose attitude towards the insurgent peoples' demands for rights and liberty was, to say the least, one of prudence, if not ambivalence or even hostility.
Worse, we can never be reminded enough that the organization whose pale apparatchik is in the process of acceding to the leadership of the largest Arab nation was born in the late '20s as a totalitarian sect, inspired by Naziism, one whose founder, Hassan Al-Banna, never neglected an occasion to inscribe Adolf Hitler after Saladin, Abu Bakr or Abdelaziz al-Saoud in the lineage of "reformers" whose "patience, firmness, wisdom and obstination" had guided humanity.
...Scarcely more than a quarter of registered voters adhere to the president-elect's supposedly "moderate" Islamism.
Better still, there exists today in Egypt a huge "modern party" that, though certainly divided and rife with contradictions, consists of half of the electorate.
Or, even better put, it means that a battle is engaged where there will be, on one side, as usual, the military-Islamist bloc, and on the other, this formerly unheard of bloc that, though disorganized, has not renounced the spirit and the hope of the Tahrir Commune, and no one knows what the outcome of this battle will be.
Revolutions are not events but processes. These processes are long, conflictual, fraught with sudden leaps forward and discouraging retreats. But nothing says that things will not happen in Egypt at this dawn of the 21st century as they have in other great countries, heirs of immense civilizations that have taken time to give birth to their respective futures -- France, for example, where we had to pass through the Terror, the counter-Terror, two Empires and a Commune crushed in blood before we saw the birth of the Republic, or these countries that have emerged from a long communist coma and are groping towards a democracy whose first stage will have been the return to power, at the voting booth, of this or that Communist Party, or, worse, the appearance of a chimera named Putin, synonym of crimes that are right in line with those of the red czars of the last century.
Will we regret the fall of the Wall because of the war in Chechnya? 1789 and the glorious Gironde because of the massacres of September? No, of course not. And that is why the sombre lesson coming, these days, from Cairo does not make me regret the breath of spring of Tahrir. The promise is still alive. The struggle continues.
Indeed, he seems to be almost prophetic about the current events in Egypt in this June 2012 article.