The Muslim Brotherhood’s Samson Option

In their feverish attempt to grab Egypt now, the Muslim Brotherhood are pushing the millennia old nation to the brink

ANOTHER GREAT PIECE

By Hani Shukrallah , Tuesday 19 Mar 2013

Ahramonline

"......Lacking in vision, remarkably incompetent and afflicted by a severe dearth of intelligent cadre (they managed to drive out their best and most politically sophisticated members), the Muslim Brotherhood leadership is driven, frenziedly and feverishly, to “seize the moment”, to capture Egypt’s state and society now, in the full knowledge that by tomorrow it will be never – their decades-old yearning lost forever, their future “bound in shallows and in miseries”.

More than anything else, it is this feverish zeal that best explains the attacks and the bungled retreats, the innumerable barefaced lies, the killings, the torture, the ravenous power grabbing, the always failed attempts at intimidation and terror and the almost indifferent squandering in mere months of a popular goodwill the group had built over a great many decades.

Nothing else, not incompetence, nor lack of vision, nor yet dearth of cadre, but a frenzied, irrational compulsion, bordering on psychosis, can explain political behaviour that – Samson like – is driving both the 84-year old group and the nation to ruin......


Like that compulsive gambler, the Brotherhood – fervently bent on capturing Egypt’s state and society in one fell blow – are inherently unable to cut their losses, but rather are constantly and with growing desperation betting on the next hand, the next throw of the dice, the one that will compensate them for all their losses, and ‘lead [them] to fortune”.

Meanwhile, their chips are dwindling fast, their debt to the House piling up, and the pit-bosses are hovering in the background.

The pit-bosses in that little metaphor are of course the military."