Egyptian courts already use Shariah law as do a number of courts in a number of Middle Eastern countries, including Valteron’s beloved Israel.
What specifically do you think that Shariah law means and what are you afraid will happen?
No there isn’t and saying so shows massive ignorance of Israel. For starters, the generals wouldn’t allow this too happen and secondly even if the MB was massively, massively more successful than even it’s most terrified critics fear the MB isn’t led by “Imams”. For that matter, Hamas has never been led by clerics either.
The Muslim Brotherhood is made up of Sunnis not Shia.
If they were Shia, you might have a point, but they’re not, so you don’t.
That’s a fair point. However, I’m not sure I have ever judged a country by who was standing on stage with whom and what type of facial expression someone had while another was speaking.
If you’ll look at my earlier comment, the proof of how Egypt will do under its new government should be judged by what the new government does, not the rantings of a cleric at a campaign rally. The comments in this thread that Egypt has basically already fallen to a Taliban-like government are at odds with what many expert observers are predicting of the new government: that it does not appear to be on the brink of cutting ties with the United States, abrogating the treaty with Israel, sponsoring terrorism against the West, or start stoning women.
So, it’s better to declare democracy over in Egypt before democracy is over in Egypt. You know, just to stay a step or two ahead of the game. Is that what you are proposing?
Just to get the rules of debate down: tu quoque arguments are unfair and invalid, but namecalling is fair game. Is that what you are saying?
That is indeed a real chance, and a real potential danger. Do you think that the fact that such a chance exists is enough to justify the assertion that the situation in Egypt “has turned into an Islamist nightmare”?
Not “might turn into an Islamist nightmare” or “opens the door to the possibility of some very bad consequences”, or something like that, mind you.
Do you think that Islamophobes such as the OP are now justified in writing off Egypt as having already become a catastrophically undemocratic Islamist theocratic state, as the OP is trying to claim?
Though since you mention Iran, one of the key differences between Iran and the Sunni countries is that in most of the Sunni countries, I.E. Egypt, the religious establishment, clerics, or if one prefers “Imams” supported the dictators and as a result most the leaders of the the various radical Islamic groups weren’t clerics, while in Iran, the Shia religious establishment was never tainted as “collaborators” which is why the Islamic radicals were led by Ayatollahs(which are somewhat analogous to Cardinals) while the various Sunni radical groups tend to be led by engineers, pediatricians, or university professors specializing in French philosophy.
In short, even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to somehow get rid of the generals, Egypt is not going to be led by Clerics or “Imams”.
Whew! For a second there I thought that a candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood:
– whose stated credo is “God is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”;
– whose stated goal is to " instill the Qur’an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for …ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community … and state”;
– who seems to have no idea what is meant by separation of Church and State;
–and whose Presidential candidate had his campaign kicked off by an agressive nutjob cleric calling for “millions of martyrs”;
– and whose presidential candidate wants to install Sharia (with its inherent sexism and discrimination against non-Muslims, with its killing of apostates and laws against “blasphemy”) as soon as possible;
. . . .might turn out to be something more of a theocracy than something we would recognize as a free, liberal democracy.
Silly me! Please consisder me chastised and my OP question answered in the negative! Welcome Egypt to the world of free and democratic nations!
The military council will take a week to [del]think about it[/del] get the opinion of the Egyptian people and then let you know if your welcome is accepted.
Canada doesn’t have strict separation of Church and State.
Nor for that matter does the UK, Ireland, any of the Scandinavian countries, and Israel most especially doesn’t.
I wish everyone believe in separation of Church and State the way the US practices it, but I’m not going to blame the Egyptians for disagreeing with it just as the Brits, the Irish, and the Israelis do.
I’m sorry, do you have a time machine in which all of us are posting in the present, but you’re posting from some time in the future, and you’re telling us what is to come? Because you’re speaking in the present tense, and I just simply wasn’t aware that the “imams” have taken over before Morsi has even been sworn in.
If you are posting from the future, please tell me (and only me!) who is going to win the World Series. kthxbye
I am not even going to ask you to explain that because I have had this argument before and it is the same irrelevant bullshit listing one or two arcane details (e.g., the Queen is still officially the head of the Anglican Church or Bishops sit in the House of Lords, or Lutheranism is still the state church of Norway, or whatever, and then you are going to list all of these minor details as if they were the equivalent of the sort of theocratic state that Islamists want to impose with their world caliphate. Let’s not waste each others’ time.
Trading the Canadian formula for the American one would be disastrous for us. What we have now is an atheist utopia compared to the pervasive fundamentalist menace that corrupts the American system, and has since 1980 or so.
One example will suffice to show what a ridiculous “tu quoque” argument this is, obviously born out of the despair of wanting to defend the indefensible..
The Lutheran Chruch is the “official” state Church in most Scandinavian countries. A majority of people in Norway and most other Sandinavian Countries are atheists.
What do you suppose would happen if I did cartoons mocking Luther in Norway? What do you think would happen if I did cartoons mocking Mohammed in Egypt?
Stop comparing apples and oranges, man. Your constant comparisons of rights in Islamic countries and in the west are completely ridiculous and you know it.
Well, not exactly. Like Iraq, and unlike China and India, their ancient culture is long extinct and their modern culture is only tenuously connected to it.
Once again, you’re attempting to shift the goal posts. You began this by whining about about the fact that the MB and Egyptians in general don’t believe in the separation of Church and State. After I pointed out how ridiculous this was because lots of countries don’t have the Separation of Church and State you pretend that you said something different and that I was comparing “rights in Islamic countries” and “in the west”.
Anyway I wish that most countries did have separation of Church and State, like the US, but that’s not the case.
Similarly, I wish that most countries didn’t have anti-Blasphemy laws, like Norway(since you bring it up) does, but they do.
I know people like to think that it’s only barbaric Muslims that believe blasphemy should be illegal, but that’s not the case.
Your analogy to Iraq isn’t completely wrong, but I think a vastly better comparison would be Greece, home to a long-dead ancient culture with a modern culture with somewhat tenuous connections to the ancient culture since Egypt and Greece have somewhat stronger connections to Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt than Iraq does to Babylon.
Far more than one or two. And they abide by the Constitution because the government forces them to do so. On a regular basis the religious fanatics try to ignore or evade the Constitution and impose their religion on everyone else. The main difference isn’t in the nature of the fundamentalists or their numbers, it’s that the government here and in most other “Western” nations restrains them more. Give the Christian fundies the opportunity and many would cheerfully turn America into something that looks like Afghanistan under the Taliban, or worse.
That’s American exceptionalism; “it can’t happen here”. It can happen here, just as it can happen anywhere; America isn’t magically immune to tyranny.
“Have the Egyptians already begun cannibalizing Christians, or will they wait until next year to begin the feast?”
If you can spare a moment from your crusade, feel free to explain why I, an American atheist who strongly advocates strict separation of church and state and believes all religions are a basically a crock, would feel any particular need to apologize for Islam.