ANALYSIS  – Anyone in doubt that Egypt’s military conducted a coup to overthrow that country’s first ever democratically elected Prime Minister only needs to look at today’s farce of a court judgement to realise they are either deluded or have spent too much time on the PlayStation. Hosni Mubarak the brutal dictator of decades standing who made Saddam Hussein and Assad’s father look like prep school principals has been cleared of all charges relating to the murder of demonstrators in Tahrir Square in 2011, protesters who were only asking for the kind of rights citizens in America and Europe enjoy.
But that was too much for the military and the people who have flourished under their inept and corrupt regime – it was also sadly too much for the US who preaches the need for democracy in the world as long as its the type enjoyed in Turkey, Colombia, South Korea and Japan. Under the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt was taking its first steps towards the modern world, the Islamist party understood that theirs was a transitory time for other political parties would emerge to take their place for that is the nature of democracies. All they wanted to ensure, like they have always wanted to ensure, was that change occurred within the framework of its Islamic heritage – that the eventual secular future would be the outcome of Egypt’s Muslim identity.
But the military perhaps at the behest of the US launched its crackdown that killed thousands and imprisoned thousands more. Egypt was seen by many as the birthplace of the Arab Spring, despite it starting in Tunisia, and so it is symbolically from here that the West has launched its crackdown on political Islam in the Middle East and North Africa.

Nothing to answer for? This was Mubarak’s response to protests in 2011Israel’s assaults in Gaza to break Hamas are part of a process that John Prescott described as an attempt to de-islamify the Middle East and North Africa. Within this context the so called Islamic state can be seen for what they are – Islamists created by the West as useful tools in their ‘crusade’ to relegate Islam to the private sphere in the way its practised in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. In every way Islamic state represent everything that the West believes Islam to be, they follow the teachings of Mahound, not the noble Prophet. But they are useful because they will get in the way of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And their gruesome actions also justify Western military intervention in the Middle East.
Of course, there are still many who fight for a democratic future in the Middle East, but until the West led by the US understands that those people have rights too, and that it may even be in their interest to allow a free and independent Middle East and North Africa to flourish  the current state of affairs will remain – a downward spiral where questions are raised about the Arab mind and why it resorts to violence at home and to terrorism abroad.