Egypt runoff exposes tensions between Islamists

An Egyptian army soldier guards at the roof of a polling center next to an electoral poster that reads, in Arabic, "Al-Nour Party, candidate Mohammed Ahmed Jaber," during the first day of runoffs in Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Dec. 5, 2011. / AP Photo/Nasser Nasser

CAIRO - A runoff Monday for Egypt's first-round parliamentary elections exposed tensions between competing Islamist parties that have so far dominated the vote.

In the southern province of Assiut, supporters of hardline Islamist party Gamaa Islamiya attacked and chased away campaign workers from the Muslim Brotherhood outside a polling station where the two groups were facing off in a vote. Supporters of one Brotherhood candidate said they received death threats and one of their clerics was beaten up by campaign workers of Gamaa Islamiya — an ex-militant group-turned-political party.

Ultraconservative Islamists make gains in Egypt

The Brotherhood, the most established and organized party running, is in the lead so far, according to official results released on Sunday. Gamaa Islamiya is part of the second-place Al-Nour alliance with the ultraconservative Salafists, hard-liners who seek to impose strict Islamic law on Egypt.

The elections are the first since Hosni Mubarak's ouster in an uprising in February and are the freest and fairest in living memory. Voters are choosing both individual candidates and parties and runoffs on Monday and Tuesday will determine almost all the seats allocated for individuals in the first round, about a third of parliament's 498 seats.

The two leading Islamist blocs of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists took an overwhelming majority of the first-round vote for parties with 60 percent, a huge blow to the liberal and youthful activists who drove the uprising. But the tallies offer only a partial indication of how the new parliament will look. There are still two more rounds of voting in 18 of the country's 27 provinces over the coming month.

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But the grip of the Islamists over the next parliament appears set, particularly considering their popularity in provinces voting in the next rounds. The runoffs are unlikely to alter the Islamists' dominance.

The first round of voting includes the capital Cairo and the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria in Egypt's north. Turnout in Cairo Monday was very weak, with little drama.

But in Assiut, tensions between Islamists were simmering. The province is a stronghold of Gamaa Islamiya, a former militant group that fought the Mubarak regime in a bloody insurgency in 1990s.

Since Mubarak's ouster, hardline Islamists, many of whom were released from prisons, exploited a growing security vacuum in the country and grew increasingly assertive in a push for power. In Assiut, they wrested control of mosques from government-appointed preachers and installed their own prayer leaders. The city is filled with signs exhorting residents to follow Islamic teachings and women to wear the hijab, or Muslim headscarf.

"The hijab is obligatory," one sign says. "Take your eyes off women," another tells men.

In the city of Dayrout in Assiut province, the Brotherhood accused Gamaa Islamiya campaign workers of attacking their supporters and ordered all Brotherhood campaign workers to remove their computers and stay away from polling centers around the city. The Brotherhood has been accused of violating election rules barring campaigning near polling sites on election day.

"A cleric was beat up, insulted and ordered to stay away," a Muslim Brotherhood campaign worker there told The Associated Press. "Our people were told not to get close to the polling centers," the worker said, asking not to be identified for security concerns. He said Gamaa Islamiya was using loudspeakers mounted on pickup trucks cruising the streets to urge people to vote for their candidate, but threatening others if they did not keep quiet.

"Our people were threatened that if they entered villages around this city, they will be shot dead," he said.

The Brotherhood told its campaign workers to avoid confrontations, according to one of the workers in Assiut.

The tensions were also evident in Alexandria.

A video clip for Muslim Brotherhood candidate Hosni Dweidar, who is contesting hardline Salafist sheik Abdel Moneim el-Shahat, shows Dweidar in anti-Mubarak protests during the uprising. Next it shows El-Shahat, with the long beard typically worn by Salafists, slamming the youth behind the uprising as "barbaric." The Brotherhood, which was banned and persecuted under Mubarak, threw its support behind the uprising shortly after it began while Salafist leaders came out against the protests in the beginning.

El-Shahat raised concerns with both secular liberals and moderate Islamists last week when he branded the novels of Egypt's Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, as "prostitution."

Some of the runoffs pit Islamist candidates from the Brotherhood and the Salafis against each other while others are between Islamists and secular candidates. The runoffs will decide 52 of the 56 seats for individuals that were up for grabs in the first round. Only four were decided in the first round.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party garnered 36.6 percent of the 9.7 million valid ballots cast for party lists, according to results released on Sunday. The Salafists' Al-Nour Party captured 24.4 percent, while the secular Egyptian Bloc won 13.4 percent of the votes.

The Salafis want to impose strict Islamic law on Egypt and the strong Islamist showing worries liberal parties, and even some religious parties, who fear the two groups will work to push a religious agenda. It has also left many of the youthful activists behind the uprising feeling that their revolution has been hijacked.

Tensions aside, the runoffs drew a much weaker turnout compared to last week's vote which drew massive lines. The electoral commission initially said turnout last week was around 60 percent but it revised the number down to 52 percent on Monday — still the highest in Egypt's modern history.

In Cairo, Sohair Kansouh, waiting with hundreds of other women to cast her ballot in an upper-class Cairo neighborhood, said she is worried about the Islamists' win because she doesn't want Egypt to "go back 1,000 years."

"I'm Muslim and we want freedom and tolerance for all. But if they (Islamists) come to power, there will be less freedom for all, especially women," said Kansouh, 72, adding that a parliament dominated by Islamists will "mean that all the objectives of the revolution have failed."

Others came out to bolster the Islamists' already strong showing.

"We want Muslims who fear God to rule because they are cleaner than those who came before," said Karim Nabil, a 24-year-voter who cast his ballot while holding a Brotherhood leaflet in the other hand.

The new parliament will be tasked, in theory, with selecting a 100-member panel to draft the new constitution. Liberals are now worried that the Islamists will gain too much sway over the process and will impose a religious agenda on it.

[FP1970]

It won't be long before Islamist political parties are seizing power in N. America and Western Europe thanks to mass immigration which strengthens their numbers every year. They are being aided and abetted by:
a) Politicians, activists and journalists who breathlessly sing the praises of mass immigration and multiculturalism.
b) radical secularists who are always desperate to change the subject to religion in general—as is there is even one majority-Christian country that has even one tenth as many problems as the best majority-Muslim country. As for the atheistic paradises, no one seems to know where they actually are. North Korea? China?
It has to be understood that Saudi Arabia (and Saudi front organizations) are behind a lot of this. As backwards as Saudi Arabia is, it has plenty of money to set up front organizations that lobby relentlessly for open immigration---to the West from 3rd world, mainly Islamic nations. Just like China and India want to have a support base in the West and are keen to get their people in, so does Saudi Arabia want a following of Radical Islamists in Western nations who will do its bidding. Why do you think we even have open immigration at a time when it's completely unnecessary? All the supposed economic and social arguments have been debunked for years and there's always someone anxious to stifle the debate anyway.
The politicians, activists and journalists who breathlessly sing the praises of mass immigration are not all stupid and naive. A lot of them just pretend to be stupid and naive while cynically promoting the wishes of the Saudi (and other) gov'ts for more and more immigration.

[FP1970]

It won't be long before Islamist political parties are seizing power in N. America and Western Europe thanks to mass immigration which strengthens their numbers every year. They are being aided and abetted by:
a) Politicians, activists and journalists who breathlessly sing the praises of mass immigration and multiculturalism.
b) radical secularists who are always desperate to change the subject to religion in general—as is there is even one majority-Christian country that has even one tenth as many problems as the best majority-Muslim country. As for the atheistic paradises, no one seems to know where they actually are. North Korea? China?
It has to be understood that Saudi Arabia (and Saudi front organizations) are behind a lot of this. As backwards as Saudi Arabia is, it has plenty of money to set up front organizations that lobby relentlessly for open immigration---to the West from 3rd world, mainly Islamic nations. Just like China and India want to have a support base in the West and are keen to get their people in, so does Saudi Arabia want a following of Radical Islamists in Western nations who will do its bidding. Why do you think we even have open immigration at a time when it's completely unnecessary? All the supposed economic and social arguments have been debunked for years and there's always someone anxious to stifle the debate anyway.
The politicians, activists and journalists who breathlessly sing the praises of mass immigration are not all stupid and naive. A lot of them just pretend to be stupid and naive while cynically promoting the wishes of the Saudi (and other) gov'ts for more and more immigration.

[wagner7]

Islam teaches that to disagree with or even reinterpret the Koran's 6000 odd verses, organized into 114 chapters or Suras and dealing as fully with law and politics as with matters of faith, is punishable by death.

Islamic authorities of all the major branches of Islam hold that the Koran must be read so that the parts written last override the others. This so-called theory of abrogation means that the ruling parts of the Koran are those written after Muhammad went to Medina in 622 A.D. Specifically, they are Suras 9 and 5, which are not the Suras containing the verses often cited as proof of Islam's peacefulness.

Sura: 8:12
"I will strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers so cut off their heads, cut off every fingertip of them"
8:39 "Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme"
8:67 " It is not for any prophet to to have captives until he has made slaughter in the land"
9:2:3 Allah will humble the unbelievers, Allah and his apostle are free from obligations to idol-worshippers. Proclaim a woeful punishment to the unbelievers"
9:5 "When the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them and lie in ambush everywhere for them"
9:28 " Believers know that idolaters are unclean"

Al-Bukhari Vol 8, Book 82, Hadith 795 "The prophet cut off the hands and feet of the men belonging to the tribe of Uraina."
Sahih Al-Bukhari Vol 4, Book 53, Hadith 392 "You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and his apostle, and I want to expel you from this land."
Sahih Al-Bukhari Vol 4, Book 53, Hadith 386 "Our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, has ordered us to fight you until you worship Allah alone..."
Sura 5:51 "Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends."
Sura 9:12 "...make war on the leaders of unbelief...Make war on them: God will chastise them at your hands and humble them. He will grant you victory over them..."
Sura 9:27 "Fight against such as those to whom the Scriptures were given [Jews and Christians]...until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued."
Sura 9:121 "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them

These are but a very, very tiny fraction of the numerous injunctions that Islam's followers are obliged to conform to regarding the level of "tolerance" they are permitted to extended to people who do not accept Islam.

However, Islam is the most dangerous of the three Abrahamic religions and for the sake of the preservation of the remnants of occidental civilization Islam should be proscribed on the grounds of its intolerance of other faiths. If Islam is not contained we will eventually see ladies stoned in western nations if accused of adultery or being lashed to the point of death for having been the victims of rape! Other uncivilized Islamic practises such as the cutting off of hands and feet will also come with Sharia.

Please do not construe this as an attack but rather see it as a dire warning to any who might be deceived into thinking Islam equals peace and tolerance in a universal fraternal brotherhood that has affords any remote semblance of respect for those who do not accept the teachings of Islam.