After the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak' regime, Egypt couldn’t confront the fundamentalist terrorist attacks. Countries in the Middle East have been suffering from real setback since the beginning of the Arab spring, simply because they need a real change, and not just a fake one.
The problem is that peoples in the Muslim countries such as Iraq and Tunisia don’t have an idea or a complete theory about modern and democratic regime that enforce the law and protect the freedoms. They simply live in a state of religiosity that considers such regime kind of blasphemy. Therefore, ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood found a fertile ground in the region and spread their destruction.
After Morsi's regime was overthrown, Egypt has been witnessing several terrorist attacks against the army and police. 31 soldiers were killed in a terrorist attack on October 24, 2014. 32 soldiers were killed in January 29, 2015. Recently, 70 soldiers were killed in Sinai one day after the assassination of the Egyptian prosecutor's murder.
The US Congress submitted a report on July 7 criticizing the deteriorating democracy and individual freedoms in Egypt. I believe that Egypt will not be able to confront the rising Islamic violence as long as the Egyptian government is still using the old repressive methods of Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi.
The real reason for the existing violence in Egypt is that the government is dealing with security issues considering them the key for solving all problems in Egypt. Several court rulings came against terrorists, journalists, thinkers and even artists assure that the government is still thinking the old way.
The Egyptian state is still pursuing the same old policy of successive regimes that were used since Abdel Nasser, Sadat, Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi. All of them decided to hit the Islamists, liberals and secularists against one another. Moreover, all of these regimes decided to limit freedoms of politics, religion and sex.
In order to fight terrorism, a country has to grant even more freedoms, but Egypt is doing exactly the opposite. The Egyptian Minister of Awqaf, Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa, said that atheism is a serious threat on our society, ignoring that all terrorists’ attacks were carried out by religious people like him and not by atheists.
Using the same policy should bring the same results. Fighting ideas with terrorism will never bring good results. Al-Azhar terrorizes many thinkers at the time it refuses to call terrorists of ISIS blasphemers. Finally, Will al-Sisi face same fate as Sadat?
