KIND OF LIKE HITLER WAS A REFORMER OF LUTHERANISM...:

It's troubling that Westerners claiming to be lovers of human rights would overlook, or downplay, Al-Sisi's policy record--which features a military coup against a democratically elected president, large-scale massacres of civilian protesters, the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people (including many journalists), the shutting down of all oppositional medial outlets, and the banning and effective elimination of key political competition, among other gross human rights violations.

Many Western writers have demonstrated a near-complete lack of contextual awareness. Read through the lens of Egypt's political context, Al-Sisi's talk of a "religious revolution" is about political domination, not religious reform. The 2013 military coup was not a confrontation against extremism: it was an attempt by Egypt's "deep state" to reverse the nation's democratic gains and to once again assume complete control over its political economic system.

It's important to note that Egypt's military coup was carried out against the Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist group that had dominated Egypt's first-ever election season in 2011 and 2012. In all, the Brotherhood won five consecutive elections, and only one of the five votes was closely contested. With no indication that the Brotherhood could be defeated at the polls in the immediate future, procedural democracy became the enemy of Egypt's corrupt state institutions--the army, police and judiciary. Bypassing elections and political competition was seen as necessary for the survival of Egypt's ancien régime.

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