Repression in Egypt

NY Times:

Heavily armed police officers woke the Said family at 2 a.m. with pounding on the front door. The parents dressed quickly as their two children drifted between sleep and fear. The police seized books, documents and computer equipment. They blindfolded the father, Abdellatif Muhammad Said, 40, and took him away.

The raid occurred about two weeks ago in a tidy, two-bedroom apartment that also served as an office for a family business that promoted an unconventional view of Islam over the Internet. The Saids and their relatives concluded that they had run afoul of the state-sanctioned vision of faith.

That may well be true. But in the weeks since Mr. Said disappeared into the netherworld of Egyptian jails, it has also begun to appear that his case may have as much to do with efforts to challenge the governing party’s monopoly on power, as it does with holding a view of Islam that many Muslims consider heretical. The arrest appears part of a zero-tolerance policy toward anybody who challenges the status quo, political analysts said.

In recent days, hundreds of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the popular outlawed political movement, have been arrested. A request was denied to free from prison the onetime presidential candidate and political dissident Ayman Nour. A prominent member of Parliament who helped form a new political party was forced out in connection with a years-old financial case.

The state-controlled press has virulently attacked Egyptians who attended a conference in Doha, Qatar, to discuss democracy. And elections on Monday to select members of the upper house of Parliament were described by independent organizations as manipulated to ensure that the governing party won a majority of the seats — a charge the government denies.

“They don’t want any divergence, they don’t want any noise,” said Mohamed Sayyid Said, deputy director of the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “They don’t want anyone to talk. They don’t want anyone to disagree.”

Government officials declined to respond to requests for information about the arrests or the recent series of events described by analysts as a political crackdown.

...

Egypt appears to be bent on denying Egyptians the opportunity to make the same kind of bad choice the Palestinians made when they selected Hamas. The Palestinian election wound up not only undermining the Middle East peace effort but the democracy movement in the Middle East. The extraordinary poor judgment of the Palestinians will probably reverberate for a while.