by Raymond Ibrahim • Nov 15, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Cross-posted from Jihad Watch
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood just made a few assertions that have ruffled the nation’s secular and Christian populace.

Essam el-Erian: “No one dares oppose the application of Sharia law.”
At a conference attended by some 5,000, Senior Muslim Brotherhood leader, Dr. Essam el-Erian, Vice President of the “Freedom and Justice” party, the Brotherhood’s political wing, declared that “No one in Egypt—not a Copt, a liberal, a leftist, no one—dares say they are against Islam and the application of Sharia: all say they want the Islamic Sharia [applied]. And when referendum time comes, whoever says ‘we do not want Sharia’ will expose their hidden intentions.”
He went on to threaten Egypt’s Supreme Council of Armed Forces with “massacres” if it interfered in politics and Islam’s role in the constitution and addressed the nation’s Coptic Christians as follows: “You will never find a strong fortress for your faith and rights except in Islam and Sharia,” adding, “Our Lord has commanded us to be just, and we have learned it from Islam. We do not wish to hurt anyone…”
More to the point, his Brotherhood colleague, Sheikh Sayyid Abdul Karim, asserted: “Those who do not wish to see Islam [Sharia] applied are drunks, druggies, adulterers, and brothel-owners.”
While such talk is commonplace from Egypt’s self-styled Salafists, it is significant that the Muslim Brotherhood, which has mastered the art of stealth, the art of appearing “moderate”—to the point that President Obama’s intelligence chief described them as “largely secular“—is beginning to feel comfortable enough to let snippets of the truth come out.




RAYMOND IBRAHIM, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, best known for The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007), he guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of Egypt's Christian Copts. Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CBN, and NPR.