Underneath all the moderate rhetoric that Morsi and the Brotherhood are purveying these days, there is this. “Report: Brotherhood Has Egyptian Caliphate Plans,” from IPT News, June 24:
Watch out Egypt: Now that Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi has been declared the country’s new president, Sharia punishments may be making their way to a public square near you.
And that’s only the start of it.
According to an Arabic-language report last Tuesday of a closed-door senior-level Brotherhood confab, the Islamist group intends to get rid of film and “artistic heritage,” replace police uniforms with “Islamic garb,” and make memorization of Islam’s holy book a pre-condition for advancement in school. These sweeping changes””dubbed the “Jazira Plan–”are to “be put into execution on the first day Dr. [Mohamed] Morsi assumes the presidency.”
The first step in the plan is to “replace the national anthem with the so-called anthem of the Islamic Caliphate,” soon after followed by “the abolition of the Ministry of Information and replacing it with an Islamic media organization” whose sole aim would be to “publish Islamic heritage only.”
The plan speaks to the Brotherhood’s deep-seated, and oft-referenced, “dream” of reinstating the Caliphate. Yet, when pressed to expound upon its goals by an unfriendly audience or in the West, the group instead turns ambiguous, speaking in terms of Western concepts of freedom, dignity, and justice….