‘Washington must acknowledge Egyptian military coup’

The US refuses to call the event in Egypt a military coup as it would make their support of the country’s army, which ousted president Mohamed Morsi, a criminal act, Gerald Celente, Publisher of the Trends Journal, told RT.

Egypt's Islamists, who support the deposed president Morsi, are vowing further protests until the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader is restored to power.

On Saturday, the violence saw 36 people killed and more than a thousand wounded in clashes between rival groups all across the country.

Publisher of the Trends Journal, Gerald Celente, believes that Morsi was “another incompetent rising to the level of power, for which he was not suited for” and a new wave of bloody protests was just a matter of time for Egypt.  

“The foundation of why the revolution began in the first place – it wasn’t an Arab Spring. It was a lot of poor people,” he told RT. “You had most of the people living on $10 a day. And that was the genesis, the foundation behind the ousting of [president Hosni] Mubarak [in February 2011]. People wanted to live a higher standard of life. Vast corruption – all the money on the top of the pyramid, and the rest of the people having nothing.”

“And then when Morsi came in, he made it worse. It wasn’t that he was an Islamist so much. It could’ve been Mickey Mouse or Mohamed Morsi. It would’ve made no difference if the people had a standard of living that was going up, rather than crashing as it was. You know about the gasoline lines, tourism died virtually and the country went into deeper poverty. And that’s really the genesis behind all of these or many of these uprisings not only in Egypt, around the world,” he added.

The US-based expert also said that there are political reasons behind the Washington abstaining to condemn the Egyptian army for ousting democratically elected president Morsi on July 3.

“Over here in the US they refuse to call it a military coup because the US supports the military,” he said. “If they called it a coup by law, the US wouldn’t be able to give that $1.3 billion to the Egyptian military. So it’s the US military… it’s the military dealing with the military. And that’s why they’re not calling it a coup because it would be breaking the law. I don’t know if that should stay in the way of anything because they break the law all the time.” 

President of the Arab Lawyers Association, Sabah Al-Mukhtar, agrees that the events in Egypt should be referred to as nothing, but a military coup.  
   
“This is by all definitions is a coup d'etat,” he said. “You can’t have an election thwarted by the army even if you don’t like the result. We in Britain, for instance, elected the conservatives. We don’t like them. We want to get rid of them. But the idea that somehow you get the army to change it because you don’t like it is totally contrary to even the basics of democracy.”

“What’s really shocking is that president Obama, who is the leader of the American nation, the secretary general of the UN [Ban Ki-moon] and many European leaders and indeed even Russia isn’t taking a principal stand,” he added.

But, unlike Celente , the attorney doesn’t see the US administration as hardcore supporters of the Egyptian military, criticizing Washington and its Western allies for absence of clear policy in the Arab world.

“They don’t know whether they (Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood) should go or come,” he said. “And we can see what they have done in Syria. In Syria, they said you can’t negotiate for two years when Russia was saying you must negotiate. Two years later, they decided: well, we have to negotiate now. The US and Europe really have no policy because they want a designer-made government in these places. They didn’t like Mubarak. They don’t like [Syrian president Bashar] Assad. They don’t like the [Muslim] Brotherhood. They don’t like the nationalists. They don’t like anybody. So, they all know whom they don’t want, but they don’t know that they must accept what the people want, otherwise, the strife will continue.”