Today (Wednesday, 12/5/12), Al-Ahram is reporting that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its Sharia supremacist allies are planning "massive" counter-demonstrations supporting President Morsi in front of the presidential palace in Cairo's Heliopolis district, at 4pm.

Many analysts remain willfully blind to the Egyptian Muslim population's "thirst for Sharia," and instead dwell excessively upon the so-called "evil machinations" of the MB.  These "experts" ignore five critically more important-and honest-considerations:

1) The MB's taqiyya (sanctioned Islamic dissimulation) is directed only at witless, useful idiots in the West who are more responsible in the end than the MB for such willing susceptibility to this tripe

2) No one in Egypt is the least bit confused about the MB's now 80 plus year openly avowed Sharia supremacist agenda.

3) Hard, repeatedly confirmed polling data make plain that the MB's Sharia supremacism is shared overwhelmingly by Egypt's masses, and the past two years have demonstrated further that Egyptian Muslims - 90% plus of Egypt's population - are willing to vote in accordance with those beliefs. Thus in ascending order, polling data published between 2007 and 2010 establish that: 67% of Egyptians want the creation/re-creation of a Caliphate; 74% desire strict application of the Sharia; 77% favor mutilating punishments for theft; 82% favor stoning adulterers to death; and 84% reject freedom of conscience and believe that so-called "apostates" - Muslims who forsake Islam for another religion, or the right to no religious belief - should be put to death

4) In retrospect, deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak, given the milieu he had to operate in, and despite his own resultant brutal actions, was a pillar of reasoned, secular-championing stability. He was the very best this region can produce, at least in terms of viable leaders - see the full Wikileaks confidential memo of former US Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobey, and at least read her summary:

Mubarak is a classic Egyptian secularist who hates religious extremism and interference in politics. The Muslim Brothers represent the worst [emphasis added], as they challenge not only Mubarak's power, but his view of Egyptian interests. As with regional issues, Mubarak, seeks to avoid conflict and spare his people from the violence he predicts would emerge from unleashed personal and civil liberties. In Mubarak's mind, it is far better to let a few individuals suffer than risk chaos for society as a whole. He has been supportive of improvements in human rights in areas that do not affect public security or stability. Mrs. Mubarak has been given a great deal of room to maneuver to advance women's and children's rights and to confront some traditional practices that have been championed by the Islamists, such as FGM [i.e., female genital mutilation, sanctioned by not merely "Islamists," but the predominant Shafiite school of Islamic law in Egypt, leading to rates of this misogynistc barbarity among Egyptian women of 95%], child labor, and restrictive personal status laws.

5) The real hypocrites in Egypt are the so-called "liberal Muslims," and the only true victims are the dhimmitude - ridden Copts, torn between leaving and clinging to a miserable life in their own homeland - because it is their patrimony, and they certainly have more rights to it than the Muslims. Despite all the hand-wringing by Egypt's "liberal Muslims" over Morsi's actions to prevent the judiciary from thwarting the recently drafted Constitution, after months of debate, not one of these "liberals" has denounced the free speech crushing Egyptian Emergency State Security Court's decision last Wednesday  (11/28/12) which handed out "blasphemy" death sentences to 7 expatriate Egyptian Copts, and American pastor Terry Jones.

Finally, written over 14 years ago, Bat Ye'or's analysis of "enlightened Muslim moderates," and their terrible failings, merits careful reconsideration. Her unflinching appraisal from the perspective of a great scholar who grew up among them, as a non-Muslim, indeed a Jew, is that these "Muslim reformers" completely squandered opportunities for genuine reform at the end of the European colonial era. She describes an attitude of utter denial by Muslims, even much-ballyhooed "liberals" and "moderates," which still applies, with the rarest of isolated excep­tions. The consequences of this willful, callous blindness are equally apparent in the current triumph of mainstream Islamic, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated "Arab Spring" uprisings, accompanied by a burgeoning litany of abuses of indig­enous and foreign non-Muslim religious minorities, as well as foreign women reporters and indigenous Muslim women:

It is this lack of testimony that has brought back the evils and the preju­dices of the past-the jihad mentality, and the laws of dhimmitude that were only abolished by the colonial European powers. And now, more and more, because of this lack of testimony, we see moderate Muslims them­selves being persecuted. Because they were indifferent to the humiliation of Jews and Christians, because they remained silent and aloof, they now find themselves-in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere-suffering from cruel injus­tices and barbarism. Testifying together, giving testimony against dhim­mitude, would have allowed Muslim intellectuals to rethink their whole relationship with the People of the Bible-and with all non-Muslims, and this without renouncing their faith. Such an attitude would have brought all of us together in the fight against tyrannical oppression, against the process of dehumanization. This is what could have been done and what was not done.