Did the Muslim Brotherhood Really Win the Presidency in Egypt?

By Raymond Ibrahim, FPM

The one and only positive point that every Western commentator, beginning with Barrack Hussein Obama, has pointed to regarding the victory of an Islamist president in Egypt, is that it was done through democracy—through elections, fair and square.  It was the “will of the people” and so must be respected.

Yet, even that, too, is under question.  In fact, last week Ahmed Shafiq, Morsi’s secular opponent for the presidency, “filed a complaint with the public prosecution alleging numerous irregularities and violations during the presidential runoff elections held in June,” citing “specific instances of alleged forgery, such as rigging ballots and importing pens with removable ink to invalidate them.”

I had written about some of these “numerous irregularities,” including how the Muslim Brotherhood bought votes from Egypt’s many poor by bribing them with food and how MB official Khairat al-Shater sent a memo to members ordering them to “resort to any method that can change the vote.” Accordingly, in the words of Al Ahram, “the Muslim Brotherhood blockaded entire streets, prevented Copts from voting at gunpoint, and threatened Christian families not to let their children go out and vote.”

One of the most formal proofs, however, has been completely overlooked in the West.

Enter Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a longtime political dissent who was imprisoned under Hosni Mubarak’s rule, currently an American University of Cairo professor of political science and head of Egypt’s Ibn Khaldun Center, which closely monitored Egypt’s presidential elections.  According to him, the secular candidate, Shafiq, did, in fact, defeat the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi in the presidential elections, by some 30,000 votes.  He has stressed this point several times, most recently on this Egyptian TV program, a translation of which follows:

The elections that brought President Muhammad Morsi to power are of questionable legitimacy. First, the results were withheld for three days. Second, many rumors arose concerning them, about the practice of pressure, threats and attempts of suicide attacks and the bombing of public properties, all of which caused the Military Council—or so it was said or alleged—to favor the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, despite the rather slight margins that necessitated either an election redo or re-tabulation or at least a vote recount.

There is, of course, another reason why the military favored Morsi: the Obama administration pressured it.  After all, it was precisely during those three days that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as Andrew McCarthy put it,  did “her part to help the Muslim Brotherhood,” by pressuring the military to surrender power and portraying its delay to proclaim a winner as “clearly troubling”—words better reserved for the Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-democratic tactics.

Saad Eddin continues:

We here at the Ibn Khaldun Center, through 7,000 field monitors, monitored the elections, and, according to our data, Shafiq won these elections, by a margin of 30,000 votes.

He further went on to confirm, according to Gate Ahram (translated by Coptic Solidarity) that the “Ibn Khaldun Center had announced the result directly after the end of the voting process, and a report was being issued every 8 hours, pointing out that several other centers had announced the same result [victory of Shafiq], while others had monitored it but were too intimidated to announce it.  [Saad Eddin] Ibrahim added that a delegation from the Muslim Brotherhood traveled to the US right before the second election round. Brotherhood members were expecting the US to formally deny this, but the US ambassador and other sources have confirmed the trip, allowing no room for denial.”

It appears, then, that the one saving grace concerning the victory of an Islamist president—that he was elected through a fair democratic process—is no saving grace at all; and history will record that, through deceit, bribes, violence and threats, the Islamists took control of Egypt, turning it into a hostile Sharia-state, against the will of the majority—and all with the Obama administration’s help.