Back in February this year, just one day before the fall of Hosni Mubarak, when many Egyptians were labouring under the illusion that the army was their friend and protector, I said on this blog:
Please, let us all shed our illusions. The Egyptian army is the enemy of the Egyptian people. Some might say this can't be so because the army consists of conscripts, i.e. is made up of the people. That is true, but make no mistake: these conscripts will not hesitate to massacre their own people.
Let us have faith in ourselves. To hell with the army, the police and all the other tools of repression. If the army consisted of real men, then let these men go and fight the real enemy, the enemy whose permission they have to get in order to tread on their own soil in Sinai. Let them go and fight and not surrender in their tens of thousands, as we've seen in 1967 and 1973.
They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and if there's a silver lining to the mayhem that is now unfolding in Egypt it is that the Egyptian people must by now be shedding all the illusions they have had about their armed forces.
The photograph and video below speak for themselves. The thugs of the Egyptian army – the cowards who dishohoured Egypt not just in 1967 and 1973, but also in 1948 and 1956 – can be seen beating a defenceless, female protester for daring to exercise her inalienable right to protest against the oppression, deception, corruption and privilege of the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Predicatably, the SCAF's defenders argue that the incident, which was witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people, never happened and that the image of the woman being beaten had been manipulated. Presumably, they would say the same about the video below, which shows the same woman and a companion being chased then beaten by the brave soldiers.
Egypt's armed forces are interested only in protecting their considerable privileges and in enriching themselves. Despite the billions of dollars in US handouts on which they survive and for which they would sell their own mothers, the Egyptian armed forces are not a fighting force in any real, professional sense of the word. Incompetent and incapable of securing a street, let alone fighting another army, they are just one or two levels up on the defunct Gaddafi's thugs.
Back in 1978 the elite of Egypt's army, Unit 777, was deployed in Malta to free an Egyptian aircraft that had been hijacked. Deluded into thinking that they could imitate the Israeli raid on Entebbe two years earlier, they succeeded only in killing 57 of the 88 hostages, who were reportedly mistaken for the hijackers.
Thirty-four years have passed since then but, by all accounts, nothing has changed. Egypt's army today is made up of dehumanized, poorly trained, badly educated, semi-literate peasants who are led by corrupt dinasaurs and their cronies, a hierarchy of mediocrities who know little about military strategy and tactics and care less and whose paramount purpose is to preserve their power and privilges.
The revolution that began on 25 January 2011 has only just begun and will not be complete until the dishonourable, incompetent and corrupt traitors in the Egyptian army are purged and brought to account for betraying the people and the country they are supposed to defend.
