Unknown to many in the West, one of the very first things Morsi did as president was to release and pardon countless jihadis. This is unsurprising considering he himself was imprisoned and released by Hamas.
Naturally, in the West, all this was portrayed as a positive development—as if Morsi and his Brotherhood gang were imprisoned by Mubarak for being freedom loving prisoners of conscience, and not what they truly are—power hungry, Sharia-pushing haters of freedom.
Knowing all this, the interim government of Egypt has just issued another blow to the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies. According to a new report, the Interior Ministry has announced that Egyptian leadership “is preparing to cancel any presidential pardons issued during Morsi’s era to terrorists or criminals.”
Soon after Morsi became president last summer 2012, news website Massai Ahram reported that Egypt’s Shura Council had agreed to begin taking steps to release convicts who had been imprisoned in Egyptian prisons for years from the nation’s two most notorious terrorist organizations, Islamic Jihad and Al Gama’a Al Islamiya—including several held under tight security and on death row for committing especially heinous acts of terror in Egypt under Mubarak’s era.
Tarek al-Zomor—who himself was released from prison where he was doing time for his role in the assasination of President Anwar Sadat—said back then that some 40 prisoners from Islamic Jihad and Al Gama’a Al Islamiya were set to be released, refusing to give their names until they had all been released onto the streets of Egypt.
Now that Egypt has experienced the natural consequences of all this “freedom”—including Sharia-pushing and terrorism—Egypt is back to square one, trying to put a lid on the Islamists one again.