If I were an Egyptian . . .

If I were an Egyptian Copt, a woman, a gay, a Muslim apostate, a critic of religion, an agnostic or atheist, etc, etc. - heck, if I were I, but Egyptian, I would prefer rule by the army to a democracy guaranteed to lead straight to Islamic theocracy.

I would feel exactly the same way in most Muslim majority countries.

Given a chance, Muslims not only vote overwhelmingly for theocracy, they vote for constitutions that formally institutionalize it like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran so as to make it proof against second thoughts on the part of the same voters who created it in the first place.

So far as I know, the Iranian constitution is the only constitution in the region that explicitly limits democracy not to prevent clerical domination of power but to ensure it.

Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah sentenced to five years in jail

As it used to do in Turkey - but no more - and as it has done in various other Muslim countries in the last few decades, the army in Egypt intervened to save their country from democratically installed Islamism.

And yet many Occidentals, having learned nothing from all the disasters since the fall of the Shah, still favor the view that democracy is preferable to military rule, even if it leads to Islamic clericalism and Shariah.

Occidentals who are furious when Christians in some Western countries are able to use democracy to keep abortion illegal, or to keep same-sex marriage impossible, or to keep divorce illegal or at any rate very difficult, or to keep contraception illegal.

Occidentals who are delighted when US judges appeal to a constitution that exists only in their imaginations to stop the law enforcing those very same Christian moral norms, not accepted by liberals.