The knives — or more properly the scalpels — are drawn in the Egyptian public square. The liberal forums and the state media are suddenly filled with discussions of illness, with the workings of cancer, with the way diseased cells spread unless "excised" and the tumors removed.
Hail the surgeons who perform the needed operations. They must be possessed of steady hands and be precise; they must do their work and check again to make sure that the damaged organs are completely removed. "Istisal," surgical removal, is the word of the day among erstwhile decent men and women, who express their fondness for the removal of tumors.
In the fairly independent forum Al Masry Al Youm, a well-known commentator, Tarek El-Ghazali Harb, sees "total excision of the Muslim Brothers as the only proper cure." It is a "satanic group," the Brotherhood, allowed to "prey on a weak Egyptian body whose immune system had been damaged by ignorance and poverty and disease, in precisely the same fashion the dreaded cancerous tumors spread and take hold."