December 05, 2013 05:34 PM
 |
| Nour party spokesman Nader Bakkar attends a news conference about constitution in Cairo December 5, 2013. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany |
CAIRO: Egypt’s Salafist Al-Nour party said Thursday it will rally supporters to vote for a new draft constitution in a referendum fiercely opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
“It is an amended constitution. Generally speaking, the final result is acceptable for us,” said Nader Bakkar, spokesman for Al-Nour, which had a representative on the panel that drafted the constitution.
“We are going to campaign” in favour of it, he told AFP.
The ultra-conservative party had broken ranks with other Islamist groups to support the military’s overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi in July.
The military had suspended the previous constitution, passed by an Islamist-dominated panel during Morsi’s year in power, before it toppled the president.
A senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi belonged, told AFP the movement had yet to decide whether to call for a “No” vote or boycott the referendum.
A 50-member panel drafted the constitution and handed it to interim president Adly Mansour on Tuesday.
Mansour has a month to hold the referendum which is billed as the first stage the “democratic transition” promised by the military-installed rulers.
A statement by the Anti-Coup Alliance led by the Brotherhood said it “rejects as a total waste of billions of Egyptian pounds a potentially rigged and certainly unconstitutional referendum to rubber stamp the country’s most important document”.
Egypt’s Islamists were divided even on the ouster of Morsi — the country’s first democratically elected president — with Al-Nour backing the military in deposing him on July 3 along with Christian and Muslim religious institutions.
Morsi’s supporters have been staging near-daily protests against his ouster despite a crackdown in which more than 1,000 people, most of them Islamists, have been killed and thousands arrested.
The draft constitution has retained powers and privileges of the military, including allowing it to prosecute civilians in certain cases despite stiff opposition from secular activists who spearheaded the 2011 revolt against Hosni Mubarak.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2013/Dec-05/240025-salafists-urge-supporters-to-back-egypt-constitution.ashx#ixzz2mnED2p5U (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)
Interesting, in that, when I popped Nader Bakkar’ name into a search engine the first site presented was “opendemocracy” – a George Soros – Rockefeller aka Rothchild et al supported website:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/nader-bakkar
http://www.opendemocracy.net/about/supporters
C-Span Video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Reconciliationfo
Nader Bakkar is co-founder of Egypt’s al-Nour Party and serves on the party’s presidential and foreign affairs committees, as well as being the chairman’s assistant for media affairs. In 2012, he was elected member of Egypt’s Constituent Assembly. Before this, Bakkar was executive manager for Andalusia Medical Group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. He has represented Islam and the Salafi movement at many conferences throughout Egypt’s universities. He holds a bachelor’s degree in commerce, studying project management and Islamic economics,and a master’s degree in strategic management. Bakkar is a regular contributor to al Ahram newspaper, al Shorouk newspaper, and Ahram on line .
http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/nader-bakkar
Is Bakkar another Soros et al agent like ElBaradei and Khanfar?http://mediachecker.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/flashback-elbaradei-forms-the-national-association-for-change/
