Within the past three years, Egypt has undergone two revolutions. Although one of them is sometimes considered to be a coup d'etat because the government was technically ousted by the military, the people of Egypt and most other people consider it to be a revolution of the people because the military was implementing the people's desires.
The first revolution began on Tuesday, January 25, 2011. People gathered on the streets of numerous cities in Egypt to protest because they were suffering from poverty and rampant unemployment and felt that this was happening to them because of the perceived corruption of the autocratic leader, President Hosni Murabak. Murabak made several attempts to quell the people's anger without relinquishing his power, including promising government reforms, saying that he would finish his term but not run for re-election, and stating that he would give his power to his vice-President before the end of his term before he finally resigned as president and left Cairo on February 11, 2011. His government took some actions during this time that angered many Egyptian people and the West, including shutting down the Internet in Egypt between January 27 and February 2 and detaining foreign journalists in the country.
The second revolution began in protest of Mohammad Morsi, the first officially elected president after the 2011 revolution, for several reasons. One of them was that women, minorities (including religious minorities like Christians), and intellectuals felt oppressed by the new constitution, which allowed for freedom of speech and expression so long as they conformed to Sharia (a term meaning "legislation" but which in context means Islamic law), and another was the fact that Morsi had unilaterally granted himself more power. These protests began in December and gained traction and frequency between February and March. On July 3, the military removed Morsi from office after issuing an ultimatum.
The biggest challenge that Egypt currently faces is the growing animosity between Islamists and the military. Many Islamists are angry at the military because they supported Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and because when the military took over they replaced the parliament at the time (which was almost completely composed of Islamists) with non-Islamists. This issue has been demonstrating itself in the form of protests and attacks on government officials.
The United States should be involved only as much as it can be without taking control of the situation. During the protests in 2013, many protestors who wanted to oust Morsi's regime felt angry that the United States was not becoming more involved in opposing the Muslim Brotherhood. However, if the United State becomes too involved, then the situation will become all about creating a democracy in the image of the American government and it will no longer be about the Egyptian people creating the democratic government that they want.
Western media, at least in the resources that I used for research, makes the assumption that all Egyptian people are united in their two ways of thinking in both cases, thus completely oversimplifying the issue. For both revolutions, the media portrayed all of the people as being either completely supportive of the insurgence or in support of either Murabak or Morsi/The Muslim Brotherhood, respectively. They did not take into consideration or write about any other viewpoints, and in this way I think that the full scope of the issue was under-represented in Western (especially American) media.
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