Killed in Custody

The latest from Egypt is far from pretty:

The Egyptian government acknowledged that its security forces had killed 36 Islamists in its custody on Sunday, as the country’s military leaders and Islamists vowed to keep up their fight over Egypt’s future.

The deaths were the fourth mass killing of civilians since the military took control on July 3, but the first time so many had died while in government custody.

The news of the deaths came on a day when there appeared to be a pause in the street battles that had claimed more than 1,000 lives since Wednesday, most of them Islamists and their supporters gunned down by security forces.

Is this terrible? Yes. Are innocents being killed? Almost certainly. Am I weeping? Not this time.

Being an Islamist, a jihadi, being a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, means being ready and able to kill innocents in the name of Islam. This is what they do. So once Mubarak was gone and the lid was off, something like this violence was bound to happen. The question is whether the military will be violent enough to put down this revolt quickly. Otherwise the place really will devolve into a combination of the worst parts of Syria and Somalia.