The speech came as the armed forces shut down an office of the Brotherhood’s political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, at which they uncovered weapons and flammable liquids. The party is urging Egyptians to take up arms against the interim government created after Morsi was booted from office last week.

Egypt’s top Muslim cleric, Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb, yesterday urged Egyptians to resist “dragging the country into civil war.”

El-Tayeb, who is grand imam of Al-Azhar Mosque, the leading locus of learning for Sunni Muslims worldwide, said he plans to go into seclusion at home until “everyone shoulders his responsibility to stop the bloodshed.”

Yesterday more than 50 people were killed and hundreds wounded in various battles across Egypt between the armed forces and Morsi supporters, reports Frank Spano of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Army officials say troops fired on protesters in self defense, a claim the protesters deny. At least one Egyptian military officer lost his life and dozens were injured in an incident at Republican Guard headquarters.

Military spokesman Ahmed Aly said armed groups attacked army and police forces protecting the headquarters, reports Al Ahram newspaper, which is now under the control of the armed forces. “[P]ro-Morsi protesters, who have been gathering outside the Republican Guard headquarters for days, used live ammunition and birdshot against security personnel.”

Aly said at a press conference that “certain factions” have been inciting violence, as a video of Brotherhood-affiliated preacher Safwat Hegazy played behind him. “The video, which has gone viral on social networks, contains a threat of ‘escalation’ from Morsi supporters if the former president is not reinstated,” the newspaper reports.

In the last few days television viewers and YouTube users have been treated to the gruesome spectacle of Brotherhood lynch mobs hurling their adversaries from the roofs of buildings. Often the victims survive the initial drop only to be dragged to the same heights and pushed off again.

Brotherhood supporters have also been trying to blacken interim President Adli Mansour’s name by claiming he’s secretly Jewish.

“By now it is of course a time-honored Arab and Muslim tradition to express one’s hatred by calling someone a ‘Jew’ or at least a ‘Zionist agent.’ Apparently, there can be no worse smear,” notes Petra Marquadt-Bigman in the Jerusalem Post.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is tap-dancing around what to call last week’s insurrection that evicted Morsi from the Heliopolis Palace.

The nomenclature is important because if Morsi’s ouster is labelled a “coup,” federal law requires that the $1 billion-plus annually in U.S. military aid be cut off. The law states that funds shall not be “expended” when a country’s “duly elected leader of government is deposed by decree or military coup.”

Morsi opponents characterize his removal from power as a popular uprising or a revolution, as opposed to a coup d’etat.

“It’s not a coup because the military did not take power,” said Mohamed Tawfik, Egypt’s ambassador to the U.S. “The military did not initiate it, it was a popular uprising.”

Daniel Pipes takes the view that what happened last week was indeed a coup but that Morsi was not a legitimately elected leader to begin with. The election that put Morsi in power was a fraud-ridden “ploy by the ruling military leadership to remain in power.”

Although Morsi was president de jure, “he did not control the military … the police, the intelligence services, the judiciary, or even the Presidential Guard assigned to protect him,” Pipes writes. Morsi served “at the sufferance of the deep state, the very agencies that brokered his ‘election’ in June 2012.”

There was no revolution last week, in Pipes’s estimation. There was merely a personnel change at the top.

“There are only two powers, the military and the Islamists: This sad truth has been confirmed repeatedly in the past 2½ years of Arabic-speaking upheaval, and it has been confirmed again now in Egypt,” according to Pipes. “The liberals, seculars, and leftists do not count when the chips are down. Their great challenge is to become politically relevant.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that the dawdling Obama administration was still “taking the time to determine what happened, what to label it.” When asked about the possibility of suspending aid in the short term, Carney said, “We think that would not be in our best interest.”

In May the Obama administration quietly approved military aid to Morsi’s government rewarding it for its increasingly vicious assaults on foreign workers, religious minorities, and civil society. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry authorized the aid despite finding in a May 9 memo that “we are not satisfied with the extent of Egypt’s progress and are pressing for a more inclusive democratic process and the strengthening of key democratic institutions.”

Despite the fondest wishes of many in the Western media, Egyptians on the whole remain largely supportive of Islamization and the imposition of Shariah law in Egypt.