Israel Matzav

2011 Egyptian revolution orchestrated by Hamas, Hezbullah... and Obama?

Writing in The National, a daily newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates, Bradley Hope attaches much importance to the role of the heretofore largely ignored prison escape of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsy in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Hope reports that escape was orchestrated by Hamas and Hezbullah, and that the revolution started from pro-democracy NGO's financed by the United States, and was then hijacked by the Islamists.

According to the testimony by Omar Suleiman, the powerful former director of Egypt's national intelligence directorate, the Wadi Natroun prison break may have been part of a well-planned operation to liberate jails across the country, carried out by Egyptian Bedouins with the help of Islamists in Egypt and abroad.

Testifying on September 14, 2011, in the trial of Mubarak on charges of complicity in the deaths of protesters during the 2011 uprising, Suleiman said Egypt's spy agencies started monitoring communications between members of Hamas and Bedouins in Sinai on January 26, 2011 - one day after mass protests broke out.

"Hamas communicated with the Bedouins and agreed that they would provide them with ordnance in exchange for assistance in freeing their comrades from Egyptian prisons," said Suleiman, according to a transcript of his court testimony.

The Al Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas, "created a diversion so that the border guards would not pursue the smuggled ordnance. Thus the weapons, ammunition and explosives were successfully smuggled and given to the Bedouins," he said.

With up to 90 Gaza-based members of Hizbollah, Hamas militants then entered Egypt illegally and led the assaults on prisons across the country, said Suleiman, who died in July last year.

...

In his court testimony, Suleiman, acknowledged that unequal income distribution, unemployment and other legitimate grievances of Egyptians brought about Mubarak's downfall. He insisted, however, that external actors exploited these wrongs to help bring his former boss down.

This view is now being taken further by some Egyptians as they seek to explain their country's zigzag course back to a state of emergency, one of the most reviled pillars of Mubarak's rule. The role of foreign influences, including United States funding for civil society groups in Egypt, looms ever larger in their attempts to explain and justify it.

To many former members of Mubarak's National Democratic Party such as Ali El Dean Hilal Dessouki, it seems increasingly plausible to suggest that foreign Islamists, with the aid of the Brotherhood, infiltrated the protests and hijacked the revolution, setting Egypt on a path that culminated with the military's intervention on July 3.

This "second revolution", as the coup against Mr Morsi is sometimes referred to, is more meaningful and legitimate than the first, he said.

It is, Mr Dessouki said, the first "exclusively internal Egyptian uprising."

Asked why the Mubarak regime collapsed so quickly, he said it was too soon to know for certain. But he pointed to many signs of foreign intervention, including the prison break and foreign funding of non-government organisations.

Read the whole thing.

Undermining Mubarak's rule in the hope of turning Egypt into a democracy was the sort of naive action that we have come to expect from the Obama administration. It's why they've gotten the Middle East all wrong from the beginning (recall their insistence on the Muslim Brotherhood attending Obama's Cairo speech in 2009). And given the opportunity, he will compound his mishandling of the Middle East by creating a state of 'Palestine.'

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Egyptian democracy, Egyptian Revolution, Hosni Mubarak, Mohammed Morsy

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:36 AM