Netanyahu threatened to send the IDF to defend Israel's Cairo embassy in 2011
As many of you might recall, in September 2011, Israel's embassy in Cairo, Egypt was attacked by 'protesters.' At the time, the Israeli government promoted a narrative that claimed that the Obama administration pressured the Egyptian government into acting to free the ambassador and his staff. But at an Independence Day toast with foreign ministry staff on Tuesday, Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted that he threatened to send the IDF in to free the embassy workers (the IAF was sent in to fly them out that weekend).
Oh my... Netanyahu tells Foreign Min workers: During '12 takeover of Cairo embassy threatened to send IDF to rescue https://t.co/89vs9aq1PZ
Taharrush - the Arab rape 'game' that's been exported to Europe
What happened in Cologne and other cities in Europe on New Year's Eve is known in the Arab world as Taharrush. It's a rape 'game' and it's particularly unpleasant for the women caught up in it (Hat Tip: Ellen S).
The "rape game" Taharrush is about a large group of Arab men surrounding
their victim, usually a Western woman or a woman wearing Western-style
clothing, and then the women are subjected to sexual abuse.
They
surround the victim in circles. The men in the inner circle are the
ones who physically abuse the woman, the next circle are the spectators,
while the mission of the third circle is to distract and divert
attention to what's going on.
If there is enough men, the woman
is dragged along by the mob, while the men take turns ripping her
clothes off, grope her, and inserting fingers in her various body
orifices.
I have a mercifully short video of it to show you (safe for work, but parental discretion advised - I did not turn on this video with my kids in the room).
Let's go to the videotape. More after the video.
Sounds like what happened to CBS reporter Lara Logan in Cairo's Tahrir Square five years ago, doesn't it? More reading here.
And now thanks to Frau Merkel, it's been exported to Europe. Will the US be next?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States and current MK Michael Oren (Kulanu) criticizes Prime Minister Netanyahu's handling of his relationship with President Hussein Obama, and then rips Obama for abandoning Israel. More after the lengthy excerpt (someone was kind enough to send me the full article by email).
[M]any of Israel’s bungles were not committed
by Mr. Netanyahu personally. In both episodes with Mr. Biden, for example, the
announcements were issued by midlevel officials who also caught the prime
minister off-guard. Nevertheless, he personally apologized to the vice
president.
Mr. Netanyahu’s only premeditated misstep was
his speech to Congress, which I recommended against. Even that decision, though,
came in reaction to a calculated mistake by President Obama. From the moment he
entered office, Mr. Obama promoted an agenda of championing the Palestinian
cause and achieving a nuclear accord with Iran. Such policies would have put him
at odds with any Israeli leader. But Mr. Obama posed an even more fundamental
challenge by abandoning the two core principles of Israel’s alliance with
America.
The first principle was “no daylight.” The U.S.
and Israel always could disagree but never openly. Doing so would encourage
common enemies and render Israel vulnerable. Contrary to many of his detractors,
Mr. Obama was never anti-Israel and, to his credit, he significantly
strengthened security cooperation with the Jewish state. He rushed to help
Israel in 2011 when the Carmel forest was devastated by fire. And yet,
immediately after his first inauguration, Mr. Obama put daylight between Israel
and America.
“When there is no daylight,” the president told
American Jewish leaders in 2009, “Israel just sits on the sidelines and that
erodes our credibility with the Arabs.” The explanation ignored Israel’s 2005
withdrawal from Gaza and its two previous offers of Palestinian statehood in
Gaza, almost the entire West Bank and half of Jerusalem—both offers rejected by
the Palestinians.
Mr. Obama also voided President George W. Bush’s
commitment to include the major settlement blocs and Jewish Jerusalem within
Israel’s borders in any peace agreement. Instead, he insisted on a total freeze
of Israeli construction in those areas—“not a single brick,” I later heard he
ordered Mr. Netanyahu—while making no substantive demands of the
Palestinians. Consequently, Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas boycotted negotiations, reconciled with Hamas and sought statehood in the
U.N.—all in violation of his commitments to the U.S.—but he never paid
a price. By contrast, the White House routinely condemned Mr. Netanyahu for
building in areas that even Palestinian negotiators had agreed would remain part
of Israel.
The other core principle was “no surprises.”
President Obama discarded it in his first meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, in May
2009, by abruptly demanding a settlement freeze and Israeli acceptance of the
two-state solution. The following month the president traveled to the Middle
East, pointedly skipping Israel and addressing the Muslim world from Cairo.
Israeli leaders typically received advance
copies of major American policy statements on the Middle East and could submit
their comments. But Mr. Obama delivered his Cairo speech, with its unprecedented
support for the Palestinians and its recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear
power, without consulting Israel.
Similarly, in May 2011, the president altered 40
years of U.S. policy by endorsing the 1967 lines with land swaps—formerly the
Palestinian position—as the basis for peace-making. If Mr. Netanyahu appeared to
lecture the president the following day, it was because he had been assured by
the White House, through me, that no such change would happen.
Israel was also stunned to learn that Mr. Obama
offered to sponsor a U.N. Security Council investigation of the settlements and
to back Egyptian and Turkish efforts to force Israel to reveal its alleged
nuclear capabilities. Mr. Netanyahu eventually agreed to a 10-month moratorium
on settlement construction—the first such moratorium since 1967—and backed the
creation of a Palestinian state. He was taken aback, however, when he received
little credit for these concessions from Mr. Obama, who more than once publicly
snubbed him.
The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no
surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my
years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with U.S.
officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration
statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck
Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking
Iran pre-emptively.
Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its
primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy.
The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis
considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr. Obama, though,
insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional
power.”
The daylight between Israel and the U.S. could
not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president
pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military
option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution
cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been
greater.
Oren doesn't go far enough. His claim that Obama was 'never anti-Israel' doesn't square with the facts that we knew long before Obama was elected President. The fact that the one example Oren gives of 'significantly strengthened security cooperation' under Obama relates to a natural disaster and not to a military action is telling.
Oren seems to be placing the burden of restoring the US-Israel relationship to what it was on both the US and Israel. But clearly, one party here (the US in the person of the Obama administration) initiated the hostilities. The actions that Obama took immediately on taking office - the introduction of 'daylight' between the US and Israel, the Cairo speech, the Buchenwald visit in which he adopted the 'Palestinian' narrative of Israel's sole right to our land being based on the Holocaust, and the disavowal of the Bush letter - set the tone for the relationship, and it's up to Obama - more likely to his successor - to reset that tone.
Yesterday, I met with the Washington correspondent of a US-based newspaper. She asked me how Israelis feel about the United States. I told her 'Israelis love the United States and the American people. Israelis hate Obama. For good reason.'
Tahrir Square, Cairo, exploding once again after gov't drops all charges against former president Mubarak. #Egypt
— James Miller (@MillerMENA) November 29, 2014
Reports from Cairo indicate that there has been a breakthrough in the talks between Israel and the terror organizations. As of now, it appears that the current cease fire will be extended for 24 hours to allow the negotiations to conclude.
A Hamas official said that the Islamist group had agreed to prolong the cease-fire by another 24 hours so as to allow for more negotiations with Egyptian officials in Cairo. Israeli officials, meanwhile, are denying that an agreement is in place.
Palestinian News Agency Ma'an reported that the Israeli delegation had left Cairo and was set to return to Israel and present the cabinet with the cease-fire agreement to be approved.
The reported deal comes after significant progress was made in Egyptian-mediated cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, according to Palestinian sources.
While there is no word regarding the nature of the discussions, a number of web sites affiliated with Islamic Jihad as well as independent Palestinian sources say that there has been greater movement by both sides toward a deal.
“There is optimism, and it seems as if the chances of reaching an agreement are better than they’ve ever been thus far,” said a Palestinian source currently in Cairo.
Sources in Cairo told the Ma’an news agency that the Egyptian government has presented a two-tiered plan – one security-oriented, and the other political – which includes a mechanism that could lead to a lifting of the siege on Gaza.
“A six-hour negotiating session today, as well as a nine-hour session on Sunday, led to agreement in a number of areas,” a Palestinian source is quoted as telling Ma’an.
There's a lot more to this story, but most of it seems to be unconfirmed rumors.
Meanwhile, sources close to the Palestinian delegation in Cairo told the Al Quds
newspaper Monday night that there has been a breakthrough in the talks
that may make it possible to extend the ceasefire even before it expires
at midnight tonight.
"The Egyptian mediator played an important role in the breakthrough,”
the sources said, “in refusing the new Israeli demands through which
Israel reinforced its objection to the Egyptian initiative.”
There has been no confirmation of this report from any other source.
The Al Mayadeen network reported, meanwhile, that the
Israeli delegation returned to Israel and that neither side is
interested in renewing the fighting, so the ceasefire that began
Thursday is expected to hold.
I wouldn't bet on it happening tonight, but maybe tomorrow it will. Or maybe not. As Yogi Berra used to say 'it ain't over 'til it's over.'
UPDATE 12:36 AM
Just to reconfirm, Israel Radio reported at Midnight that there is a 24-hour extension to the current cease fire during which they hope to work out a longer term deal. No one knows what the terms are. Nearly the entire JPost article (linked at the top of this post) is either speculation or 'Palestinian' claims not confirmed by Israel.
With the current 'cease fire' due to end at Midnight Wednesday night, Arutz Sheva is reporting that the Cairo talks are at a 'dead end.'
Indirect talks between Israel and Hamas in Cairo to broker an
end to the Gaza conflict have so far made no progress, a senior Israeli
official said Tuesday.
"The gaps are still very wide. There has not been progress in the negotiations," he told AFP. Israel Hayom cited “an official diplomatic source” as saying the talks had reached “a dead end” and the gaps were too wide.
...
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had been due to discuss the
Cairo talks with his Diplomacy and Security Cabinet later on Tuesday
afternoon but the meeting was cancelled, media reports said.
Late on Monday, a Palestinian official in Cairo told AFP that the first day of talks had lasted nearly 10 hours.
"The negotiations were serious," he said, adding that the Israelis
were insisting on the demilitarization of Hamas, the defacto power in
Gaza, but that the Palestinians had refused it.
"(Tuesday's) meeting should be the most important," he said,
indicating the talks were expected to tackle core issues such as the
eight-year-old Israeli blockade of the territory.
I guess we haven't hit Hamas hard enough yet. Maybe if we go after their leadership instead of just blowing up their ammunition dumps, they'll get the idea that we don't intend to go on living under their threats.
Reports on Arab television claim that Khaled Meshaal will sign a 'humanitarian' cease fire on Hamas' behalf in Cairo on Tuesday.
Mashaal held cease-fire discussions with Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas in Qatar on Monday in the first meeting of its kind since
the beginning of the current round of fighting.
During the meeting, Abbas emphasized the need for all parties to abide
by the recent Egyptian cease-fire initiative, a Palestinian official
accompanying the PA president said.
The official said that Abbas and Mashaal agreed to continue
consultations in order to “stop the Israeli aggression” on the Gaza
Strip.
There are two small problems with this report. One is that Meshaal is not in Gaza and does not control the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Their leader - Ismail Haniyeh - would rather fight than quit.
In the Gaza Strip, former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said in a
televised speech his movement has decided to “end the blockade with its
blood and weapons and there would be no return back.”
Haniyeh said that Hamas’ conditions for a cease-fire include ending the
blockade and Israeli “aggression” on the Gaza Strip and the release of
former Palestinian prisoners who were rearrested by Israel in the past
few weeks.
Haniyeh is also furious at the lack of support from the Arab world (well, duh - did you really expect the Arab world to support mass suicide with no gains in return?).
Haniyeh also denounced Arab “silence” toward the war in the Gaza Strip.
“The silence of the Arab regimes has emboldened the enemy and given it a
cover to perpetrate more crimes,” he charged.
There's a second problem with this report: No one seems to have asked Israel if we agree to this 'cease fire.' Do we?
Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin posts a rant after she is deported from Egypt to Turkey instead of being allowed into Gaza for - get this - International Women's Day. Meanwhile, her fellow travelers, pictured above, remain at Cairo airport.
Just the other day I hopped on a plane to Egypt, eager to join the international delegation of 100 women headed to Gaza for International Women’s Day. Little did I know I would be stopped at the Cairo airport, detained, held overnight in a cell, then in the morning brutally assaulted by Egyptian authorities. They threw me to the ground, stomped on my back, handcuffed me so tightly they dislocated my shoulder, and then deported me to Turkey.
Now the Egyptian authorities are blocking most of the remaining delegates from entering Egypt and traveling to Gaza. It has been frustrating and disappointing for us, but we cannot forget that almost two million Palestinians remained trapped in Gaza while the Egyptian Rafah border remains closed or tightly controlled
What happened to me was traumatizing, but is minor compared to what Egyptian activists are going through, including women. Thousands of peaceful Egyptian demonstrators have been killed or jailed by the Military Junta since the July 2013 military coup.
And just how does this moron think that Hamas is treating 'Palestinian' women in Gaza? Here's an example.
There's only one country in the Middle East which strives to treat its women like human beings. But Benjamin and her ilk cannot even acknowledges that country's existence. Jew hatred takes precedence over women's rights for these self-proclaimed women's rights activists.
My grandmother a"h (peace be upon her) was in Israel in 1980 while I was studying in yeshiva. In the post-Camp David euphoria, she suggested that we visit Egypt together during my Pesach vacation. And so, we did. We flew Tel Aviv to Cairo on El Al, spent three days staying in the Sheharezade Hotel along the banks of the Nile (right near the 6th of October bridge you've all seen in the news and probably not far from Tahrir Square), spent a day in Cairo, flew to Luxor one day to see the tombs of the kings (50 degrees Celsius in March - my grandmother dehydrated in the heat), and then were taken by a driver to Alexandria on the third day. Everywhere we went (and we had private tour guides for the entire trip), my grandmother begged them to take us to a synagogue. So we saw the outside of Cairo's main synagogue and the outside of the Rambam (Maimonides) synagogue, and we drove past a Jewish square in Alexandria. The only Jew we met was the caretaker at the Maimonides synagogue.
I mention all this because I was surprised to discover that there are still 14 Jews - all women - left who live in Cairo. Not surprisingly, they are all happier to have the army in charge than the Muslim Brotherhood.
Haroun, the president of the Egyptian Jewish community, doesn’t enjoy
hearing anti-Semitic slurs on the street. She gets nervous when she
hears Egyptians are burning the churches of Coptic Christians, a much
larger religious minority than the country’s tiny Jewish community.
She
assumes that most of her compatriots have forgotten there are any Jews
left in Egypt.
But when protesters filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square at
the end of June calling on President Mohamed Morsi to step down, she
was right there with them.
“The amount of people in Tahrir was
breathtaking,” Haroun told JTA. “The unity between people was
breathtaking. Some of the people recognized me because I was on TV. They
were shaking my hand and telling me, ‘God bless you. You are a real
Egyptian.’ ”
Haroun, 61, is the youngest of the 14 women who make
up Cairo’s dwindling Jewish community. Most are now in their 80s, living
off charity and rental income from properties the community has owned
for generations.
But though small in number, Haroun says the
community is proud of its country and, like many Egyptians, supportive
of the army’s campaign to quell Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood.
...
Jews have lived in Egypt for millennia. Around the time of Israel’s
founding in 1948, the community was estimated to number 75,000, but in
the decades that followed the vast majority fled.
Those that
remain are happy to call Egypt home, Haroun says. Although she has
relatives in several European countries, she vows to “never, never,
never” leave.
“I’m very proud to be here,” she said. “I want to do
whatever I can to help. We are a strong people. I am very happy now
that people [are] in the street. Instead of talking about football, they
are talking politics. There is more awareness about the importance of
our country.”
On Tuesday, CNN reported that the White House was
withholding some military aid to Egypt in protest of the military’s
violent crackdown on Morsi supporters. But for Haroun, the army’s
assertion of control is a welcome development she sees as “fighting
terrorism.”
Haroun says the Jewish community thus far has not
experienced any anti-Semitism as a result of the fighting — probably,
she says, because it’s so small.
Under Morsi’s rule, however, it was a different story.
Once again, there are pitched battles between supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Mohammed Morsy, on the one hand, and the Egyptian army, on the other hand. These images are from today (Friday).
And here are twoimages of Egyptians jumping off bridges in Cairo (and there's nothing underneath the but roadway) to escape gunfire.
Here's a video report from CBS News from before the riots started.
Let's go to the videotape.
Hot Air points out that the lines between the Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood are not as clear-cut as was the case in
Tiananmen Square in China in 1989.
You have to ask: How would the world be reacting if the victims in Cairo were secularists or anti-communists?
Well, they’re not, and as Bloomberg notes, the indications
from the first year of Muslim Brotherhood control wasn’t that the
country was headed for a pluralistic, tolerant self-government. In the
wake of the massacre, the Brotherhood and its Islamist allies are
torching Christian churches all over Egypt, part of a campaign against
the Copts that had been simmering ever since Mohamed Morsi took power.
That doesn’t mean that the Egyptian military should be slaughtering them
in the streets, or that they’re much better in practice than Morsi’s
coalition was. The lines are nowhere near as clear as they were in
Tiananmen Square.
Of course, we also didn’t fund the Chinese military back in 1989,
either. Like it or not, this week has American fingerprints on it, and
even with the murkier battle lines, that’s an embarrassment for the US.
Yes, it has been. Obama and Kerry have no clue what to do. The only thing they really care about in this region is the 'Palestinians.'
The picture above was taken in Tahrir Square in Cairo around 7:00 pm on Saturday by an Egyptian blogger named The Big Pharoah. But the action is happening elsewhere in Cairo at a rally of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted President Mohammed Morsy. The Egyptian health ministry is admitting to 38 deaths at that rally, while the Brotherhood is claiming that more than 100 people have been killed and some 1500 wounded (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
The anti-Morsi camp occupied Cairo's Tahrir
Square in support of the army, after its chief, Gen Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi, had urged people to demonstrate to provide a mandate for its
intervention.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Morsi supporters continued their sit-in protest at the mosque in the Nasr City area.
On Saturday, Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim vowed to end
the sit-in, saying local residents had complained about the encampment.
He said the protest would be "brought to an end soon, and in a
legal manner" with an order from the prosecutor, although this has yet
to happen.
The BBC's Jim Muir in Cairo says the latest violence is the
most serious since the army's intervention to remove President Morsi,
but this does not appear to have been a planned campaign to clear the
area around the mosque.
...
It appears that clashes began after some of the Morsi supporters
tried to block a main road in the area, and security forces responded.
The state news agency Mena quotes a security official as
saying they had been trying to stop fighting between rival sides, and
that eight security personnel had been injured.
The official added that live fire had not been used, only tear gas.
But our correspondent says medics at the hospital believed about 70%
of the casualties were caused by live fire - with many of the victims
hit in the chest or head by snipers firing from rooftops.
Ahmed Nashar, a Brotherhood spokesman witnessed what happened
near the Nasr City mosque where demonstrators built a wall to protect
themselves.
"When I arrived, bullets were whizzing past my ears," he told
the BBC. "Today was just brutal - people were fired at, with live
firearms."
Our correspondent says Morsi supporters are furious about the
role the military is taking, and in particular the head of the army,
General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whom they say is killing Egyptians.
Does anyone really see western troops being sent in to fight for Morsy? I wouldn't hold my breath. Much as President Hussein Obama is in love with the Muslim Brotherhood, he wouldn't dare put American troops at risk for them. Would he?
Cairo Airport refuses inbound flight from Syria, 'Palestinians' deported
The new Egyptian government knows how to do one thing right. Actually, make it two. On Monday, they sent an arriving flight from Syria back to its origin because the passengers didn't have visas, and 'Palestinians' arriving from all over the world were sent back to their departure points.
Officials at Cairo International Airport on Monday have refused an
inbound Syrian Airlines plane and requested it fly back to Latakia with
all its passengers on board, according to new regulations which state
that Syrian nationals must obtain a visa and security approval before
arriving in Cairo.
Syrian Airlines flight number 203, flying from Latakia with 95
passengers, had arrived in Cairo without foreknowledge of the new
procedures.
Fifty-five other Syrians arriving on a Middle East Airlines flight
from Beirut, and 39 others arriving on other airlines, were also denied
entry into Egypt.
Syrian nationals did not previously require visas to enter Egypt.
Electronic Intifada co-founder Ali Abunimah meanwhile reported that
Palestinians attempting to return home to the Gaza Strip via Cairo
airport have been deported by Egyptian authorities.
Palestinians have been deported to countries they arrived in Egypt from, reportedly at their own expense.
Palestinian writer Yousef M. Aljamal was forced to return to Kuala
Lumpur airport in Malaysia, after flying there from Auckland, New
Zealand, to obtain an Egyptian visa.
"All Palestinians who arrived yesterday were sent back to the
countries they came from," Aljamal tweeted on Monday, reporting that he
had also seen Palestinians being forced to travel back to Algeria,
Jordan, Tunisia and Canada.
And you thought the 'Palestinians' couldn't afford anything. Boo. Hoo.
Millions of anti-Morsi protesters around the
country erupted in celebrations after the televised announcement by the
army chief. Fireworks burst over crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where
men and women danced, shouting, “God is great” and “Long live Egypt.”
Fearing a violent reaction by Morsi’s Islamist
supporters, troops and armored vehicles deployed in the streets of
Cairo and elsewhere, surrounding Islamist rallies. Clashes erupted in
several provincial cities when Islamists opened fire on police, with at
least nine people killed, security officials said.
Gehad el-Haddad, a spokesman for the Muslim
Brotherhood party, said Morsi was under house arrest at a Presidential
Guard facility where he had been residing, and 12 presidential aides
also were under house arrest.
The army took control of state media and
blacked out TV stations operated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The head of
the Brotherhood’s political wing was arrested.
The ouster of Morsi throws Egypt on an
uncertain course, with a danger of further confrontation. It came after
four days of mass demonstrations even larger than those of the 2011 Arab
Spring that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Egyptians were angered that Morsi was giving
too much power to his Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists and had
failed to tackle the country’s mounting economic woes.
US President Hussein Obama called on the army to hand back control to civilians as soon as possible, but stopped short of calling it a coup, which would require him to suspend aid.
He said he was “deeply concerned” by the
military’s move to topple Morsi’s government and suspend Egypt’s
constitution. He said he was ordering the U.S. government to assess what
the military’s actions meant for U.S. foreign aid to Egypt — $1.5
billion a year in military and economic assistance.
The U.S. wasn’t taking sides in the conflict, committing itself only to democracy and respect for the rule of law, Obama said.
In a speech immediately before the army's ultimatum expired, Morsy did call it a coup.
Oh my: Morsy under house arrest - LIVE TV FROM EGYPT
Reports indicate that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsy was placed under house arrest by Egypt's powerful military after Wednesday's deadline for him to accept protester demands expired (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is reportedly
under house arrest after the military ultimatum expired Wednesday,
reports Al Hayat TV.
Morsi's spokesman denied the report, according to ABC News, but word of the house arrest provoked cheers in Tahrir Square.
This comes as Egypt's military moved to tighten its control on key institutions before their afternoon ultimatum expired.
The
military stationed officers in the newsroom of state television on the
banks of the Nile River in central Cairo. Troops were deployed in
news-production areas.
Officers from the army's media department
moved inside the newsroom and were monitoring output, though not yet
interfering, staffers said, speaking on condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized to talk about the arrangements.
This
move shows the military's preparation for an almost certain push to
remove the country's Islamist president when an afternoon ultimatum
expires.
The military has to tread a fine line.
Experts watching the situation feel that Morsi lost the trust of the
people early on when he and the Muslim Brotherhood took power and made
changes to the country's constitution.
"It is not the economy.
It is the quest for freedom and feeling that they have been betrayed and
the resenting to replace a dictatorship of Mubarak by a theocracy
dictatorship, where it will be the dictator is ruling but garbing
himself in religion," said Dr. Maher Hathout with the Muslim Public
Affairs Council.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is urging Morsi to address the
people's grievances and the White House is also warning Egypt's military
that a coup could jeopardize relations with the United States.
It will be interesting to see whether other Arab spring countries (Tunisia, Libya, Syria), which have been or are in the process of being taken over by Islamist rulers will have similar reactions to the reaction in Egypt. And while Dr. Hathout is dismissive of the role the economy is playing in this, the Egyptian economy is a complete and total basket case, and there's no way that isn't (and won't in the future) playing a role here.
As to Obama, he is continuing to stand by Morsy and the Muslim Brotherhood, and that could yet have serious backlash against the United States.
Here's live television from Egypt (sorry, Arabic only).
For those who have forgotten just what Eltahaway did, please go to that last link. It's quite entertaining.
Eltahaway has already admitted her guilt - at least outside the court room.
After all this agitation, Eltahawy has now decided that it was
finally time to do what one could have expected from a prominent writer
long ago, and she has taken to the pages of the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) website to make her case in writing.
It is quite obviously a weak case. The headline of her post announces “If anti-Muslim ads are protected, so must be my free speech right to protest”
– but the text reveals that even Eltahawy is aware that her act of
vandalism wasn’t really an exercise of free speech, because she admits:
“I broke the law, yes.”
But Eltahawy adds defiantly: “So what? I broke it to make a point of
principle. Eleven years after the 9/11 attacks, American Muslims are
still being bullied and vilified.”
Indeed, Eltahawy tries hard to make the case that there is at least
some “coincidental correlation” between the ads that denounce violent
jihad as savage and various incidents of anti-Muslim violence and
bigotry.
"Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" reads the banner atop the
site where the @USEmbassyCairo
Twitter feed sat until this morning. A cached
version of the page shows that the last tweet was a link to the Daily Show'sJon Stewart
talking about the Egyptian government's arrest of Stewart's Egyptian
doppelganger Bassem Youssef, who was
detained and fined by the Egyptian police on the charge of insulting Islam and
President Mohamed Morsy.
"It's inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in
such negative political propaganda," the official Twitter feed for the Egyptian
presidency said
on their own feed Tuesday. The Egyptian presidency tweet was directed at
the Cairo Embassy, the Daily Show, and Youssef himself.
The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the political wing of
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, has been lashing out at Embassy Cairo repeatedly on
its
own Twitter feed.
"Another undiplomatic & unwise move by @USEmbassyCairo, taking sides
in an ongoing investigation & disregarding Egyptian law & culture," the
FJP tweeted Tuesday.
A State Department official told The Cable Wednesday that the decision to take down Embassy Cairo's
Twitter page was made by U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson without the consultation of the State Department in
Washington. Foggy Bottom is urging Embassy Cairo to put the page back up, lest
it appear that the United States is caving to the online pressure.
"This not a permanent shutdown. Embassy Cairo considers this
to be temporary. They want to put new procedures in place," the official said.
...
UPDATE 12:20 : The Embassy Cairo Twitter feed is back up and running, although the controversial tweet in question has been deleted.
UPDATE: 1:00 : Nuland said at Wednesday's briefing that the Embassy
viewed the tweet as a mistake but she defended the State Department's
criticism of the Egyptian government on the issue.
"We've had some glitches with the way the twitter feed has
been managed. This is regrettably not the first time. Embassy Cairo is looking
at how to manage these glitches," she said. "They came to the conclusion that the decision to tweet it
in the first place didn't accord with post management of the site."
What is wrong with the United States these days? Why does it insist on showing weakness to the Arab Muslim world? (Answer: Hussein Obama).
This picturewas taken overlooking Cairo's Tahrir Square on Tuesday night (Hat Tip: Sunlight).
Let's go to the videotape.
The report makes it sound like a football tailgate party. But it's not.
On Wednesday, there were more clashes in Tahrir Square.
Dozens of police officers
-- backed by trucks firing tear gas -- advanced across Simon Boulevard
Square, arresting many young people, some of whom were beaten by
officers. Protesters continued to throw stones at police.
The latest clashes come
after huge numbers of protesters swarmed into the square Tuesday night
into Wednesday, hoping to revive a democratic groundswell that swept the
country's former strongman from power nearly two years ago.
Observers suggested the
crowds were the biggest seen since former strongman Hosni Mubarak was
forced out early last year following days of street protests.
...
But Morsy showed no signs of backing down.
Egypt's Cabinet chief,
Mohamed Refa'a al-Tahtawi, said there will be no retreat from the
constitutional decree, state-run EGYNews reported. He reportedly
stressed the president would not back down because his actions were
motivated by democratic aims.
Mahmoud Ghozlan, a
spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsy's political movement, said
Wednesday that it would stage nationwide protests Saturday in support of
Morsy and his decree.
The Muslim Brotherhood
called off a planned "million man" protest Monday amid concerns about
political tensions and potential violence.
There were no official
crowd estimates for Tuesday night's demonstrations, but the square was
packed as protesters clogged the roundabout and tents filled the grassy
area in the middle. The rally lasted into early Wednesday, with some
demonstrators singing and playing drums and guitars while others
listened to speeches.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
