NINE YEARS since last visit by an Egyptian foreign minister
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukhry is in Israel this afternoon to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss - what else - how to advance the 'peace process' with the 'Palestinians.' It is the first visit to Israel by an Egyptian Foreign Minister in NINE YEARS.
Netanyahu said he would meet with Shoukry twice on Sunday, once in the afternoon and again in the evening. Netanyahu's special envoy Isaac Molho is responsible with coordinating Shoukry's visit, the premier said.
"The visit today is important in many ways," Netanyahu said at the start of Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting. "It shows the change in relations between Israel and Egypt, including Sissi's important call to advance the peace process [both] with the Palestinians and with Arab states.
Two weeks ago Shoukry met Palestinian President Abbas in Ramallah.
For the record, the last time an Egyptian President visited Israel was when Hosni Mubarak came to Yitzchak Rabin's funeral... in 1995.
None of this is surprising. Here's how the average Egyptian thinks of peace with Israel. I took it from the Egyptain blog, Sandmonkey.
But
then I rememebrd that we- the majority of us anyway- don't want peace
with Israel, and are not interested in any real dialogue with them. We
weren't then and we are not now. The Entire peace process has always
been about getting the land back, not establishing better relations.
Even when we do get the land back, it's not enough. People in Egypt
lament daily the Camp David treaty that prevents us from fighting.
In
Gaza they never stopped trying to attack Israel. In Lebanon Hezbollah
continued attacking even after the Israeli withdrawel. And the people-
the majority of the arab population- support it. Very few of us are
really interested in having any lasting Peace or co-existance. I mean,
if our left is asking for war, what do you think the rest of the
population is thinking?
I think that the Israeli want peace with
us because they don't want their lives disrupted. They don't want to
have the IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza, rockets coming into their towns
from Hamas or having to go to wars against Hezbollah to get their
soldiers back. I think they want peace because they want their peace of
mind. They view us as if we were a headache. We view them as if they
are a cancer.
All of which leads the average Israeli to conclude that peace with the Arabs isn't really worth the price in land that we'd have to pay - there won't be real peace.
Tahrir Square, Cairo, exploding once again after gov't drops all charges against former president Mubarak. #Egypt
— James Miller (@MillerMENA) November 29, 2014
Former Egyptian Interior Minister: We Gave CIA Early Warning about 9/11
Egypt's former interior minister testifies in his trial (for being part of the Mubarak government) that Egypt warned the CIA about 9/11 in advance, but the CIA never passed the warning on, because... you won't believe why.
Kerry to go over government's head without going over government's head?
US Secretary of State John FN Kerry is 'mulling' speaking directly to the 'Israeli people' (not God forbid the Jews) in a bid to convince us that we should support 'concessions' to the 'Palestinians.' Kerry claims he does not want to go over Prime Minister Netanyahu's head, but....
Kerry is mulling the option of delivering a speech directly to the
Israeli public which would be similar to a "state of the union" address.
The secretary has instructed officials in the American embassy to begin
examining the logistical and practical aspects of a Kerry speech.
The idea of a speech is being examined in concert with Israeli
officials, for the Americans have made it clear that they have no
intention of "going over the head" of the government in Jerusalem.
Instead, the goal of the speech would be to help Netanyahu gain more
support from the Israeli public as the secretary puts the finishing
touches on the framework agreement that is due to serve as the basis for
further negotiations between Israel and the PA.
If Kerry does go forward with the speech, it would be along the lines of
remarks he delivered to the Saban Forum this past December. Many in
attendance at the event said that the secretary of state's remarks were
akin to "an almost religious sermon." Kerry is likely to emphasize to
the Israeli public the cost of refusing to move forward in the peace
process and the destructive repercussions that would befall Israel in
the event that talks with Ramallah collapse.
In other words, if we don't 'move ahead,' he will try to convince us that the United States (where almost as few people - as a percentage - support this 'process' as is the case here) is going to rain fire and brimstone on us from the sky. He will try to convince us that the Europeans - who are threatening us with sanctions at his behest - will impose sanctions on us at his behest if we don't 'move ahead.' For this we should agree to commit suicide?
And of course he won't give any such speech to the 'Palestinians.' Their 'leadership' wouldn't allow it and they don't have to make any concessions anyway.
Then there's this amusing tidbit:
Kerry is now trying to create linkage between a Palestinian demand that
east Jerusalem be mentioned as the future capital of Palestine and
Israel's demand for Palestinian recognition of it as a Jewish state. He
is hard at work in trying to lobby Arab governments to apply pressure on
PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who has suddenly got a case of cold feet
and is hesitating.
This is where the absence of Hosni Mubarak is most felt. It was Mubarak
who would intervene on behalf of Washington in moments like these. Right
now, there is no responsible adult in Egypt who can avail himself to
apply diplomatic pressure on the Palestinian Authority. That is a shame.
And who is the one who cut Mubarak loose, leading to his downfall, in the first place? Who was the first 'world leader' to call on Mubarak to resign?
It's time to show John Kerry the door, and suffer the consequences, if any. The sky is not falling.
It was a moment of high symbolism. More than 50 years after the Cuban
Revolution, the United States and Cuba still do not have diplomatic
relations. The President has eased some of the economic embargo and
travel restrictions that the administration of President George W. Bush
strongly enforced, but relations still are tense. Cuba continues to
imprison an American citizen, Alan Gross, who was arrested in 2009 on
charges of attempting to destabilize the Cuban government.
Obama knew, of course, that Castro would be on stage. But refusing to
shake Castro's hand would not have been in keeping with Mandela's
legacy of reconciliation. And it was not the first handshake between
American-Cuban leaders. In 2000, at the United Nations, then-President
Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro, the leader of the Cuban
Revolution, its first revolutionary president, and Raul's brother.
Obama says he wants to improve relations with Cuba, but disagreements
over human rights violations and other issues continue to keep the
countries apart.
The handshake came before Obama's speech, in which he made remarks about reconciliation.
Somehow, I think Ronald Reagan would have avoided that handshake. And somehow, if Netanyahu or Peres had shown up, I can think of a lot of 'world leaders' who would have avoided shaking their hands.
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.
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.'
Convening on Wednesday at the Cairo jail where Mubarak is held, the
court upheld a petition from his lawyer demanding the release of the man
who ruled Egypt for 30 years until he was overthrown during the
uprisings that swept the Arab world in early 2011.
Judicial and
security sources said the court had ordered Mubarak's release. His
lawyer, Fareed al-Deeb, confirmed this as he left Tora prison after the
session. Asked when Mubarak would go free, he told Reuters: "Maybe
tomorrow".
Mubarak, 85, was sentenced to life in prison last year
for failing to prevent the killing of demonstrators. But a court
accepted his appeal earlier this year and ordered a retrial.
The
ailing former president probably has no political future. But many
Egyptians would see his release as the rehabilitation of an old order
that endured through six decades of military-backed rule - and even a
reversal of the pro-democracy revolt that toppled him.
...
Mubarak is still being retried on charges of complicity in the killing
of protesters during the revolt against him, but he has already served
the maximum pre-trial detention in that case.
The court ruling
removed the last legal ground for his imprisonment in connection with a
corruption case, following a similar decision in another corruption case
on Monday.
If I were him, I'd seek asylum in another country as soon as possible.
Change: Mubarak to be freed in next 48 hours - UPDATED
Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is to be released within the next 48 hours according to a report from Reuters in Israel Hayom.
Hosni Mubarak, the former Egyptian president
overthrown in an uprising in 2011, will be released from jail in the
next 48 hours after a prosecutor cleared him in a corruption case, his
lawyer, Fareed El-Deeb, told Reuters on Monday.
He was speaking after judicial authorities ordered Mubarak released in one of the remaining corruption cases against him.
The only legal grounds for Mubarak's continued
detention rest on another corruption case which will be cleared up
later this week, Deeb said.
In June 2012, Mubarak was sentenced to life
imprisonment by an Egyptian court for failing to prevent the killing of
more than 900 protesters during the 2011 uprising that forced him from
power. In January 2013, the court ordered a retrial granting an appeal
of the former autocrat’s life sentence.
"All we have left is a simple administrative
procedure that should take no more than 48 hours. He should be freed by
the end of the week," Deeb said.
Mubarak, 85, still faces a retrial on charges of complicity in the murder of protesters during the 2011 revolt.
Something tells me he won't get - or take - a call from Obama either.
Without confirming that Mubarak would be
freed, a judicial source said the former leader would spend another two
weeks behind bars before judicial authorities made a final decision in
the outstanding case against him.
Mubarak,
along with his interior minister, was convicted and sentenced to life
in prison last year for failing to stop the killing of protesters in the
revolt that swept him from power.
He
still faces a retrial in that case after appeals from the prosecution
and defense, but this would not necessarily require him to stay in jail.
Mubarak did not appear at a hearing in the case on Saturday. He was
also absent from Monday's proceedings.
Mubarak,
who ruled Egypt for 30 years, is being held at Tora prison on the
southern outskirts of Cairo, the facility where senior members of the
Muslim Brotherhood have been detained since they were arrested in a
crackdown on the organization that began in July.
The
military removed President Mohamed Mursi, a senior Brotherhood
official, on July 3 after mass protests against his rule. Mursi is in
detention at an undisclosed location.
I sure hope Mubarak and the Brotherhood are nowhere near each other. At least Morsy is apparently someplace else. In any event, it does appear that Mubarak will be released from jail. If I were him, I would use the opportunity to move to another country.
For the same reason, the Gulf monarchies, having weathered the
immediate storms of the Arab spring and understanding the longer-term
threat the Brotherhood represents, have supplanted Washington as Cairo’s
principal paymasters: The $1.5 billion subvention to Egypt was always a
drop in the great sucking maw of the US Treasury; compared to what the
Saudis and the Emirs are ponying up, it’s looking less and less
consequential from the Nile end, too.
Out in the wider world,
Putin figures there’s a regional power play to be made, and that Moscow
can be back in Cairo in a big way for the first time in four decades.
All
these parties are pursuing their strategic interest. Does the United
States have such a thing anymore? Not so’s you’d notice. As a result,
the factions in Egypt are united only in their contempt for Washington.
Obama is despised by Sisi and the generals for being fundamentally
unserious; by the Brotherhood for stringing along with the coup; by the
Copts for standing by as the Brothers take it out on them; and by the
small number of genuine democrats in Egypt for his witless promotion of
Morsi’s thugs as the dawning of democracy. Any “national-unity
government” of the kind the usual deluded twits are urging on Egypt
would be united only in its unanimous loathing of Obama, his secretaries
of state, and his inept ambassador.
Meanwhile, out on the
streets, Washington is reviled both for standing by Mubarak too long and
for pushing him out too soon (eighty per cent of Egyptians say things
are worse than under the old man).
And, with the 2011 “Facebook Revolution” all out of “Likes”, the King
of Jordan and the Gulf emirs understand the meaning of the ailing,
abandoned strongman in his military prison cell in purely geopolitical
terms – that (as Bernard Lewis used to warn) America is harmless as an
enemy but treacherous as a friend.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said on Tuesday
she found that deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was well and had
access to television and newspapers when she visited him.
Ashton
was speaking to journalists after meeting Morsi at an undisclosed
location on Monday night. "I've tried to make sure that his family know
he is well," said Ashton.
Ashton, who is trying to mediate a resolution to Egypt's political
crisis, added: "I said I wouldn't come unless I could see him (Morsi)."
Asked about a media report that she had offered Morsi a "safe exit", she
replied: "I did nothing of the kind."
European Union foreign
policy chief Catherine Ashton held two hours of "in depth" discussions
with Morsi late on Monday, her spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic said on
Twitter. Kocijancic did not say where the talks had taken place.
A lot better than the Brotherhood treated Mubarak.... And no one was allowed to meet Mubarak.
The mainstream media won't tell you this, but two of the biggest targets of the massive protests in Egypt are Barack Hussein Obama and his ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson.
Doug Ross publishes 15 pictures of the Egyptian protests that you won't see in the legacy media. One of them is above and another is below. You can see the rest here.
On Monday evening, the Egyptian military gave the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsy 48 hours to meet the protesters' demands. Otherwise, the military will move in.
As a main party in the considerations of the
future and based on their patriotic and historic responsibilities to
protect security and stability, the Armed Forces state the following:
— The Armed Forces will not be a party in the
circles of politics or governance and are not willing to step out of the
role defined for them by the basic ideals of democracy based on the
will of the people.
— The national security of the state is
exposed to extreme danger by the developments the nation is witnessing,
and this places a responsibility on us, each according to his position,
to act as is proper to avert these dangers. The armed forces sensed
early on the dangers of the current situation and the demands the great
people have at this time. Therefore, it previously set a deadline of a
week for all political forces in the country to come to a consensus and
get out of this crisis. However, the week has passed without any sign of
an initiative. This is what led to the people coming out with
determination and resolve, in their full freedom, in this glorious way,
which inspired surprise, respect and attention at the domestic, regional
and international levels.
— Wasting more time will only bring more
division and conflict, which we have warned about and continue to warn
about. The noble people have suffered and have found no one to treat
them with kindness or sympathize with them. That puts a moral and
psychological burden on the armed forces, which find it obligatory that
everyone drop everything and embrace these proud people, which have
shown they are ready to do the impossible if only they feels there is
loyalty and dedication to them.
— The Armed Forces repeat their call for the
people’s demands to be met and give everyone 48 hours as a last chance
to shoulder the burden of the historic moment that is happening in the
nation, which will not forgive or tolerate any party that is lax in
shouldering its responsibility.
— The Armed Forces put everyone on notice that
if the demands of the people are not realized in the given time period,
it will be obliged by its patriotic and historic responsibilities and
by its respect for the demands of the great Egyptian people to announce a
road map for the future and the steps for overseeing its
implementation, with participation of all patriotic and sincere parties
and movements — including the youth, who set off the glorious revolution
and continue to do so — without excluding anyone.
The military’s statement puts enormous
pressure on Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. So far, the president has
vowed he will remain in his position, but the opposition and crowds in
the street — who numbered in the millions nationwide on Sunday — have
made clear they will accept nothing less than his departure and a
transition to early presidential elections.
That makes action by the generals when the
deadline runs out nearly inevitable, since a deal seems unlikely. The
statement did not define the “people’s demands” that must be met. But it
strongly suggested that Sunday’s gigantic rallies expressed the desire
of Egyptians, raising the likelihood it would insist on Morsi’s
departure.
An army move against Morsi, however, risks a backlash from his Islamist supporters, who include hard-line former militants.
Morsi met Monday with el-Sissi and Prime
Minister Hesham Kandil, according to the president’s Facebook page,
without giving further details.
Already, the military’s presence in Cairo has
increased at sensitive spots the past two days. Troops on Monday manned
checkpoints on roads leading to a pro-Morsi rally of Islamists near his
palace. They checked cars for weapons, after repeated reports some
Islamists were arming themselves.
Morsi’s backers have been infuriated by what
they call an opposition move to forcibly overthrow Egypt’s first
president chosen in a democratic election. Some see the campaign as
aimed at defeating the “Islamist project.”
In the evening, the pro-president rally
outside the Rabia al-Adawiya Mosque not far from the Ittihadiya palace
also swelled, though it was eclipsed by the opposition rallies. Its
participants blew whistles and waved banners with Morsi’s picture on it.
“The military has sacrificed legitimacy. There
will be a civil war,” Manal Shouib, a 47-year-old physiotherapist at
the pro-president rally outside the Rabia al-Adawiya Mosque not far from
Ittihadiya.
Morsy's cabinet is abandoning ship with 11 members resigning already. Read the whole thing.
And Obama? I'm so glad you asked. He's urging 'restraint,' which sounds like the protester's version of voting 'present' (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
President Obama said Monday that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi
has more work to do to create a “responsive and truly representative”
government, sidestepping the question of whether Morsi should step down
amid growing demands from protesters to do so.
Obama, who arrived
in Tanzania on Monday, said his administration has encouraged the Morsi
government to “reach out to the opposition and work through these
issues in a political process.”
But Obama told reporters, “It’s
not the U.S. job to determine what that process is. But what we have
said is, ‘Go through processes that are legitimate and observe rule of
law.’”
Now that's a double standard when you consider than in 2011, it took about two weeks for Obama to call on Hosni Mubarak to resign. But that's because Obama considers his good friend Morsy's election to be 'legitimate,' while Mubarak was not. Morsy isn't the first (or last) fascist to win an election, and the fact that he won an election doesn't make his behavior legitimate....
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Sunday, March 17.
1) When elephants crash land
Recently, I brought up an example of how Professor Barry Rubin handled a
mistake. First he admitted it. Then he explained the forces involved.
His behavior showed a few things.
1) He is serious about what he has written.
2) He respects his audience's intelligence.
Neither of these qualities can be attributed to Thomas Friedman.
A few weeks ago, Friedman wrote a column in which he faulted the Muslim
Brotherhood for failing to govern Egypt effectively. Nowhere, in the
essay does Friedman acknowledge that he had misunderstood the revolution
in Egypt from the start.
Well, that’s what happened here. The ferocity and popularity of
Mubarak’s ouster should have told Israelis that they need to get to work
immediately on building a relationship with the dynamic new popular
trend here, not to be trying to cling to a dictator who was totally out
of touch with his people. And, as we sit here today, the popular trend
is not with the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, what makes the uprising here
so impressive – and in that sense so dangerous to other autocracies in
the region – is precisely the fact that it is not owned by, and was not
inspired by, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Finally, there is the issue of the Muslim Brotherhood itself. While the
likelihood of the Brotherhood taking power in the near future is very
low, the chance of it gaining power in the long run is now enhanced. At
any rate, the Brotherhood is going to be an important force in Egypt and
perhaps an influence on the government. As it spreads its message of
hate, this is not likely to lead to a love-fest for Israel.
...
But won’t the Egyptians just concentrate on raising living standards and
enjoying freedoms? Perhaps. Yet the problem is that there is no money
for improving the Egyptian economy and angry frustration is more likely
than prosperity. We have seen often in the Arab world how a government
that cannot deliver the goods provides foreign scapegoats instead.
Last year, when it became clear that the Muslim Brotherhood had emerged as the leading force of the revolution, Friedman wrote Watching Elephants Fly:
SOMEDAY I’d love to create a journalism course based on covering the
uprising in Egypt, now approaching its first anniversary. Lesson No. 1
would be the following: Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and
take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying.
No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see
it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why
the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.
If you do, the first thing you’ll write is that the Islamist parties —
the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the
secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free
Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats.
To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic,
anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to
be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be
impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the
contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for
jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics
today.
The Islamists were taking power and here's Friedman assuring us that
they will be moderated by the responsibilities of governance. Note too,
how he uses his authority as a journalist to assure us that he knows
more than the rest of us. (I guess this is an implicit acknowledgement
that he got the Egyptian revolution wrong at first. As an admission it's
a pretty weak one.)
But there’s even more irony here. These women are already living lives
governed by Sharia and, as traditionalists, are happy (and told to be
happy) with that situation. Thus, they have ample reason for supporting
Islamists. There is nothing surprising in their political behavior,
except to people like Friedman who predicted last year they would back
liberal, Westernized Facebook kids.
The Brotherhood, though, doesn’t just need a new governing strategy. It
needs to understand that its version of political Islam — which is
resistant to women’s empowerment and religious and political pluralism —
might be sustainable if you are Iran or Saudi Arabia, and you have huge
reserves of oil and gas to buy off all the contradictions between your
ideology and economic growth. But if you are Egypt and basically your
only natural resource is your people — men and women — you need to be as
open to the world and modernity as possible to unleash all of their
potential for growth.
On top of that, Friedman uses that “needs to understand” phrase, so
beloved by editorialists but totally absurd when dealing with dictators.
Well, what if they don’t understand, Mr. Friedman?
Friedman's latest does not acknowledge that he had been wrong for the
past two years about Egypt. In fact the tone of his article is more a
message to the Muslim Brotherhood, "Hey, guys, you're getting this
revolution thing wrong." Worse, his final paragraph reads:
It would not be healthy for us to re-create with the Muslim Brotherhood
the bargain we had with Mubarak. That is, just be nice to Israel and
nasty to the jihadists and you can do whatever you want to your own
people out back. It also won’t be possible. The Egyptian people
tolerated that under Mubarak for years. But now they are mobilized, and
they have lost their fear. Both we and Morsi need to understand that
this old bargain is not sustainable any longer.
To Friedman, the problem isn't even really with the Muslim Brotherhood
but with the United States. The United States was so concerned about
Israel it allowed Mubarak to oppress his own people for thirty years.
Israel isn't even a factor here. But Friedman brings it in because it
sounds good to him. In Friedman's world everyone is wrong but him.
That works for him. He has a great high profile job and lots of people
pay good money to hear him speak. However since he has no capacity for
self-criticism, it's unlikely that you'll learn anything of value from
him except for a few meaningless pithy phrases.
If you want to learn something, read Barry Rubin. Unfortunately too many
of our policy makers are drawn in by Thomas Friedman's clever sounding
but ultimately meaningless tropes.
2) The Friedman deficit
"What ails the Arab world is a deficit of freedom, a deficit of modern education and a deficit of women’s empowerment." Thomas Friedman, A Festival of Lies, March 24, 2012
Ditto in Syria and Libya. In their essay, the study’s co-editors,
Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, note that from 2006 to 2011, up to
60 percent of Syria’s land experienced the worst drought ever recorded
there — at a time when Syria’s population was exploding and its corrupt
and inefficient regime was proving incapable of managing the stress.
In 2009, they noted, the U.N. and other international agencies reported
that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result
of the great drought, which led to “a massive exodus of farmers,
herders, and agriculturally dependent rural families from the Syrian
countryside to the cities,” fueling unrest. The future does not look
much brighter. “On a scale of wetness conditions,” Femia and Werrell
note, “ ‘where a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought,’ a
2010 report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that
Syria and its neighbors face projected readings of -8 to -15 as a result
of climatic changes in the next 25 years.” Similar trends, they note,
are true for Libya, whose “primary source of water is a finite cache of
fossilized groundwater, which already has been severely stressed while
coastal aquifers have been progressively invaded by seawater.”
Friedman sees the water crisis as a major problem going forward.
As Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies conclude in their essay, “fledgling democracies with
weak institutions might find it even harder to deal with the root
problems than the regimes they replace, and they may be more vulnerable
to further unrest as a result.” Yikes.
Friedman is great at quoting other experts. However, there's one story he missed, How Israel beat the drought:
Kushnir’s answers: Yes, Israelis must still be wise with their water
use. Yes, emphatically, this is a desert region, desperately short of
natural water. And yes, we have indeed been worried for years about the
possibility of water shortages provoking conflict.
But for Israel, for the foreseeable future, Kushnir says, the water
crisis is over. And not because this happens to have been one of the
wettest winters in years. Rather, he says, an insistent refusal to let
the country be constrained by insufficient natural water sources — a
refusal that dates back to David Ben-Gurion’s decision to build the
National Water Carrier in the 1950s, the most significant infrastructure
investment of Israel’s early years — led Israel first into large-scale
water recycling, and over the past decade into major desalination
projects. The result, as of early 2013, is that the Water Authority
feels it can say with confidence that Israel has beaten the drought.
It's true that Israel's area is much smaller than any of the countries,
so maybe solutions that work for Israel won't work for Syria, Libya or
Egypt. On the other hand Israel has the technology and know-how to
alleviate the effects of drought. Maybe Friedman didn't see the article
about Israel's success. But is it conceivable that he would have written
something like:
Ironically the struggling governments of the Middle East could benefit
by putting aside their irrational hatred of Israel and turning to the
Jewish state to learn about desalinization and water management.
Of course not.
In 2002, Friedman's most famous column was his "speech in the drawer" column
in which he announced that (then) Crown Prince Abdullah would propose
normalization with Israel at the upcoming Arab summit if Israel would
agree to end the occupation on the terms dictated by the Arab League.
What was astounding about the column is how overwhelmed Friedman was by
the proposal. Abudllah's offer was very specific about its demands on
Israel and very nebulous about what was promised to Israel in exchange.
There was no unequivocal statement to the effect of "In return for
complying with our conditions, the Arab League promises to treat Israel
as it does any other nation." Rather there were questions as to the
degree of normalization promised.
What mattered to Friedman, was not how poorly Mubarak, Assad or Qaddafi
were persecuting their own people at that time, but whether they were
willing to make the Palestinian cause their first priority. It didn't
make a difference that Israel was now fighting a terror war directed by
Arafat, Friedman promoted this proposal, which put pressure on Israel,
rather than suggesting any alternative that would have pressured the
Palestinians to stop their violence.
By promoting the Abdullah proposal, Friedman was normalizing the Arab
rejection of Israel. He effectively endorsed the idea that Arab concern
for the Palestinians was sufficient reason for them to treat Israel as a
pariah. Concern for Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Libya or Saudi Arabia was
absent from his writing back then.
Over the years Friedman would sometimes refer to the deficits of the
Arab world. To be sure he'd recommend some form of Westernization as a
cure for these deficits. Never, though, did Friedman suggest that
accepting Israel and eschewing antisemitism would be a necessary step
for these countries to take.
So when Thomas Friedman wrote about droughts in the Arab world it is
inconceivable that he'd have suggested that Egypt or Libya turn to
Israel for help. (Right now even water technology won't help Syria.) To
Friedman Israel is an inconvenience when it comes to the Middle East,
not a benefit.
Two years on, Soccer Dad looks back at the Egyptian Revolution.
The revolution + 2
Two years ago last week, growing protests against Hosni Mubarak
eventually (with a nudge from the military) forced him from power.
Here's an arbitrary sampling of news and comment from the New York Times
of those momentous events, plus contrasts to current commentary and
news.
Egypt’s revolution earned many names in 18 days: Revolution of the
Youth, of the People, of Anger, of Freedom, of the Hungry, and most
poetically, the Revolution of Light. In the end, it was called the
January 25 Revolution, the date of the first protest. In that, it was a
departure from another revolution, that of July 26, when Gamal Abdel
Nasser and fellow officers seized power from a decadent king and
mobilized Egypt for wars with Israel. It evolved into something far less
ambitious: a mantra of security and stability, in which Egyptians and
many Arabs were forced to give up their rights.
Even in his very last days, Mr. Mubarak understood the conflict in those
terms; in his last speech to the nation, he spoke of security and
stability 10 times. The protesters in Cairo wrecked the regional
formula, though their ambitions have yet to offer a paradigm to replace
it. “Leaders in the Arab world are weaker now,” said Sadiq al-Azm, a
prominent Syrian thinker and writer.
Whatever order emerges will almost certainly be less favorable to Israel
and the United States, both symbols to many protesters of Egyptian
subservience. It was no coincidence that the most outspoken proponents
of Mr. Mubarak’s rule were Israel and Saudi Arabia who, with Egypt,
formed the spine of American dominance in the region. Nor will economic
reforms of the kind mandated by the International Monetary Fund make
headway in a country that blames them for creating a class of crony
capitalists.
The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect
since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and
Israel’s intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President
Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.
According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama’s policy
debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early
on, a senior official said, that “this was a trend” that could spread to
other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By
the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38
meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a
chance to create an alternative to “the Al Qaeda narrative” of Western
interference.
American officials had seen no evidence of overtly anti-American or
anti-Western sentiment. “When we saw people bringing their children to
Tahrir Square, wanting to see history being made, we knew this was
something different,” one official said.
The unrest was an acute embarrassment for Iranian leaders, who had
sought to portray the toppling of two secular rulers, Zine el-Abidine
Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, as a triumph of popular
support for Islam in the Arab world. They had refused permission to
Iranian opposition groups seeking to march in solidarity with the
Egyptians, and warned journalists and photographers based in the
country, with success, not to report on the protests.
Iranian demonstrators portrayed the Arab insurrections as a different
kind of triumph. “Mubarak, Ben Ali, now it’s time for Sayyid Ali!”
Iranian protesters chanted in Persian on videos posted online that
appeared to be from Tehran, referring to the country’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Iranian authorities have shown that they will not hesitate to crush
demonstrations with deadly force. Other governments across the Middle
East and the Persian Gulf also moved aggressively to stamp out protests
on Monday.
President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret
report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without
sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe
for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified
likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how
the administration could push for political change in countries with
autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States,
these officials said.
The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that
has bedeviled the White House’s approach toward Egypt and other
countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests
and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic
demands of the protesters.
This could get interesting — for all the region’s autocrats. Egypt’s
youthful and resourceful democrats are just getting started. Up to now,
the democracy movement in the Arab world was largely confined to the
U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, which, because it was U.S.-led, has not
been able to serve as a model for emulation. If, and it remains a big
if, Egypt can now make the transition to democracy, led by its own youth
and under the protection of its own armed forces, watch out. The
message coming out of Cairo will be: We tried Nasserism; we tried
Islamism; and now we’re trying democracy. But not democracy imported
from Britain or delivered by America — democracy conceived, gestated and
born in Tahrir Square. That will resonate among Arabs — and in Iran.
It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in American relations to the Arab world. The
truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in
Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East
for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil
flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last
month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a
Ben Ali or a Mubarak.
Perhaps the most effective antidote to 9/11 will prove to be 2/11,
the day Hosni Mubarak conceded the game was up with his 30-year-old
dictatorship and left town under military escort for the beach.
We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems
of government on them. We’ve tried wars on terror. We’ve tried spending
billions of dollars. What we haven’t tried is tackling what’s been
rotten in the Arab world by helping a homegrown, bottom-up movement for
change turn a U.S.-backed police state into a stable democracy.
This is the critical opportunity Egypt now presents. Islamist radicalism
has thrived on the American double standards evident in strong support
for the likes of Mubarak’s regime. It has prospered from the very brutal
repression that was supposedly essential to stop the jihadists. And it
has benefited from the reduction of tens of millions of Arab citizens to
mere objects, shorn of dignity, and so more inclined to seek meaning in
absolutist movements of violence.
Thus, Al-Dardery said, the significance of Egypt's 2011 uprising was
that it represented the first opportunity for Egyptians to finally
answer collectively, "What is the future of Egypt? Where Egypt should
go?" And the Muslim Brotherhood's successive electoral victories have
legitimized its preferred formula, which reconciles "the Islamic
tradition with...Euro-American developments." Al-Dardery traced this
approach back to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Islamic
thinkers such as Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida, as well as Brotherhood
founder Hassan al-Banna, who aimed "to take from Europe the best we
could, add it to the best traditions we have, and try to create the
third alternative."
It bears emphasizing that this "third alternative" takes "Euro-American
developments" -- specifically western scientific advances and
administrative procedures, such as electoral politics -- but uses them
to advance the Brotherhood's "Islamic tradition," which emphasizes
"instituting the sharia" and, thereafter, building a "global Islamic
state." This approach makes it different from, say, traditional
Salafists, who until recently largely rejected western advancements as
illicit "innovations." But the Brotherhood's approach ultimately views
western values -- such as political secularism and pluralism -- as
imports against which, according to Al-Dardery, Egyptians have been
fighting for 213 years.
This is, of course, not what motivated most of the revolutionaries who
bravely took to Tahrir Square two years ago, demanding political freedom
and touting their ecumenism. But the Islamist organization that seized
the revolutionaries' initial momentum has been fighting a very different
battle for nearly a century, and Washington should note that the
Brotherhood essentially views Egypt's revolution as part of an ongoing
struggle against western influence and values. One of the Brotherhood's
own spokesmen, after all, said as much in Washington.
Alas, the Arab Spring may have swept away one generation of dictators
but it did not do away with the “Little Prince” phenomenon. David
Schenker, perhaps Washington’s most consistently correct Arab affairs
analyst, notes the pattern has now re-emerged in Cairo. According to the
Associated Press:
Egypt’s aviation minister says the hiring of President Mohammed
Morsi’s son to a highly-paid government job was justified, dismissing
accusations of nepotism… Omar, one of the president’s five children and a
recent university graduate, got the internally-advertised job in a
department that usually hires with a starting monthly salary of $5,000.
Such a figure is unheard of for new graduates in Egypt, where the
starting salary for a government job can be as low as $75.
Clearly, the Muslim Brotherhood is just as corrupt as the regime it replaced, if not more so.
Islamist Era: Indeed, the rise of revolutionary Islamism put
additional Peer Pressure on all Arab regimes. They needed the Israel
issue more for Cynical Manipulation and, except for the always moderate
Jordanian regime and the Sadat-altered Egyptian one, could not afford to
think of peace. The non-Saudi Persian Gulf states were tempted,
however, as were the main Lebanese Christian forces.
In 2013, support from the UN for the first time made the original
two-stage theory seem possible in practice. If Palestine was now an
independent state, it could win that status without making concessions
or commitments. Using international backing, it could create an entity
which—unlike the one existing under the Camp David accords—could
eventually be used as a base for attaining total victory. Many
Palestinian nationalist leaders were, literally, of two minds.
>Simultaneously, they understood better Israel’s strength yet they
could not shake the need for True Belief, reinforced both by Cynical
Manipulation and Peer Pressure from their own movement and from Hamas.
Islamist regimes and groups—notably Hamas and Hizballah as well as the
Muslim Brotherhood and of course al-Qaida and other Salafists plus the
Iranian Islamist regime—followed the pattern of the early Arab
nationalists. Only the lack of Islam had prevented Israel’s extinction
but they were going to do the task the proper way.
Perhaps more glaringly, while the Bush administration tried to
directly fund civil society in Egypt – pro-democracy groups and the like
– the Obama administration changed that policy and cut funding
significantly, ending an effort to provide direct funding to democracy
groups not “approved” by the Egyptian government, and reduced funding in
the budget for programs to promote civil society groups.
A Treasury statement noted that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander
has said that Jaysh was “modeled after Iran’s own Basij,” which it
described as “a paramilitary force subordinate to the IRGC that has been
heavily involved in the violent crackdowns and serious human rights
abuses occurring in Iran since the June 2009 contested presidential
election.”
In a divided Syria, Iran’s natural allies would include Shiites and
Alawites concentrated in provinces near Syria’s border with Lebanon and
in the key port city of Latakia. Under the most likely scenarios,
analysts say, remnants of Assad’s government — with or without Assad —
would seek to establish a coastal enclave closely tied to Tehran,
dependent on the Iranians for survival while helping Iran to retain its
link to Hezbollah and thereby its leverage against Israel.
Experts said that Iran is less interested in preserving Assad in power
than in maintaining levers of power, including transport hubs inside
Syria. As long as Tehran could maintain control of an airport or
seaport, it could also maintain a Hezbollah-controlled supply route into
Lebanon and continue to manipulate Lebanese politics.
But Hezbollah isn't just building its infrastructure in Syria, it's doing it Lebanon too. Ron Ben Yishai noted an interesting aspect of Hezbollah's tactics:
Hassan Nasrallah's organization has found that it is more difficult
to deal with IDF soldiers and their superior firepower in open areas.
Moreover, UN Resolution 1701 from 2006 forbids Hezbollah gunmen from
carrying weapons in open areas. Therefore, Hezbollah has moved from
bases in "nature preserves" to designated areas within the villages from
which it can launch rocket or other attacks against Israel. The
evacuated nature reserves no longer serve as permanent bases, and
instead are meant to be used as bases for launching raids on Israeli
communities in the Galilee.
At the same time, the Shiite terror group launched a major
social/real-estate project that bolstered its political standing: It
purchased lands on the outskirts of the villages, built homes on these
lands and offered them to poor Shiite families at bargain prices (to
rent or buy), one the condition that at least one rocket launcher would
be placed in one of the house's rooms or in the basement, along with a
number of rockets, which will be fired at predetermined targets in
Israel when the order is given.
In addition, Hezbollah has set up camouflaged defense positions in
villages which contain advanced Russian-made anti-tank missiles it had
received from Syria. Hezbollah gunmen have planted large explosive
devices along the access roads, and inside the villages structures that
were purchased by the organization were converted into arms caches. The
Hezbollah gunmen are focusing their efforts on finding ways to hide
underground to protect themselves from IDF fire and to prevent Israeli
intelligence from tracking them down so they will be able to continue
fighting even when IDF forces are nearby.
Remember that there are those who defend Hezbollah claiming that it has
social programs too. Not all social programs are meant to better
peoples' lives.
The Washington Post asked retired Gen. Amos Yadlin what the triggers for future Israeli attacks on Hezbollah would be.
Israel, he said, has defined four types of weapons whose transfer to
militant groups would not be tolerated: advanced air defense systems,
ballistic missiles, sophisticated shore-to-sea missiles and chemical
weapons.
In accordance with this policy, Yadlin said, “any time Israel will have
reliable intelligence that this is going to be transferred from Syria to
Lebanon, it will act,” although specific decisions to strike would be
subject to assessments of the military value of the attack, the risk of
escalation and the positions of foreign powers.
“As the Syrian army becomes weaker and Hezbollah grows more isolated
because of the loss of its Syrian patron, it makes sense that this will
continue,” Yadlin said, adding that Israeli responses would be weighed
each time and “not happen automatically.”
The “world needs to be prepared for the next war with Lebanon,” a
senior military adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently
said during a private meeting with representatives of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies (FDD), a D.C. think-tank.
“All of Lebanon is now South Lebanon,” the official reportedly said,
referring to Israel’s ongoing attempts to prevent the Lebanese terror
group Hezbollah from replenishing its weapons cache.
Jonathan Schanzer, FDD’s vice president of research, recalled being
“struck by the blunt nature of this senior officials’ comments.”
It is possible that red lines are being crossed even now.
2) More Hagel
Yesterday I wrote about a report that claimed that Sen. Chuck Hagel had
dealings with a group called "Friends of Hamas." It was pointed out that
if this report were true, it would have garnered a lot more attention
than it did.
Still there's plenty of damaging material on Sen. Hagel. Jennifer Rubin writes that Hagel's less than forthcoming approach to financial disclosures is problematic.
One of those senators displeased with the ongoing game of
hide-the-ball is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). His communications director,
Sean Rushton, e-mails me, “When Henry Kissinger was named by George W.
Bush to the 9/11 Commission, Harry Reid demanded to know any and all
foreign funds he might have received, asking ‘What are they trying to
hide?’ Now, when the nominee is for Secretary of Defense — the civilian
leader of our entire military, rather than just an advisory commission —
Democrats are suddenly declaring it is irrelevant whether he has been
paid substantial sums by foreign governments, lobbyists, corporations,
or individuals?” He makes clear there is unanimity among the committee
Republicans: “Twelve members of the Senate Armed Services Committee have
asked for reasonable financial disclosures, namely what compensation
Chuck Hagel has received in the last five years and what foreign funds
have paid indirectly for the substantial fees that he has received in
the financial sector. If Hagel refuses to disclose whether he has
foreign financial conflicts of interest, he will make it impossible for
the Committee or the full Senate to make a fair and informed decision
about his nomination.”
The Democrats’ hypocrisy here is stunning. While Hillary Clinton and
Henry Kissinger and were both required to fork over the full array of
financial data, Hagel’s protectors seem to think he is above that sort
of thing. In refusing to provide the requested information on foreign
affiliations or financial data (he still won’t turn over a list of those
who paid him for his speeches, for example), Hagel is daring the Senate
to rebuff his nomination. At a time when another senator is tied up in
knots over his ties to a shady donor, doesn’t it behoove the Senate to
get to the bottom of Hagel’s finances?
This lack of cooperation repeats a pattern we saw in the Senate when he
refused to comply with the Ethics Committee’s demands for information on
the McCarthy Group Inc. In a report titled, “Hagel’s ethics filings
pose disclosure issue,” The Hill reported, “Hagel had reported a
financial stake worth $1 million to $5 million in the privately held
firm. But he did not report the company’s underlying assets, choosing
instead to cite his holdings as an ‘excepted investment fund,’ and
therefore exempt from detailed disclosure rules. . . . [S]everal
disclosure law experts said financial institutions set up in the same
fashion as the McCarthy Group Inc. do not appear to meet the definition
of an ‘excepted investment fund.’ ” In other words, Hagel has never
disclosed some of this information to the Senate, either while in the
Senate or while he is now seeking confirmation.
The Weekly Standard uncovered a 2008 speech given by Hagel regarding his
fears of a nuclear Iran. After praising Aaron David Miller, in part,
because "he's Jewish," Hagel expressed greater fear of Israel's nuclear arsenal than Iran's.
"Now that doesn’t apologize for or doesn’t close our eyes to what
Iran has been doing, what Iran does do, but unless they are engaged in
some way , then I don’t see this getting any better, and then where this
could go, where this could eventually go. Someone was asking me the
other day about a nuclear exchange in the world, where that would come
from. I said well I’ll give you a scenario that’s very real. If Israel
gets backed up enough into a corner and Israel uses a tactical theater
nuclear weapon, you want to talk about seeing some things unravel in the
world. The United States shouldn’t even be thinking about options of
bombing Iran or anybody else. I mean we got our hands full right now.
And we’re in such a hell of a mess."
Nonetheless, the New York Times who believes that President Obama should
get everything he wants (except the unchecked power to order drone
strikes) considers objections to Hagel to be "petty politics."
Mr. Inhofe told National Review on Monday that he would block Mr.
Hagel’s nomination on the Senate floor for “a long, long time.” The
reason? He thinks Mr. Hagel is “anti-Israel,” and he hopes the delay
will pressure pro-Israel Democrats. Mr. Hagel, in fact, has 12 years’
worth of votes in support of Israel, and he amplified that backing in
his confirmation hearing. But because he has also dared to express
concern about the plight of Palestinians in their quest for a state, he
has given Mr. Inhofe a platform to make extremist charges.
Mr. Graham is being even more petulant. With his eye clearly on his
Republican primary next year, he said on Sunday that he would block the
nomination of Mr. Hagel (and of John Brennan to run the C.I.A.) until he
finds out whether Mr. Obama called the Libyan government last September
during the takeover of the American consulate in Benghazi. This is a
continuation of his party’s fantasy of a direct connection between the
president and the deaths of four Americans. Most Republicans gave up on
this nonsense after Mr. Obama’s re-election, when it was no longer
useful to them, but Mr. Graham is proving to be the ultimate dead-ender.
Incredibly, Sen. Hagel's disastrous performance in Senate hearings last week has done nothing to diminish the paper's enthusiasm for his nomination.
Two years ago, on Feb. 11, 2011, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak
stepped aside, overwhelmed by 18 days of protests. Silent and remote, he
had ruled for three decades. He had offered his countrymen—and powers
beyond—the sole gift of stability. He was a gendarme on the banks of the
Nile. Now his country was done with him, and the vaunted stability of
his near 30-year reign was torn asunder.
Yet it is only against the backdrop of the sordid political landscape of
today's Egypt—the hooliganism of the young, the lawlessness, the fault
line between a feeble secular camp and a cynical Muslim Brotherhood bent
on monopolizing political power—that the true work of the Mubarak
tyranny can be fully appreciated. The "deep state" he presided over—a
Ministry of Interior with nearly two million functionaries, a police
force that ran amok—is Mubarak's true legacy.
The disorder today in Egypt's streets is taken by some as proof that the
despot knew what he was doing, and that Egyptians are innately given to
tyranny. But that view misses the damage that this man and his greedy
family and retainers inflicted on a nation of more than 80 million
people that once had nobler ideas of its place in the world.
According to two reports, Egypt's security forces are possibly getting help. Khaled Abu Toameh reports:
Did Hamas dispatch 7,000 militiamen from the Gaza Strip to Egypt to
protect President Mohamed Morsi, who is currently facing a popular
uprising?
Reports that appeared in a number of Egyptian opposition media outlets
in the past few days claimed that the militiamen entered Egypt through
the smuggling tunnels along the border with the Gaza Strip.
The reports quoted unidentified Egyptian security officials as saying
that the Hamas militiamen had been spotted in the Egyptian border town
of Rafah before they headed toward Cairo, to shore up the Muslim
Brotherhood regime of Morsi, which Hamas may have feared was in danger
of collapse.
High-ranking Iranians visited Cairo, then ruled by the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces; Iranian warships were allowed to transit
through the Suez Canal on their way to a show of strength in the
Mediterranean. Iran says over and over again that it wants better
relations with Egypt and wishes to reestablish diplomatic ties. That was
the message carried by the Iranian foreign minister who came to Cairo a
few days ago.
According to the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas, there was another, secret visit
some weeks ago. The head of al-Quds Force, the elite force of the
revolutionary guards of Iran, had apparently been invited to demonstrate
how to set up a special and elite unit – distinct from the army –
faithful to President Mohamed Morsi’s regime. There have been reports in
recent months to the effect that the Muslim Brotherhood was forming a
special militia to protect the regime and tackle its opponents and that
it was already operational.
Since the revolution there has been much talk about the need for Egypt
to develop economic and commercial ties as well as tourism and air
traffic with Iran. Both countries have much to gain from the move.
If these reports are true, it means that despite all the talk of the
Muslim Brotherhood representing the will of the Egyptian people, the
Brotherhood, instead, is turning to outside forces to enforce its will
on the Egyptian people.
4) Credit
A number of items here have come from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs' Daily Alert.
Ahmed Meligy, who blogs for the JPost in Egypt, was reportedly arrested on Monday in Egypt. No details are known at this time regarding any charges against him.
An associate of Meligy, whose blog "Egypt's Missing Peace" has been critical of the Egyptian government, informed the Post that he had been arrested in Alexandria.
No other information was immediately available, and the Post was unable to confirm Meligy's whereabouts.
Meligy had recently informed Post Blog editor Lidar Grave that he would have to take a short hiatus from blogging because he was receiving threats.
In
early November, Meligy opened a blog post critical of Egyptian
President Mohamed Morsi with the words, "I hope that I don’t get
arrested for this one." He went on to say "the Muslim Brotherhood is
creating a dictatorship that will set back my Egypt for years to come."
Aren't you glad that the Obama administration is supporting the Morsi dictatorship and teaching them about democracy? Isn't this much better than having Mubarak in power? I don't think so either.
The untold story of the "Arab Spring" is that the Obama administration secretly helped bring Islamofascists to power. Consider this timeline:
2009: The Brotherhood's spiritual leader — Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi — writes an open letter to Obama arguing terrorism is a direct response to U.S. foreign policy.
2009: Obama travels to Cairo to deliver apologetic speech to Muslims, and infuriates the Mubarak regime by inviting banned Brotherhood leaders to attend. Obama deliberately snubs Mubarak, who was neither present nor mentioned. He also snubs Israel during the Mideast trip.
2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which supports the Brotherhood.
2010: State Department lifts visa ban on Tariq Ramadan, suspected terrorist and Egyptian-born grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna.
2010: Hussain meets with Ramadan at American-sponsored conference attended by U.S. and Brotherhood officials.
2010: Hussain meets with the Brotherhood's grand mufti in Egypt.
2010: Obama meets one-on-one with Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who later remarks on Nile TV: "The American president told me in confidence that he is a Muslim."
The IDF has asked for NIS 15 billion to prepare to defend a 'fourth front': Egypt (Hat Tip: Ricky G).
Analysts said that the new situation in Egypt necessitates the opening of a “fourth front” for the IDF. For decades, security along the southern border has been more relaxed, because of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and the IDF was able to concentrate on trouble spots like Gaza and the northern border, as well as “distance missions.” Egypt's new President, Mohammed Morsi, who is identified with the Muslim Brotherhood, has said several times that he wishes to “reexamine” the Camp David Accords. Given his party's open hostility to Israel and its strong support for Hamas, Israel has decided that it can no longer regard the Egyptian border as a “normal” one.
A senior IDF official told the Israeli daily Ma'ariv that while no one expects Egypt to abrogate the Camp David Accords, the new situation requires extreme caution. And thanks to three decades of American military aid and support, the Egyptian army today is extremely sophisticated, and is equipped with the latest equipment, making it, for all purposes, a Western-type army, the official said. Egypt also has the largest army in Africa; it has about 470,000 regular troops and some 480,000 reserve troops. The IDF, by way of comparison, has 180,000 active duty soldiers, and about 560,000 reserve troops.
The IDF will ask for the NIS 15 billion increase to be funded over a five year period. Without this money, officials said, it will be impossible to upgrade the IDF's souther flank, making the country dependent on the graces of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement, an IDF official would not comment directly on the funding issue, saying that “as a matter of course the IDF is studying the changes in the region, and specifically in Egypt.”
Shavua tov v'chodesh tov, a good week and a good month to everyone.
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Friday, June 22.
1) The anatomy of coverage of Israel
There were recently two articles in the New York Times. One was in an opinion section called "Latitudes." The other was in the news section. Despite the different editorial locations, comparing the two articles can serve as an exercise to see how a newspaper's reporting can distort perceptions.
The article appearing in the Latitudes section, Bangladesh’s Right of Refusal by Dan Morrison, tells of the plight of the Rohingyas, an ethnic group fleeing persecution in Myanmar. Morrison writes:
Bangladesh’s refusal to help these desperate families is, despite its claims to the contrary, a likely violation of its international obligations. It’s also entirely reasonable. ... Bangladeshi officials might serve their case better by condemning the violence while pointing out that Bangladesh is among the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, that in 1978 and 1991 it sheltered Rohingyas fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and that as it struggles to meet the aspirations of its 160 million citizens, it cannot consider another “temporary” influx of refugees.
Note Morrison's judgment, that Bangladesh's decision to turn away refugees is "reasonable."
For now, most of the immigrants and asylum seekers — about 50,000 — cannot be deported, in line with international conventions. They come from Sudan and Eritrea, countries considered too dangerous for their repatriation, and so they are afforded temporary collective protection in Israel. That protection was recently lifted for immigrants from South Sudan. On June 7, a Jerusalem court ruled that it was safe enough to repatriate them to South Sudan, a newly independent nation that has diplomatic ties with Israel.
This is saying that, unlike Bangladesh, Israel does conform to its international obligations regarding refugees, yet here are the fourth and fifth paragraphs:
But the government clampdown is also ripping at Israel’s soul. For some, the connotations of roundups and the prospect of mass detentions cut too close to the bone. “I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936,” said Orly Feldheim, 46, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, as she doled out food last week to a long line of immigrants in the neighborhood’s Levinsky Park.
This is how Kershner sets the tone for the article. (The headline writer, no doubt, understood how compelling this could be and included "soul," making sure that no one would ignore these paragraphs.) She's not writing that Israel has higher standards and is, perhaps, not meeting those standards. She's writing that Israel's failure to meet her standards, makes it comparable to Nazi Germany. Of course, Kershner would say that it's not her view but the view of the woman she quoted.
The problem is that Ms.Feldheim isn't just a random resident, a Google search reveals that she runs a soup kitchen for African refugees. There is nothing wrong with that; in fact it's admirable. But it also means that she isn't exactly a detached observer. Activists often exaggerate crises. Kershner, I'm sure, knew more about Feldheim than she reported and probably knew what kind of quote she would get.
Kershner cites two more criticisms. First she writes:
People can apply for refugee status, but priority is given to those not covered by collective protection, said Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority. The approval rate is negligible. Since 2009, out of 7,000 applications, 16 people were granted refugee status or asylum. Critics say that Israel, a nation largely founded by refugees, lacks a proper immigration policy. “We say: ‘Be fair, we are Jews. Decide who is or isn’t a refugee,’ ” said Iftah Cohen, a lawyer working for We Are Refugees, an Israeli organization that provides free legal aid to asylum seekers threatened with deportation.
Towards the end she also mentions:
Some Israelis invoke the biblical injunction to “love the stranger for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Others say they now feel like strangers in their own country.
Even if someone rejects the noxious comparison to Nazi Germany, the reference to Israel's being a haven for Jews escaping persecution and the Bible suggest that Israel's failure to deal with the refugees adequately is nothing less than a violation of its founding principles.
In fact refugees are a problem all over. Little in the article suggests that Israel's handling of them is unusuallly bad or inhumane, except that activists involved in helping refugees claim that it is. And that is the impression the reporter leaves us with. No doubt in the future she can write about the refugees again and refer to Israel's "highly criticized" or "controversial" policies now that she's laid the groundwork.
Some of us, of course, have been saying precisely this for almost 1½ years, from even before Husni Mubarak's resignation. Mubarak had displeased the generals, especially his efforts to found a dynasty, and they took advantage of the Tahrir Square demonstrations to bounce him. Simple, no? ...The starry-eyed quality of press reporting on the Middle East upheavals, symbolized by the silly term "Arab spring," meant that most Westerners have been clueless about developments in the region.
Now that Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court has disqualified a significant portion of the legislature, what's next.
Egyptians had voted for Islamists initially not because they uniformly shared the groups' agenda, but rather because the Islamist parties—with financial support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey—ran swank, well-organized campaigns which cashed in on decades of populism. While in opposition, the Brotherhood could promise Egyptians the world: If empowered, the Brotherhood would end corruption and nepotism, implement effective government services, raise salaries, guarantee housing and provide jobs, and restore social justice. Putting a chicken in every pot, however, takes not only money but also chickens and pots. The Brotherhood not only could not deliver but, increasingly, it looked like it did not care even to try. It dispensed with the moderate, English-speaking interlocutors who had charmed Western journalists in Tahrir Square, and cast its lot with intolerant, backroom religious conservatives.
Later, Rubin concludes:
With the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrating disdain for democratic values, and Shafik little more than a throwback to a moribund dictatorship, President Obama has an opportunity to implement a true freedom agenda. Speaking in Cairo three years ago this month, Obama warned, "Elections alone do not make true democracy," and called on governments to maintain consent and eschew coercion, respect minorities, embrace tolerance and compromise, and put the public's interests first. Egypt is at a crossroads. One path leads to civil chaos and another leads to dictatorship. As both sides delegitimize themselves, however, Obama has a rare opportunity to pick up where Bush left off, and support the growth of new movements which embrace the values of Tahrir Square's original protestors.
This is, of course, ideal. But is it possible? Do the "new movements" have the critical mass necessary to effect change in Egypt? Or might it be necessary embrace the less bad choice for now and bide time until the real reformers can compete? Barry Rubin has observed that Shafiq actually sounded rather moderate during the campaign.
Without relating to the Muslim Brotherhood, spokesmen for the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon decided to press the Egyptian Army to relinquish the governing role it is seeking to carve out for itself. But what if Morsi is declared the victor? Wouldn't it make more sense to allow the balance of powers between these institutions to evolve by themselves, with no external involvement? For decades, the Turkish Armed Forces were the guardians of Ataturk's legacy in Turkey, until the rise of Erdogan. Nevertheless, according to the Los Angeles Times, U.S. officials said on Monday that they were "deeply concerned by an Egyptian military decree giving the generals sweeping powers to pass laws and decide whether to go to war." This was a stunning statement, considering that the Muslim Brotherhood might still emerge as the winner. Right now, given the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and its ties to its Palestinian branch, Hamas, leaving Egypt's war-making powers with the Egyptian military is far safer for the world than transferring them to a Muslim Brotherhood government.
For now Egypt's military establishment has flexed its muscle twice. First they forced Mubarak out. Now they are limiting the political change that has occurred since Mubarak's downfall. Though this may not be the best result of the foment, it's possible that this isn't the worst possible outcome either.
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
