It'll be interesting to watch the guy who proved so critical to Iranian nuclearization...
The poor management of the crisis with Iran has to be attributed largely to [ElBaradei]. The Egyptian diplomat is responsible for his organization's placatory approach toward the Iranian nuclear program. For almost a decade, starting in 1992, the agency inspectors did not notice that Iran had a secret nuclear program that violated its international commitments. Even when the agency had the information, in 2002... ElBaradei ignored it and made every possible effort to undermine its reliability. He intervened repeatedly to distort his inspectors' reports on Iran's nuclear sites, and he made sure that the IAEA's periodic reports about Iran would be camouflaged in diplomatic gibberish. Time and again they repeated the phrase that "no proof was found" that Iran's nuclear program had military aspects, even though they were blatantly obvious. ElBaradei was opposed to sanctioning Iran, not to mention military action, and repeatedly attempted to conduct a dialogue with Tehran in order to reach a compromise.
... take control of Tehran's most powerful Arab rival. From a certain perspective it almost seems like the basis for a kind of de facto anti-Western alliance:
Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, is awaited in Cairo as police warn his supporters not to mark the homecoming of a would-be electoral challenger to President Hosni Mubarak. ElBaradei, who is expected to fly home on Friday, has repeatedly called for democratic change in Egypt since stepping down as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in November. On the eve of his return, he reaffirmed his determination to "do everything I can for Egypt to advance toward democracy and economic and social progress."
When he wasn't busy denying Iranian weaponization - here he is calling highly enriched Iranian uranium "of little significance" - he was perennially promising to "pin down" deals with the mullahs. When his summits fell through, as they inevitably did, he delayed Western responses by asserting that Iran was still considering offers. And in the twilight of his term - when it was clear that Iran was intent on weaponization and that negotiations were a cover - he continued deriding even non-military solutions because sanctions "really don't resolve issues." From "no problem" to "no solution" in just a few years.
Though you know who really does merit close IAEA scrutiny, per this tool? Israel. Because someone hatched a feverish tale that the IDF used uranium against Gazans, so of course that had to be probed. And not only are Israelis a bigger threat than North Korea - another country that got nukes under ElBaradei's watch - they're actually the number one threat in the Middle East. Not Iran, which is actively engaged in undermining the stability of the Egyptian government. Israel.
Should ElBaradei become President, those kinds of geopolitical delusions probably won't be a problem. The Middle East is a pretty forgiving region. You can afford to indulge in the occasional fantasy.
Speaking of the region, he's also pledging to open up Gaza. That's an extremely popular position domestically and it fits in addition to fitting the rest of his political inclinations would be an extremely popular campaign platform. Sure it would be an invaluable boost to Hamas, facilitating their contacts with Iran and giving them an endless supply of goods to siphon off for military purposes (think of all the medicine grenades!) But he's a humanitarian. You don't hate humanitarianism, do you?
Regardless. He's pretty popular in Egypt right now. He hopes - and I'm quoting - "to be an instrument for change." So this is probably going to become a thing.
Original: The problem with writing hagiographic paeans to the indefatigable spirit of anti-Israel resistance is that sometimes you reveal a little too much. Example: this 2,000+ word contribution, from anti-Israel partisan and Palestinian mouthpiece Amira Hass, documenting the repeatedly thwarted attempts of Code Pink and their Gaza Freedom March ilk to enter Gaza from Egypt.
There's all kinds of stuff about how the protesters spontaneously coordinated with each other: "direct democracy in action," "without secrets, without orders from on high, without hierarchies," "a message of militant pacifism and feminism," "popular, non-hierarchical action and its ability to bring about change," and so on. The daughter of Jews murdered at Auschwitz makes an appearance. So does a Nelson Mandella banner. There's a actually a section labeled "Jewish Mother," within which there's a quote about how 80% of the protesters were Jewish (Hass graciously allows that 80% "is probably an exaggeration").
And then there's the part about how Hamas controlled the GFM down to the very last detail, the better to demonize Israel from within the strict confines of their pathological anti-woman bigotry. You have to read into the middle of the article to find the relevant passage - it's buried just above a description of how Gaza children get nightmares because of Israel - but some might call it evidence of active international collaboration:
The American feminist and peace group Codepink signed on, and [the GFM] gradually spread to other countries.... [But] "From the outset, Hamas set conditions: No more than 5,000 marchers, no approaching the wall and the fence, how to make speeches, how long the speeches should be, who will make speeches. In short, Hamas hijacked the initiative from us and we gave in." Hamas, or its Popular Committee, brought 200 or 300 marchers. The march turned into nothing more than a ritual, an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators... There were no Palestinian women among the marchers - a slap to the many feminist organizers and participants, both women and men... Their variegation and the transparency of their behavior did not suit the military discipline the official hosts tried to impose.
Not that Code Pink is particularly choosy about the fascists and thugs to whom they make themselves available. But there's something particularly unseemly about ostensible feminists shamelessly marching in a gender-apartheid protest. If journalists were wary about mixing it up with the left they could even have pursued an Egypt vs. Hamas vs. Europe geopolitical angle, with protesters' faked visas "providing a window" into the "convoluted dynamics" stymieing "efforts to bring peace to the Middle East." But not so much.
Eh. They probably just ran out of time (h/t: Kerry H)
Update: The original version of this post incorrectly identified anti-Israel partisan and Palestinian mouthpiece Akiva Eldar. That was incorrect. The article was in fact written by anti-Israel partisan and Palestinian mouthpiece Amira Hass. I can't imagine how I came to mix the two up.
I haven't had a chance to post about the gigantic steel wall that Egypt is quietly building along their Gaza border, though it sounds even even more apartheidrific than the one that Saudi Arabia built - for which they also didn't catch any international flack. Diker unpacked the hypocrisy on an Omri Ceren Show episode at the end of December, so if you're interested in background that's the place to go. Apparently only Israel, which is uniquely subject to terrorist attacks as a genocidal tactic, deserves criticism for their defensive barriers.
In any case Hamas can't understand why - if the world is so anxious to condemn Israel's Gaza closure - Egypt's role is passing without much global notice. Domestic and regional opinion has been running strongly negative but the UN isn't exactly rushing to pass anti-Cairo resolutions. Curious, that:
Hamas on Monday sharply criticized Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak's defense of his country's expanded fortifications on its border with the Gaza Strip... "Mubarak's remarks defending the steel wall are an address on the blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri told reporters in Gaza City. The Egyptian president's statements "contradict his earlier remarks that he would not allow the starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza," al-Masri accused. On Sunday Mubarak marked the national annual Police Day holiday by declaring: "Fortifications along our eastern border are a work of Egyptian sovereignty, and we refuse to enter into a debate with anyone [about them]."
You do have to admire Hamas's consistency. They opened fire on Egyptian civilians and their snipers murdered an Egyptian soldier. They instigated riots across the country. And then - when the Egyptians responded as they were bound to respond - Hamas whined about victimization. Because of course they did.
I'm about to start uploading the clips for this evening's very special holiday edition of One Jerusalem Radio's Omri Ceren Show. In acknowledgment of the season we've scheduled even more optimism and cheer than usual, starting with a segment about the religiously-driven return of polygamy to the UK and Chechnya. Suffice to say that it's not because fundamentalist Methodists are sweeping across the region. From there things only get better with segments about the newest additions to Iran's arsenal, Hamas's Islamization of the Gaza Strip, and of course this nonsense. Per the usual routine you can tune in live to ask questions and participate in the chatroom, or you can grab the podcast afterward directly from the episode archive.
In between Dan Diker will join the show, this week to talk about how Egypt and Saudi Arabia are reacting to Iran's growing regional assertiveness. Small example of the pool balls bouncing off each other just on the issue of Egyptian/Israeli relations: Arab nationalism 101 is that you use Israel as a scapegoat to funnel internal dissent outward but in the Middle East the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Now plant that enemy's proxy in Gaza right between Egypt and Israel, boosting the incentive for government-to-government cooperation even though Egyptians would turn against Mubarak if he publicly colluded Egypt's "Gazan brothers and sisters."
Now add in a weird dynamic where Israel and Egypt usually compete for functionally zero-sum US ties, except they're both so frustrated with the US stance on Iran that they might close the triangle and cooperate to undermine Iran - except the Obama administration would oppose that, putting them in a position where they're blocking rapprochement between two ostensible allies. Terrific.
In the last week, Egypt has moved against Iran and its allies in the Arab world. Cairo arrested a Hizballah cell that was preparing terrorist operations on Egyptian soil, organized a campaign against Hamas weapons and money smugglers in the Sinai Peninsula, and stepped up efforts to displace Qatar -- an Iranian sympathizer -- as a mediator on Sudan, Lebanon, and other inter-Arab issues. It remains to be seen whether this policy shift will become a sustained part of a grand strategy to restore Egypt's leadership among Arab states or, instead, a more-defensive approach designed to parry previous humiliations from Iran's allies. It is apparent, however, that Cairo is sending a signal to Washington that the "nuclear file" is not the only -- or even the most urgent -- aspect of the Iranian threat.
The US went to Egypt and said "we're really committed to helping you out with this Israel thing," and the Egyptians responded by insisting that they pay attention to Iran. If for no other reason, you should tune in today to hear what happened when the Bush and Obama White Houses tried the same stunt with Saudi Arabia.
At first this was going to be a "look how biased the AP is" post, since the very first AFP report on the incident recognized that there was cross-border provocation...
But then I went back to the AFP article to screencap the timestamp - Yahoo's RSS feed served up the original AFP article at 10:57pm PST and the orginal AP article at 11:18pm PST - but the post had already been changed to mesh it with the AP's characterizations:
Now the very last line of the rewritten AFP post reminded readers that "army radio initially said the Israelis had returned fire after the Egyptian shot at them." So if you were thinking "I wonder if there's something going on here other than Israeli soldiers taking potshots at an Arab police officer, something that perhaps explains why the Egyptians aren't screaming their heads off" - well, if you're one of the less than 5% of readers who get to the end of an article you'd get a hint that there might be more. Which of course there is:
IDF troops shot and wounded an Egyptian border policeman overnight Sunday after the man cocked his weapon at them along the Israeli-Egyptian border. The incident occurred near Eilat when a routine patrol identified an armed figure moving near the border. When the troops challenged the man, he cocked his weapon, prompting the soldiers to open fire, the army said. The soldiers realized it was an Egyptian policeman only after the shooting, the military said.
Let's say you're an AP or AFP editor and that, since your early days as an idealistic undergraduate cub reporter speaking truth to power, you and most of the people in your political community have been inclined to blame Israel for Middle East violence. Fair enough. This story comes over the wire, you see the initial army radio report, then the correction, then the final Israeli version. And you unilaterally conclude that the confusion means the Israelis are flat out lying.
Don't you still put in a line like "Israeli sources denied that the shooting was unprovoked but declined to give more information pending a joint Israeli-Egyptian investigation"? Just on the off-chance that the region's most professional army wasn't just randomly making shit up? It might be a small chance, but just to hedge your bets...?
Good few weeks for the AP though. Between this story and that description of "Jewish extremists" scuffling with "Muslim residents," they're really demonstrating why people are so attached to trustworthy and objective legacy media outlets.
In the latest in a recent series of increased American assistance efforts for Arab and Muslim states, U.S. President Barack Obama has allocated an additional $150 million to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The regimes leading Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, the United Arab Emirates and even Saudi Arabia have all benefited from recent American policy shifts...
2009 State Department funding for the promotion of democratic initiatives in Egypt was cut from $50 million to $20 million. In addition, the U.S. has agreed not to give any of the pro-democracy funds to organizations that are not approved by the Mubarak regime... the Obama administration planned to dramatically increase funding to the Palestinian Authority for security training... the U.S. has already pledged $600 million in funds to the Palestinian Authority, with another $300 million for humanitarian aid to the Hamas regime in Gaza... the U.S. is set to help the United Arab Emirates become the first Arab nation with a developed nuclear power infrastructure...
The Obama administration's assistance to Arab and Muslim states extends beyond the monetary, however... the American government has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve sovereign immunity for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and four Saudi princes in connection with a civil case seeking compensation for victims of the massive September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the American homeland.
I'd think that seriously advocating book burning at any time would disqualify you, since presumably there are equally qualified candidates for the UN's cultural heritage agency who've never advocated destroying cultural heritage. But Israeli society is toxic anyway - especially compared to the glory that is the contemporary Egyptian public sphere - so no loss:
Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, a candidate for the top job at the United Nations culture agency UNESCO, apologised on Wednesday for calling for Israeli books to be burnt... Hosni said he regretted his words, adding that they had allowed detractors to associate him with things that he found hateful. "Nothing is more distant to me than racism, the negation of others or the desire to hurt Jewish culture or any other culture," he wrote. Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, film director Claude Lanzmann and Nobel Peace Price laureate Elie Wiesel last week quoted Hosni as saying he would burn Israeli books and calling Israeli culture "inhuman". "Let's burn these books; if there are any, I will burn them myself before you," they quoted Hosni as telling a member of parliament who had confronted him about the presence of Israeli books in Egyptian libraries last May.
He also banned Israeli books and films from Egypt's international book and film festivals. Plus he's stated that Jewish culture exists only to the extent that it steals from other cultures. So what could be more natural than letting him decide if Israeli and Jewish heritage is important?
Anyway, he's almost certain to get the appointment. Of course he is.
LGF has a clip of an Egyptian TV show where little children sit at a cleric's knee and learn about how it's glorious to deceive and massacre Jews. It was on Al-Hafez TV, which got me wondering: which Egyptian TV outlet - if any - will land a coveted post-Canossa interview with Obama? Kind of like the al-Arabiya interview he did, only with more obsequiousness.
On the other hand, Al-Nas hosted US cleric Salah Sultan a few months ago. He took the opportunity to threaten terrorist attacks against America. That's neither hopey nor changey!
So maybe Egyptian station al-Rahma. Although the thing with al-Rahma, though, is that I'm not sure how they'd fit into the President's vaunted image as a pro-science intellectual. Their shows with little boys who scream about talking rocks and trees who instruct Muslims hunt down Jews - those seem a little scientifically untenable.
Plus they keep putting on shows where Jews are branded "the scum of the earth, devils in human form." In between those they regularly feature that dirtbag cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub, who keeps talking about biting off the heads of Jews:
Ya'qoub's insistence that a two-state solution will do nothing to abate genocidal Islamic anti-Semitism - dutifully broadcast by Al-Rahma - would also probably count as "off-message."
Maybe it'll be both Al-Nas and Al-Rahma. Kind of like a "nobody's at fault because everybody's at fault" press pool. That would be just perfect:
Neither of these are new, although for some strange reason neither came up at Durban II. The first video - the denial side of the pathological Islamist Holocaust coin - was actually broadcast on Hamas TV on last year's Holocaust Remembrance Day:
Note how preoccupied this filthbag is with the concept of humiliation. Even as scenes of mass murder roll by, he thrills most of all to the degradation involved - a Jewish woman forced to kiss a Nazi guard's hand, a Jewish man weeping in despair.
The filthbag is Egyptian Cleric Amin Al-Ansari, and the money line is "this is what we hope will happen but, Allah willing, at the hand of the Muslims":
At times like this, I like to remember what anti-Israel hacks like Avraham Burg publish in anti-Israel outlets like the LA-Times: Jews really need to get over the Holocaust.
I guess it's not just anti-Zionism in Egypt after all:
"Egyptian Cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub: The Jews Are the Enemies of Muslims Regardless of the Occupation of Palestine," from MEMRI TV, January 17 (just posted) Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub, which aired on Al-Rahma TV on January 17, 2009: "Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub: If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels - not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: 'The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.' It is Allah who said that they are infidels.
Following are excerpts from a debate between Lebanese intellectuals Yasser Qechlaq and 'Uqab Saqr, which aired on ANB TV on February 16, 2009. Yasser Qechlaq, owner of dp-news.com: "We are facing a society that believes in nothing but force, violence, crimes, and the killing of our children and women." 'Uqab Saqr: "They also believe in rationality." Yasser Qechlaq: "Hold on. I refuse to acknowledge any Jew, whoever he may be. I do not acknowledge his holy books or holy places, nor do I acknowledge this Jew as a human being. I acknowledge just one thing: That he is an abject, filthy, and usurping terrorist, and I curse him..." Yasser Qechlaq: "I refuse to acknowledge any Jew in the world, because he refuses to acknowledge my existence as a Palestinian." Yasser Qechlaq: "I do not acknowledge the Jewish religion. I am a Palestinian extremist. I am an extremist for my land."... 'Uqab Saqr: "The Koran respects the monotheistic religions." Yasser Qechlaq: "Nevertheless, I do not acknowledge [them]."
Happy Valentine's Day from the third largest recipient of US aid on the planet, just behind Iraq and Israel. This guy thinks that Valentine's Day is worse than AIDS, Ebola, and Cholera. Combined!
That last clip is the inevitable, venomous result of treating anti-Semitic tropes as liberal sophistication, provided only that they make nudge-wink gestures toward anti-Zionism. At least we don't have that problem in the West!
Just kidding, obviously. That's just what normal countries get to do when angry mobs try to breach their border and shoot at their forces:
Gaza residents on Sunday breached the border fence with Egypt in several places and hundreds have crossed the frontier prompting Egyptian border guards to open fire, said officials and witnesses on both sides of the border... At least 300 Egyptian border guards rushed to the area to reseal the border, the official added on condition on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press... Egyptian border guards opened fire to drive back the Palestinians. Residents also commandeered a bulldozer to open new breaches. Egyptian state television reported that Hamas security forces shot an Egyptian border guard and killed him. An Egyptian security source said Hamas forces had also shot an Egyptian policeman in the leg.
Yet another reason why Egypt is highly unlikely to pull Hamas's chestnuts out of the fire they've been stocking for months. Keep in mind that this is a country where media outlets conduct interviews about whether mass rape of Israeli women is a justified war tactic; where politicians have tried to prohibit Israeli religious pilgrimages; where a popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is that Israel is handing out distorted Korans with all the "Muslims should annihilate Jews" passages deleted - and the Egyptian government is still comfortable saying that this war is Hamas's fault.
Last time - after Shalit was kidnapped and Israel turned to Gaza - it took Hezbollah less than two weeks to start a war. And if UNIFIL reports are true then they were within hours of starting another one just a few days ago:
The Lebanese army on Thursday discovered and defused eight Katyusha rockets that had been placed near the southern town of Nakoura and were about to be fired at Israel. The 107-millimeter projectiles were fitted with timers and were defused "a short while before the time set for their launching," according to the Lebanese news site Naharnet. Voice of Lebanon radio specified that the rockets were set to be launched between 10 and 10:30 p.m.
Hezbollah is bristling with missiles - Jimmy Carter's touching concerns otherwise notwithstanding - and over the last few weeks Nasrallah has been making a huge show of supporting Hamas. It's gotten to where it might be an embarrassment for him if Israel systematically dismantles their infrastructure. And even if Hezbollah's rank and file would rather sit this one out it's not clear that they'll be allowed to. Iran has significant operational control over both Hamas and Hezbollah so it's not too much to assume that there's some coordination going on. But the IDF has made it very clear that - now that Hezbollah is in formal control of Lebanon - they won't be as restrained as they were during Lebanon II. How much that matters or not to Nasrallah and how seriously he takes the threat - not much and unknown - will determine a lot of Hezbollah's behavior.
Hamas made it clear last week that they wanted war. They announced the end of the so-called truce, although as the 16th paragraph in this report finally makes clear, Hamas and other affiliated groups had never stopped attacking Israel. They want to provoke a wider war and hope to get Egypt involved. The Egyptians opened the border to provide emergency medical care to the wounded and condemned the attack, but have not broken diplomatic relations with Israel yet over the attack.
In difficult times like these - finals to grade, dissertations to write - I appreciate it when stories write themselves:
An Egyptian man said on Wednesday he was offering his 20-year-old daughter in marriage to Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad on Sunday. The daughter, Amal Saad Gumaa, said she agreed with the idea. "This is something that would honor me. I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero," she told Reuters by telephone.
Anyway, here's a post by Carl where a Palestinian Koran expert expounds about the relative metaphysical purity of male and female urine. I've been saving it for just this kind of special occasion.
Some people might describe this as mob-enforced political Islam. I take the more generous view and think of it as interfaith dialog:
Early in the morning two Sundays ago, hundreds of Christian Egyptians quietly slipped into a former underwear factory where they had discreetly set up a church and held their first service. Bells rang and hymns were sung... A crowd of angry Muslims quickly gathered, threw stones at the building and burned banners that said, "No to the church." They tried to storm the gates, clashed with police and chanted, "The church has fallen, the priest is dead," according to witnesses. In fact, no one died, but 13 people were reported injured... Tempers are flaring as Islamic conservatism gains ground and Christians grow increasingly resentful about discrimination by the Muslim majority.
"Flaring tempers" and "increasing resentment" - those are roughly on the same level aren't they? Still better than AFP's writeup:
A clash between Muslims, Christians and the police in the Egyptian capital of Cairo late Sunday resulted in injuries and multiple arrests of members of both groups, eyewitnesses and authorities said. Hundreds of Muslims gathered after evening prayers in a Cairo neighbourhood to protest that Christians in the area had gathered to pray in a parish hall. Violence broke out between the group and police then intervened, eyewitnesses said.
Actually it was closer to 20,000 Muslim rioters and it was more of an anti-Christian lynch mob than a "clash between Muslims, Christians and the police." But why should facts get in the way of moral equivalence? Pictures and video of the riot - which, you'll recall, was triggered by the sound of bells - are here and here.
Honestly I'm not really sure why Egyptian Christians are so resentful. The Egyptian court system finally got around to kind of sort of recognizing Christian converts a few months ago. Although - in fairness - the whole "Christians can't get donated organs from Muslims" thing probably grates.
And then there's the part where Muslim mobs attack Christian homes on the thinnest pretexts - e.g. teenage Christian boys don't dismount from donkeys - and in response the state police round up the victimized Christians:
The question on everybody's mind: after they rape them would they then stone them for adultery in the middle of a stadium filled with thousands of cheering spectators?
Under political Islam you can get thousands of people to cheer while they watch a 13 year old gang rape victim get bludgeoned to death for adultery. But the suggestion that women can fight back against abusive husbands? A touch less popular:
Sheikh Abdel Hamid Al Atrash, who heads the committee for fatwas, or religious edicts, at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s highest institute, ruled that women are entitled to use violence to defend themselves from abusive husbands... But the rulings have not been universally welcomed and conservative Islamic clerics were quick to express condemnation. "These fatwas contradict the Quran on how to deal with marital problems and transforms the house into a jungle where it is survival of the fittest," said Youssef el Badri... "I wonder what’s the secret behind these fatwas that favour women at the expense of men, which we’ve never heard of since the advent of Islam," said Ahmad Mahmoud, 30, at a coffee shop in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis.
Almost hard to believe that this would be unpopular in a country where two-thirds of all men admit to sexually harassing women in public:
Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women in the most populous Arab country, and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their maltreatment, a survey showed Thursday... Egyptian women and female visitors frequently complain of persistent sexual harassment on Egyptian streets, despite the socially conservative nature of this traditional Muslim society.
There are actually PSAs in Egypt telling women to wrap themselves up because they're like lollipops and they won't be able to stop men from harassing them:
Egypt's military is gradually doing away with dated Soviet equipment and replacing them with superior American F-16 fighter jets, Apache combat helicopters and Abrams tanks... Egypt has an estimated 470,000 men in its ground forces, 150,000 of them reserves,... The Egyptian army has 3,100 tanks, including more than 1,000 modern M1A1 Abram tanks that were assembled in Egypt after being imported in pieces. Egypt has no less than 2,110 anti-tank missiles and 3,590 artillery and mortar guns, as well as rocket launchers. Of the 518 planes that make up the country's air force, 211 are advanced F-16D multi-role jets. Some 35 modernized Apaches are also in service among the 225 air force helicopters. Egypt has advanced air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles, and has been supplied by the US with 16 HAWK missile batteries.
It is the Egyptian navy, however, that truly impresses in both its size and makeup, Shapir said. "If there's one thing the Egyptians have on a bigger scale than us, it is their navy. Egypt has more coastal areas and beaches than Israel, and has received the most advanced forms of frigates, known as Perry-class frigates," he said. Egypt has 27 guided-missile frigates of various classes, 12 mine warfare vessels, and 19 gunboats. It maintains eight naval bases. As for unconventional weapons, Egypt may have researched and produced chemical warfare agents and stockpiled mustard and nerve agents, although this has not been confirmed. It is thought to possess 190 scud-type missiles... Shapir said he was not overly concerned by reports of Egyptian military drills in which Israel was the simulated enemy.
Because why would you be concerned about something like that? Not mentioned in this laundry list: Egypt's ongoing nuclear program, which they're developing with US and Russian help. The dynamic is not unlike how Nasser alternated between US and Russian arms purchases during the Cold War. And if you'll recall, that worked out really well for everybody who wasn't Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, or Israel. So much for those conditions on aid to Egypt, huh?
The Egyptians may or may not be far enough gone to invite Nasrallah to Cairo. But some day very soon:
Egyptian police detained 26 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood for protesting against Israel's siege of Gaza... The Egyptian government calls the Muslim Brotherhood a banned organization, although the group operates openly and fields independent candidates in parliamentary elections. It won a fifth of the seats in 2005 parliamentary polls. Political analysts say the government wants to stop the Brotherhood from mounting a serious political challenge.
My usual line on this is that Egypt is one disgruntled general and a bullet away from being the most dangerous country on the planet. I'm not sure that it'll even take that much:
[Salafism's] doctrine is only a few shades away from that of violent groups like al-Qaida - that it effectively preaches, "Yes to jihad, just not now."... Salafism has proved highly adaptable, appealing to Egypt's wealthy businessmen, the middle class and even the urban poor — cutting across class in an otherwise rigidly hierarchical society... "We were losing our identity. Our identity is Islamic," 27-year-old Soliman said from behind an all-covering black niqab as she sat with her husband in a Maadi restaurant.
Kind of makes you miss the days when Egyptians wanted to wipe out Israel for plain old Arab nationalist reasons. On the bright side, the US has spent decades making Egypt one of the largest recipients of US military aid on the planet. So when the West goes to war with them, at least we'll know how their weapons work. At least they're not nuclearizing. Think about how much that would suck.
Abbas was still predicting a 2008 peace deal as of last month and apparently it's Egypt's sounded like a fun place to vacation in November:
An international summit is to be held in Egypt in November, with representatives from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the members of the Quartet - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations. According to a senior official in Jerusalem, the Israeli and PA participants will brief the Quartet over progress made in the ongoing peace talks. The gathering is said to be the result of a compromise between the U.S., Israel and the Palestinians. In recent months U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been urging both sides to draft a document detailing the points of agreement in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. She suggested they compile an "inventory" detailing progress on each of the core issues, such as Jerusalem, borders, refugees' right of return, security, settlements and water rights.
Sure Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the world - but at least they're a moderate secular Arabist state as opposed to pathological bigoted Islamist theocracy. Except when they're not. Like right now:
An Egyptian court convicted five men Wednesday on charges of homosexual behavior and sentenced them to three years in prison, officials said.,, the judge found the men guilty of the "habitual practice of debauchery" - a term used in the Egyptian legal system to denote consensual homosexual acts. The convictions were confirmed by a judicial official... Homosexuality is not explicitly referred to in Egypt's legal code, but a wide range of laws covering obscenity, prostitution and debauchery are applied to homosexuals in this conservative country. The five men were arrested in what human rights groups describe as a crackdown on people with the AIDS virus, using the debauchery charges as a means to prosecute them. Four of the five men tested HIV-positive after all were forced to undergo blood tests in custody, Human Rights Watch says... Ramadan, a lawyer with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said the five men were abused and tortured over the past several months to "extract confessions" from them.
Egyptian secret police have been quite literally hunting down gay men for at least half a decade. They troll online chatrooms and set up wire taps to entrap homosexuals - who are then summarily arrested and subjected to degradation and torture. Because lots of the country thinks that homosexuality is a sin, so why not right?
Egypt, by the by, has spent the last year on the UN Human Rights Council. (h/t: MR reader Moses).
A couple of years ago the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended. Among other radical changes in the global geopolitical order, Russia was supposed to stop counterbalancing the US by militarily bolstering Arab regimes in the Middle East. Somebody apparently didn't get that memo:
Russia and Egypt are expected to sign a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement this week that will boost Cairo's efforts to join a string of Sunni countries keen on developing nuclear potential and that government officials in Jerusalem believe is intended in part to offset Iran's nuclear program. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak traveled to Moscow for a two-day visit Monday, and the Russian wire service RIA Novosti quoted Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit as saying that the agreement would be signed during the visit.
This would presumably be one of several reactors that Egypt plans to build. At least there's no radical Muslim organization stationed in Egypt that might have an interest in stuffing radioactive material into a dirty bomb. And it's not like the whole country is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the world.
Just kidding, obviously. "Harsh treatment" of Palestinians who breach international borders isn't a cause for consternation when it's not Israel:
Dozens of Hamas members who were arrested in Egypt after breaching Gaza's border with Sinai in January are being tortured and held in harsh conditions, a senior Hamas leader said Wednesday. Said Siam, former interior minister in the Hamas-led government, strongly condemned Egyptian authorities for the continued detention of the Hamas men. He did not say how many Hamas members were being detained... Siam said he was especially disturbed by the fact that the Egyptians were questioning the Hamas detainees about their activities inside the Gaza Strip. "The Egyptians aren't asking anything about what's happening inside Egypt," he said. "They have even been interrogating our men about the whereabouts of [kidnapped IDF Cpl.] Gilad Schalit." Siam said the Egyptians were also trying to get information about the movements of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and other leaders of the Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip. "These are the type of questions that only Israeli interrogators would ask," Siam said.
The irony being, of course, that international human rights organizations have ensured that Israeli interrogators would pretty much never get to ask those questions. Maybe if the Egyptians find out anything they'll let the Shin Bet know.
Egypt is working on a plan with the Palestinians to supply all the besieged Gaza Strip's electricity needs and wean off its reliance on Israel for power, an Egyptian energy official said Thursday. Under the plan, Egypt - which already supplies a small part of Gaza's electricity - would increase the number of power lines linking it to Gaza and provide Palestinians with some 250 megawatts, said Izzat Ibrahim, a senior official of Sinai's National Electricity Power Co. "This capacity is considered as an alternative power for that Israel used to supply," Ibrahim said. He said Egypt's Electricity Ministry is preparing a study with President Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority on financing the project and providing equipment to Gaza. The project would take at least six months to implement, he said, though he could not say when it would start.
That's even after Hamas soldiers took pot shots at the Egyptian workers who were rebuilding the border crossing. But apparently nothing must interfere with the Palestinians' right to suffer no consequences while electing warmongers. Sentiments like "you know, maybe you people should think about not electing Islamic fanatics who wage unending war against all their neighbors" - totally out of bounds. No seriously, if you're in Egypt you're not allowed to say that.
It's a lower administrative court. And they're not allowed to actually identify themselves as Baha'i. But it's kind of like religious freedom:
The Court of Administrative Justice in Cairo upheld arguments made in two cases concerning Baha'is who have sought to restore their full citizenship rights by asking that they be allowed to leave the religious affiliation field blank on official documents... The decisions today concerned two cases, both filed by Baha'is, over the issue of how they are to be identified on government documents. The first case involves a lawsuit by the father of twin children, who is seeking to obtain proper birth certificates for them. The second concerns a college student, who needs a national identity card to re-enroll in university. The government requires all identification papers to list religious affiliation but restricts the choice to the three officially recognized religions -- Islam, Christianity, and Judaism... Without national identify cards -- or, as in the case of the twin children, birth certificates -- Baha'is and others caught in the law's contradictory requirements are deprived of a wide range of citizenship rights, such as access to employment, education, and medical and financial services... In both cases, lawyers representing the Baha'is have made it clear that they were willing to settle for cards or documents on which the religious affiliation field is left blank or filled in, perhaps, as "other."
Baha'is are regularly discriminated against in Egypt and Iran. The mullahs in Iran regularly carry out literal campaigns of extermination, carving "enemy of Islam" into the men, women, and children that they murder.
In contrast, the gigantic Baha'i World Centre - the administrative and religious center of the faith - dominates Mt. Carmel in Haifa, Israel. It's one of over a dozen religions that coexist just within the city's limits. But Israel is the Middle Eastern country that discriminates against other religions and Zionism is racism. Obviously.
Especially since their Don't Ask Don't Tell policy toward the religion of people who were born Baha'i is about as free as they're going to get about religion:
Remember yesterday when we said that Hamas has been gearing up for this war for a long, long time by making themselves into a Hezbollah clone? Yeah:
Two IDF soldiers were killed Saturday during a clash with Palestinian gunmen in northern Gaza Strip. Staff Sergeant Doron Asulin, 20, from Beersheba and Staff Sergeant Eran Dan Gur, 20, from Jerusalem, were killed Saturday morning in the Gaza Strip. Asulin was in the Givati brigade's patrol battalion; Dan Gur was of the brigade's Shaked battalion... Hamas sources said the IDF soldiers were hit by an improved anti-tank missile recently introduced to Gaza. Several weeks ago, a Hamas official told Ynet that the organization has been able to have missiles similar to those used by the Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War, smuggled into Gaza. According to reports, the gunmen were firing mortar shells, antitank and RPG missiles at the soldiers. Over 60 Palestinians were reportedly wounded in the fighting.
Egypt's complicity in Hamas's arms smuggling is so open that it probably constitutes a demonstrable breach of security agreements. Israel knows that and has known it for years. But no one bothered to call them on the violations because - thanks to a textbook State Department anti-Israel bait and switch - the alternatives to those agreements are worse. And now two Israeli soldiers have been killed by weapons smuggled from Egypt - during a campaign to capture other weapons smuggled from Egypt. Good thing that Israel gave up the Sinai.
Hamas, of course, is still boasting about their impending glorious victory:
An Israeli official's request that Egyptian schools should teach Hebrew as a foreign language is being met with verbal protests... Several opposition and independent lawmakers sent urgent requests to the government asking them to officially reject Cohen's proposal, on the grounds that it was improper and "damaged the country's sovereignty." A member of the popular opposition movement, Kifaya, said he did not want to give Hebrew an ill-deserved standing. Hebrew language studies should be limited to students studying for a masters degree or doctorate in social studies, he said, so that they can better understand Israeli society, because they should "know their enemy."
So when does Israel get the Sinai back? Because that's the deal, right? Israel gives up something tangible like land and in return its Arab enemies promise something intangible like normalization. And then if it doesn't work out, both sides go back to zero. Because if Israel's enemies got to keep their tangible benefits even when they returned to incitement and war - well wouldn't that make land-for-peace frameworks fundamentally biased against Israel?
Egypt's foreign minister said that no further violations of its borders would be tolerated in the wake of a 12-day breach on its frontier with Gaza and said anyone daring to cross would have their legs broken, the state news agency reported. The uncharacteristically assertive remarks by Ahmed Aboul Gheit came during a late night interview on state television, in which he criticized both Israel and Hamas for creating the unstable situation on Egypt's border. "Anyone who violates Egypt's borders will get his legs broken," Aboul Gheit was quoted as saying. He added that Egypt only allowed the Palestinians to cross the border after Hamas blew up the wall because of fears over the humanitarian situation resulting from Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.
That last part, of course, isn't technically "true." Egypt has a habit of finding all kinds of convenient excuses when they want to let Hamas smuggle things in and out of Gaza. Or they just happen to look the other way for years and years - or as an international lawyer might call it, they just happen to violate decades of treaty obligations.
Remember that time when the State Department placed inordinate pressure on Israel to hand over security at the Gaza-Egypt crossing to the EU? And then - once Israel made that de facto irreversible concession and withdrew from the border - the EU backed out of that agreement? Wouldn't it be totally weird if the State Department now completed their standard anti-Israel bait and switch and reacted to Hamas's temper tantrum by demanding that the Palestinians control the border? Totally weird:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Monday the United States wants a return to order along the border between Egypt and Hamas-held Gaza, and said the Palestinian Authority should have a role in policing the border. "We understand the complexity of that situation and want very much to see a resolution that would return order to that border," Rice said at the State Department.
With due respect to the Secretary, if there's one thing they have absolutely zero understanding of is the Israeli-Palestinian situation. But on the plus side, great news: the EU is thinking about maybe considering returning to their monitoring posts. So there's a very tiny possibility that the situation will revert to a near-total anti-Israel screwjob, rather than its current status as a mindbogglingly-surreal anti-Israel screwjob.
Men in black clothing, some of them masked, stood atop the bulldozer as it knocked down a concrete slab under the watchful eyes of Egyptian forces on the other side who shot in the air in an attempt to hinder the flow of Gazans into Egypt. Thousands of Palestinians, many of them carrying empty fuel canisters, managed to push through several openings despite the presence of the Egyptians deployed nine rows deep in some places. At one point, guards aimed a water cannon above the heads of people, not at them, to keep them back... The border was breached Wednesday, when Palestinians blew down large sections of the border wall. Since then, Egypt has allowed tens of thousands of Palestinians to go back and forth, but has rejected any suggestion of assuming responsibility for the crowded, impoverished territory. In an interview published Friday, President Hosni Mubarak called the situation in Gaza "unacceptable" and called on Israel to "lift its siege" and "solve the problem."
Egypt will allow Gazans to bring as much ammunition and explosives as they want into Gaza - but they won't accept responsibility for what the Palestinians do with them. That seems reasonable.
UPDATE: We keep forgetting to link to this Jihad Watch post, which opens with an interesting question and emphasizes that Hamas has been working on destroying the Egyptian border wall for moths.
About 60 people were hurt, including one woman who was hit by gunfire, as Egyptian border guards fired in the air and used clubs and water cannons to drive back hundreds of Palestinian women who surged across the border from Gaza Tuesday. The protesting Palestinians were demanding that Egypt back their demands for the border to be opened for shipments of food and essential provisions, in short supply due to Israel's closure of its borders with the Strip.
Well, every country on the planet except Israel. Just imagine the propaganda that Reuters and AP stringers would produce after Israeli troops dealt similarly with similar mobs of Palestinian women. Actually, you don't have to imagine.
Not as blatant as their recent prisoner release, but still frustrating in that "they explicitly promised not to do this if Israel handed over the crossing" kind of way:
Hundreds of Palestinians began arriving at the Gaza-Egypt border on Wednesday and prepared to cross, signaling an end to a deadlock that had left them stranded in Egypt. A Hamas official in Gaza said they would cross into the besieged coastal territory later in the day... An Egyptian security official said the government had issued an order to let the Palestinian pilgrims cross through Rafah, though he did not say when. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Israel believes some of the pilgrims are carrying sums of money intended for Gaza's Hamas rulers. Israel has been blockading Gaza since Hamas, which openly calls for Israel's destruction, came to power there in June.
The genocidal darlings - with dozens of senior Hamas terrorists sprinkled among thousands of Hamas voters - are returning from their peaceful religious pilgrimage with millions of dollars. Also, this guy:
Israel is insisting that the Palestinians, among them at least a dozen senior Hamas operatives, including leader Khalil al-Haya, who traveled to Iran for military training, return to Gaza via the Kerem Shalom crossing and only after undergoing security checks by the IDF. The money, officials said, was obtained during the Hamas operatives' trip abroad and most probably donated to the Hamas by countries such as Iran.
Egypt was in a "clear breach of agreements" last month when they let those Hamas murderers travel to Mecca by way of Tehran. Glad to see that Camp David - to say nothing of all the assurances that Sharon was given when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip and allowed the Palestinians a real chance at their own state - is working out so well. Israel should definitely exchange more land in exchange for security assurances from its Arab enemies. That always works.
Egypt has worked to thwart Israel diplomatically in various international forums for years, so Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit's recent threat to turn up the diplomatic heat on Israel is nothing new, Israeli officials said Tuesday. Egypt's foreign minister warned in a television interview earlier this week that Cairo would "retaliate" diplomatically against Israel if its complaints against Egyptian inaction on arms smuggling into Gaza hurt US-Egyptian ties. "If they [Israelis] continue to push and affect US-Egyptian relations and harm Egyptian interests, Egypt will certainly retaliate and will harm their interests," Gheit said. "We have claws capable of retaliating in all directions and through diplomacy." He did not elaborate.
That's how international assurances work in the Middle East - Israel gives away something tangible in exchange for empty promises, those promises are never fulfilled, and then Israel is attacked for pointing out that the other side is in violation of signed agreements. This is how it always happens. Egypt itself has been in explicit violation of its treaty obligations for years.
But at least Cairo isn't normalizing ties with the genocidal regime in Tehran while sitting on three decades of cutting edge US weaponry, effectively putting them a disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the Middle East. Fuck.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Monday announced plans to build several nuclear power plants, joining several Middle East Arab countries that recently have said they are kick starting their nuclear energy ambitions. Mubarak said in a speech broadcast live on national television that the decision to build the nuclear power stations was to diversify Egypt's energy resources and preserve the country's oil and gas reserves for coming generations.
"I announce before you Egypt's position to prepare the program for building several nuclear power stations. We believe that energy security is a major part of building the future for this country and an integral part of Egypt's national security system," Mubarak said at a ceremony inaugurating the second phase of construction of an electrical power plant north of Cairo.
It's cool. It's not like Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the Middle East. Or like they're in open violation of signed agreements. We quit. See you in the hills. Just don't come near our cave, because that's our special little corner of the post-apocalyptic landscape and we'll cut you if you try to take our pelts.
Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter warned Wednesday that over the past three months Hamas has equipped itself with 200 tons of explosives, most of which were obtained from the Palestinian Authority.... "When they do that, I hope we will be able to express our appreciation for their efforts, rather than lose our heads," he added. Dichter expresses his concern over the possibility of a similar situation taking place in the West Bank. "I am mentioning this issue of the weapon transfers in Gaza, sometimes from one street to another, so that we can understand the risks we are taking in the Judea and Samaria, unless we demand that they enforce the law."
We harp on Palestinian security assistance and weapons because they are exemplars of one of the two core problems in Israeli-Arab peacemaking (the other being that Israel is expected to give up tangible land for intangible promises). Israel makes concessions on the basis of international security guarantees. These assurances range from the US smugly insisting that weapons transfers to Fatah will be "done in a way that's monitored" or Egypt intercepting weapons or the EU monitoring the Gaza crossings or European forces watching over Palestinian prisoners or the United Nations preventing Hezbollah from approaching the Lebanese border. Those assurances are abandoned with such haste or implemented with such laxity that it's obvious that everybody knew that they'd never be fulfilled. Negotiators had just acted as if they didn't. It's the same dynamic as when Syria or Hezbollah or the Palestinians go to the UN and unblinkingly say that they want just this little bit of land and they'll give up their quest to wipe out Israel. And this is how it always happens. Always.
An Egyptian document distributed in Congress asserts that Israeli soldiers cooperate with smugglers in allowing arms and military equipment into the Gaza Strip. The document was relayed to senior Israeli officials where it has served to intensify concerns in Jerusalem about Egypt's willingness to stem the flow of weapons from its territory into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. The Egyptian document was circulated among congressmen by a group of Egyptian generals visiting Washington for meetings... News of the content of the document has stirred considerable ire in Jerusalem, where the issue of smuggling and the impression that Cairo is not doing enough to stop it has raised significant concerns in recent weeks... Two weeks ago, several dozen Hamas activists and militants were allowed to cross into the Gaza Strip from Sinai, and senior Israeli officials stressed in talks with their counterparts in the U.S. government that the smuggling is not "a technical problem but a strategic threat."
Trying to explain the logic of dreams, Freud told a joke about a neighbor returning a broken kettle and trying to talk his way out it: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. The point is that in dreams even the most blatant contradictions can coexist quite happily. The logic of international assurances to Israel: (1) we were never obligated to enforce that (2) we're not violating our obligation to enforce that (3) the violation of our obligation to enforce that is Israel's fault. Totally surreal, but this is how diplomacy works in the Middle East.
Don't let their clever ruse of uncovering one whole single smuggling tunnel fool you. First they restarted diplomatic contacts.Then there was the reopening of the border so Hamas soldiers could flood through. And now there's this. Three times is a trend:
[PA] officials expressed outrage over the release of Nahro Massoud - one of the commanders of Hamas's armed wing, Izzadin Kassam - who fled to Egypt more than a year ago. At the request of the PA, Massoud and several other Hamas fugitives were arrested by the Egyptian security forces and held without trial. Massoud's name had appeared on a Hamas list of prisoners whose release the group was demanding in exchange for kidnapped IDF soldier Cpl. Gilad Schalit... According to the PA officials, the release of Massoud is yet another sign of the recent rapprochement between Hamas and Egypt. "The Egyptians have clearly changed their policy toward Hamas," they said
It always upsets us when the Egyptians act like this. Because - just between us and you - we've always had a lot of faith in Arab-Israeli peace deals.
Egyptian authorities discovered a freshly dug tunnel leading under the border to the Gaza Strip and arrested an Egyptian man inside it, a security official said Friday. Moussa el-Mallahi confessed to police that he used the tunnel to smuggle explosives, money and weapons to terrorists on the other side of the border
Public Security Minister Avi Dichter said that Egypt's failure to prevent arms smuggling implies that the country wants Hamas to prosper... Dichter said that "any right thinking person who witnesses the Egyptians' failure to act against arms smuggling can all but infer that strengthening Hamas is their interest. Egypt is capable of acting decisively against Hamas, but hasn't done that for more than seven years," Dichter added. "Their intelligence is as good as ours," he concluded.The deputy head of the Shin Bet security service told the cabinet at its weekly meeting on Sunday that 40 tons of explosives have been smuggled into the Strip since Hamas took over the coastal area in mid-June. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's associates have said they believe Egypt has stopped foiling smuggling operations, and are thus in violation of an agreement signed with Israel two years ago in which Egypt agreed to prevent the smuggling of goods from its territory into the Gaza Strip.
This is how it always happens. Israel is given assurances under international agreements, they make strategic concessions based on those agreements, and then the other sides blithely ignore their obligations. Israeli negotiators are told to give nonbinding "best offers" to see if there's anything to negotiate about - and then future American and Arab leaders insist that those have to be starting points for land transfers. Israeli military officials are promised that if they hand over crossings then international monitors will guarantee security - except they leave. Israeli politicians are promised that if they will back off from Palestinian criminals then international officials will watch over them - except they don't. And then there's this.
The weird thing is that everybody knows that agreements with Israel will never be upheld. All sides, all spectators, etc. But everyone acts as if the agreements were worth something. It's a very literal fetish, where going through the motions is supposed to substitute for the thing itself. Except over the years thousands of Israelis have had to die because of the charades. Agreements guaranteeing Israeli security aren't worth the paper they're written on. The only thing that matters are facts on the ground.
Israel has saying since last May that they're eventually going to have to enter Gaza and stop the rockets. Israel did everything humanly possible to bring international, nonmilitary pressure to bear on Hamas. The New York consulate went the way up to starting a blog about the suffering in Sderot because the international press refused to cover it (although you cna be quite sure that there'll be a slight uptick in media interest when Israel rolls into Gaza). But - buoyed by the weakness of the Olmert-Peretz administration - Hamas thugs insisted that they would never stop trying to kill Israelis. Then Barak started moving tanks to the border in his new "well, if that's the way you want it..." campaign - and now Hamas is all rainbows and candy:
"Gaza's Hamas government is ready to offer a truce at this time," Mohammed Awad, a senior Hamas official, told a Gaza Web site affiliated with the Islamic group... Also Sunday, two Qassam rockets fired by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip struck the western Negev, causing no damage or injuries... Awad said the truce would only be possible if it "helped to achieve some goals for our people" - likely meaning moves to open sealed border crossings into Israel and Egypt, relieve international economic sanctions and halt Israeli army operations against Palestinian rocket squads. The Arabic word Awad used, hudna, denotes a temporary cease-fire rather than a permanent peace. Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist and is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and EU.
Well, so much for the left's "there's no military solution to the rockets" argument. Guess there was at least one solution, huh? After the jump, great news about Egyptian cooperation with Hamas.
A female Egyptian blogger has asked her readers to discuss whether she should go on vacation to Eilat in Israel. The responses are divided into: "do it", "do it but don't go to Eilat because it kind of sucks" (true), "don't do it because Egyptian security officials will harass you when you need to come home", and "Jews are evil and the enemy."
On the whole it's a somewhat heartening thread, minus the evidence of a very real undercurrent of anti-Israel intransigence in the Egypt. See, inter alia:
It's not like Egypt is obligated under the Sinai Accords to combat anti-Israel incitement. Except for all those cultural normalization planks, under which they - for lack of a better word - are. Super job President Carter.
There's not really much to this story beyond the obligatory expression of outrage, which we're more than happy to farm out to Carl at Israel Matzav. But it is interesting to see the different ways that Israel and its Arab enemies honor Ramadan. Olmert:
Cabinet ministers are expected on Sunday to discuss the release of 100 Palestinian prisoners before Ramadan as a good-will gesture, government officials said Saturday night. If the release is approved, it would likely be discussed and possibly announced at a planned meeting Monday in Jerusalem between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
And then there's the Egyptian and Syrian approach to honoring Ramadan. We'll be linking back to this post in the next few weeks every time some Western outlet passes on Muslim expressions of outrage about how the US or Israel would defile the Holy Month Of Ramadan (tm) by defending themselves.
If you want something particularly depressing out of that main JPost article, click through and search for the phrase "land bridge". Happy Sunday.
The Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) has ruled in favor of eight members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were earlier disqualified by the electoral commission from participating in the parliament's Upper House elections today, the online news portal Al-Jazeera.Net reported. The Muslim Brotherhood is a religion-based party and as such is banned from participating in any elections. However, members of the MB, who are running as independent candidates, may participate in the vote. The Upper House of the parliament has fewer authorities than the Lower House, but enjoys much prestige.
It's a little unfair of us to use news like this to mock Carter for arming Egypt to the teeth in Camp David, along with giving them back the Sinai. Unfair because Israel supported that peace deal, and we sometimes use parallel Israeli support for Oslo to castigate pro-Israeli readers who foam at the mouth about our support of Peres. We have a pretty robust defense of how they're different - things like "having Israel's best interests at heart" or "everything Peres says and does seems well thought out, while Carter may indeed be a latently anti-Semitic good ole boy". For now, suffice to say that being hypocritical doesn't make us wrong - it just makes us, at worst, hypocrites. Oh, and also: great job Carter!
Government thuggery is forcing Sandmonkey to stop blogging. State Security agents lurking around outside his house, bugging his phone, and arresting his friends - even the fact that he's gone on as long as he has is a testament to the possibility of a different Egypt. Every day it seems that this Egypt, however, recedes further and further into the distance. Gateway Pundit says the only thing that's possible to say.
Remember that time last year when we said that "Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country on Earth"? Or that other time last year when we said that Egypt is "the world's most dangerous country, minus one disgruntled general". Here is Allahpundit's breakdown of the latest polls taken in the Muslim world:
The bad news: everything else, including/especially the results from Egypt, where 60% thought suicide bombings were often or sometimes justified in attacking an enemy... Very quietly, Egypt has become one of the most radical Muslim countries in the world. As you scroll, compare its results to the results from, say, Pakistan.
(1) See? Never question us in front of the children again
(2) You know what would be really sweet? If Egypt developed a robust nuclear program and started making noises about pursuing nukes. That would be awesome!
So the AP article this morning is all about how the Arab League has dispatched Egypt and Jordan to negotiate with Israel over the Saudi Initiative. That sounds all well and good, except for the part where the Saudi plan calls for Israel to commit suicide, but let's ignore that for now. The really stunning thing here is that this news is being presented as if it's a sign that the Arab countries are serious about making peace, when in fact it's the opposite:
The Arab League has backtracked from its much-heralded offer to create a regional working group that would include Israel and representatives of Arab states. On Wednesday, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, reading a statement from the league, said that Jordan and Egypt, "the two Arab parties which retrieved their land [from Israel], will undertake efforts to revive the Arab peace initiative and facilitate direct negotiations." It will be up to Jordan and Egypt to convince Israel to accept the Saudi peace plan, and only when Israel meets specific conditions will the larger working group be initiated.
The self-declared Arab peacemakers were supposed to form a working group of all the nations that were going to make peace with Israel and then approach Israel together. Think of it as kind of like the concessions that Israelis are always supposed to be giving to the Palestinians to show that they're serious about peace (well, except for the freeing homicidal terrorists part... that only Israel has to do). The working group was supposed to show that Israel's Arab enemies were serious about getting over their half-century of rejecting the Jewish State.
And they couldn't even stomach that much.
Really a fantastic, long lasting, serious peace deal they're working out there. Definitely something that they seem ready to accept - and no way it would ever be reversed at the slightest change in the geopolitical or military winds.
Iran's systematic extermination of the Baha'i - stretching back to the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution - continues unabated. Here's a clip from a 1983 20/20 program about this program of quite literal religious extermination. People forget that in addition to deposing the Shah, eliminating Iran's Baha'i was an explicit part of Khomeini's agenda. Ignore the cheesy music and focus on the way that "enemy of Islam" was carved into mutilated bodies:
State organized persecution of the Baha'i is not exactly a secret in Iran. Now the same trends are emerging in Egypt. We're sure that you'll join us in being gratified that the UN is speaking out against these human rights atrocities. Except, well, you know.
* Michael Rubin passes on this story suggesting that these talks with the Muslim Brotherhood were cleared by the State Department. The full article quotes an anonymous "senior U.S. official", which basically means a mid-level State Department nobody passing on an anti-Bush leak to a sympathetic reporter. Not that we're denying that this meeting was cleared by State - given efforts to rehabilitate the MB in all the right journals, there have to be literally dozens of life-long civil servants looking to confirm their sophistication to themselves by talking to terrorists. We're just saying that if it was actually authorized by the State Department, that's as good a reason as any to elect a bureaucratic Hercules like Fred Thompson to clean out those stables.
On MR, we often talk about how anti-Semites are fundamentally unpersuadable. They don't hate Israel because they believe the lies that they spew, they spew those lies because they already hate Israel. Pro-Israel advocates get frustrated, because as soon as they disprove one lie, the anti-Semite always slips back to another one. And then another one. And so on. Because the particular lie doesn't matter - what matters is that the anti-Semite is already certain, for totally different reasons, that the Jewish State is evil.
A similar dynamic, but for very different reasons, occurs when you try to discuss Israel with a typical liberal sophisticate. We have a very close friend but, like many of our close friends, she suffers from having been raised in an environment of relatively lazy liberalism. Her opinions about the Middle East are a combination of very certain truths ("all sides are to blame", "extremists on both sides block peace", "it's a cycle of violence", etc) and a hodge-podge of vaguely remembered facts (suicide bombings, Israeli retaliations, etc). Picture your basic Los Angeles Times liberal, plus about 20 IQ points.
There's nothing particularly vicious about vague liberal sophistication. It's important that some of our... er... more enthusiastic readers remember this. There's a difference between hating Jews and the combination of moral superiority and faux sophistication that passes for the liberal cocktail party judgments about Israel. We're willing to entertain arguments about how the result is the same when Israel is facing an existential threat - but let's be careful about ascribing motive, if only to better repudiate vicious anti-Semites.
The problem, however, is that the process of arguing with your average liberal sophisticate is the same. When presented with obvious evidence that some vaguely held opinion is wrong, they'll slip back into another opinion. The result is that it gets very hard to get them to admit - even to themselves - that there's something deeply wrong with what they've come to believe.
So back to our friend. During this summer's Lebanon II war (or whatever the hell we're supposed to call it now), we kept trying to get her to realize that Hezbollah was actually run by real-life bad people. They're vicious anti-Semites who raise their kids to be vicious anti-Semites, and they intentionally sparked a war because they hate Jews and want to destroy Israel. But it's hard to penetrate the thick liberal fog by which Israel is an aggressor and Arabs are just naturally defending themselves. This went on for about a month. Then we finally found this video and showed it to her:
And - and this is burned in our mind - she took a couple of seconds and said: "Well, what do you expect? It's Hezbollah!" But - of course - the rest of the Arabs that refused to accept Israel must still, presumably, have some good reasons for doing so. Cycle of violence and so on.
But of course, it's not just Hezbollah and the Lebanese and the Saudis. It's also the Palestinians who bring toddlers on TV to talk about how beautiful it is to murder Jews:
And the Iranians:
And the Egyptians:
And so on.
And yet, we have no doubt that most liberals will still be able to insist that both sides are equally to blame, that it's reasonable to demand that Israel continue taking nation-endangering "risks for peace", and that it's unreasonable for anyone to suggest otherwise. Unfortunately, the vast majority of otherwise pretty reasonable people approach Israel only to find what they already "know". And what they "know" is nothing more or less than the insipid, banal catechism of bleeding heart liberalism - the Arabs are victims and the Israelis are aggressors.
Why let facts get in the way of pathetically misguided moral sensitivity, right?
An Egyptian girl has died of bird flu, bringing the number of confirmed deaths from the disease in Egypt to 12, a World Health Organisation official said on Monday... The new case brings to 20 the number of people known to have been infected with bird flu in Egypt, which has the largest known cluster of human cases outside Asia. Twelve have died and eight others have recovered since the virus first surfaced in Egyptian poultry a year ago.
At least it's not breaking out among Muslims in Britain. Because once HN51 mutates into something can be transmitted from human to human, we're going to need a lot of vaccines to stop a global pandemic. And as we know, vaccines are no-nos:
A MUSLIM doctors’ leader has provoked an outcry by urging British Muslims not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella because it is "un-Islamic". Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them “haram”, or unlawful for Muslims to take.
Jimmy Carter likes to point to the fact that the Camp David accords are still being observed by both sides, lo these many years later. That might be true at the moment, but it won’t always be so. The government’s trying to manage the monster it helped create and it won’t be able to restrain it forever... The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and of course plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale...
And for what it's worth, that collapse is going to happen very, very soon:
92 percent of Egyptians see Israel as an enemy nation, over 50 percent view Denmark, US in same light. Only 2 percent call Israel friendly nation despite longstanding peace. It's been 27 years since the Camp David accords were signed, but the vast majority of Egyptians still see Israel as an enemy state... In exchange for 92 percent of Egyptians considering Israel an outright "enemy", the US has been giving Egypt cutting-edge weaponry for well over a generation. And Israel gave up the buffer zone of the Sinai. And Egypt is getting Israeli assent and US cooperation on their fledging nuclear program.
And Carter's even wrong about how both sides observing Camp David. The Egyptians have failed to live up to their treaty obligations over and over again. And in recent years, they've all but explicitly broken the treaty several times. Even the book fair can be seen as an (albeit implicit) violation of the cultural normalization clauses in the Accords, but that's not as bad as when the Egyptian government officially declared that places like Eilat are Palestinian land. That is a direct and open and flagrant violation of the parts of Camp David where Egypt commits to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over all of mandated Palestine except Gaza and the West Bank.
But hey, at least they haven't been armed to the teeth by decades of US arms transfers. And at least their radicals aren't pursuing nukes. And at least Israel still has the Sinai as a buffer zone in case war breaks out. Jimmy Carter - globetrotting peacemaker!
Egyptian Parliament members have called on their government to seriously work to obtain nuclear weapons. The Egyptian newspaper al-Masry al-Youm reported that during a stormy meeting held Friday by the Parliament's national security, defense, foreign and Arab affairs committees, Ibrahim al-Jaafri of the Muslim Brotherhood called on the government to "change the country's diplomatic language".
Oh. It's the Muslim Brotherhood wants nukes. Maybe those "don't try to destroy Israel any more" clauses of Camp David won't work out after all, since the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't really recognize them. Good thing the US has been giving them cutting edge defensive weaponry for the last couple of decades. Otherwise, someone might be able to come in and destroy their future bomb-making production lines.
We're trying to get caught up on the last two weeks of news, and we're three days late on this story, which we found through Lynn. It seems that certain high-ranking Egyptian officials have some maverik opinions on the disposition of land in Israel:
The good news is that Egyptian Foreign Minister for Judicial Issues Abdel-Aziz Seif El-Nasr on Sunday told parliament he is against Cairo demanding Eilat as part of Egypt. The bad news is that Nasr said the Red Sea resort is "Palestinian land." Government sources in Jerusalem characterized Nasr's response to a parliamentary debate on the matter as "twisted." They said Israel would have preferred had he said there was no question Eilat was part of Israel, since this had been settled in the Egyptian-Israeli peace accords and the arbitration that followed regarding Taba. But, the officials said, Israel would not make a major issue out of Nasr's comments, saying they did not reflect official Egyptian policy. The officials said the issue likely would be raised after Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit arrives here Wednesday for a visit to discuss the situation in the Palestinian Authority.
The open secret, of course, is that this official apparently agrees with the vast, vast, vast majority of the Arab world - that all of Israel is Palestinian land, and Israel should be wiped off the map.
For the record, the Camp David Accords stipulate - explicitly - that Palestinian rights are to be resolved by negotiating over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Eilat, of course, is neither in the Gaza Strip nor the West Bank. That means that all the other parts of the treaty - stuff like committing to recognizing each other's sovereignty over each other's territory - are supposed to kick in. This isn't nitpicking - stating that the Palestinians have a right to Eilat makes a mockery of the "peace" part of Camp David - which is, under "land for peace," what Israel was supposed to get by giving up the resource-rich Sinai Peninsula. That's the problem with these treaties - Israel gives up something tangible like land or resources, and in return doesn't even get the appearance of peace.
Jimmy Carter, incidentally, won the Nobel Peace Prize for establishing Camp David as the framework for peace between the Arabs and Israelis. Good to see that it's holding up as well as all of his other helpful interventions into Middle East politics. Although he'd probably blame the whole situation on Israel, for having the nerve to demand that Egypt live up to its treaty obligations.
Here's a little brainteaser for the afternoon: what would happen if a high-ranking Israeli official came out and said that parts of the Sinai Peninsula were actually Jewish land? Not Israeli land, mind you - just land belonging to the Jewish settlers that were removed under Camp David. They want to come back and form their own state now. Do you think that the Egyptians would be as quiet as the Israelis are being?
As far as we know, Rantings of a Sandmonkey is the only site on our blogroll with an editor who actually believes that there's an Israeli-Palestinian "cycle of violence". Posts like his commentary on TIME giving Tariq Ramadan an editorial are more than enough to recommend him despite this (albeit significant) ideological misstep:
Time magazine courts Traiq Ramadan
They have him write a piece on the Pope's visit to Turkey and how he is the dark, and lot's of bullshit like that. Oh, I am sorry, does it show that I dislike the man the MB consider as their own Edward Saeed? Apologies all around. It must be because I know that his father, Hani Ramadan, is the reason for the creation of the global MB structure and the guy who convinced the saudis to start exporting wahhabisim all over the world. Or maybe because Traiq Ramadan is a hack whose PHD in Islam proposal was such a pile of shit that got rejected, which prompted him to write his magnum opus Islamophobia, and accused his Islamic professors of being islamophobic of all freakin things, which of course made them cave, cause they are european pussies, and can not possibly tolerate being-even wrongly- labeled intolerant of anyone for their religion. And now Islamophobia is the term de-jour for anyone who critisizes anything at all in Islam or muslim behavior. That is, of course, unless you are a muslim yourself, which is why apparently I can do it! But yeah, him and his father are both assholes and are one of the main reasons why we are in the shit we are in right now. But does anyone really care, or pay attention? Noooo! After all, the man has a PHD, and invented the new "anti-semitism". We must give him some credit and respect for that! Right?
In fairness to TIME, it's still not as bad as when the Washington Post allowed Hamas arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh to obfuscate / justify his genocidal ideology in their pages. Close though.
Police in Cairo have detained a blogger whose posts have been critical of the Egyptian government. Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention. The other friends were released after being questioned. Human rights groups have accused Egypt of eroding freedom of speech by arresting several bloggers recently... In recent weeks, bloggers have been exposing what they say was the sexual harassment of women at night in downtown Cairo in full view of police who did not intervene.
The controversy, however, goes far deeper than just government repression - and it has been going on longer than a couple of weeks. The first thing people should know is that the stakes involve freedom of speech and the right of women to basic physical security - two issues that we must be absolutely unwilling to compromise on. The second thing that people should know is that it's nowhere close to clear what side to choose in the medium-term to achieve those goals.
Political and religious repression in Egypt is nothing new: last month they very quietly arrested a former Sheikh for converting to Christianty. Political intimidation of bloggers is also nothing new - last summer they arrested and tortured Alaa Abdel-Fatah for his political blogging. We posted on that incident in a Winds of Change.NET HateWatch post:
Given that last time the police bought themselves a lot of trouble and not much intimidation, it might seem surprising to see them try persecuting bloggers again. But that's because the current controversy is a unique and dangerous combination for them: Egyptian bloggers have been mounting sustained protests against the disgusting sexism rotting Egyptian society, but they've been mounting them against the backdrop of more general and unspoken criticisms on the government. So these are protests that have the effect of political protests, but they're wrapped in something so undeniably true that the Egyptian government really can't oppose them. It's the same kind of perfect storm that has consistently brought down former Soviet clients (which, it bears remembering, Egypt is among) in the last half-century. A movement is not openly against the government - so no defense can be mounted and no opponent can be demonized - but it is nonetheless obviously targeted at the ruling regime. The regime is being attacked, but it has no justifiable reason or grounds for counterattack - and so the only available recourse is to arrest the protest leaders.
But it looks like these protests might not be containable. The specific controversy began in late October, when news started leaking about riots that had happened over a couple of nights in downtown Cairo. On the first two days of Eid, Muslim men - hopped up on religious fervor - had apparently gone on massive rampages, literally assaulting and raping scores of women as police looked on:
Obligatory theoretical psycho-social background: Phyllis Chesler's 2004 Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Terrorism, on how a culture that fetishizes submission ends with outbursts of repressed frustration aimed at debasing Muslim women and murdering non-Muslim enemies (the book she was reviewing, by Dr. Nancy Kobrin, was later pulled by the publisher because of post-Muhammad Cartoons fear of violence). You should also see this intimidatingly extensive analysis on links between violence against women and Islamic communities in the hearts of Old Europe.
Soon after Eid this year, the Egyptian blogosphere erupted. Early eyewitness reports quickly turned into a flood of outrage. At least as early as mid-November, Lynn-B of In Context had introduced the issue into the J-Blogosphere. But here's the thing - the main focus of the protesters' anger was not religion in general, Islam in particular, or even cultural dynamics. Rather - and this is the source of the perfect storm facing Egyptian authorities - protesters picked out the police for specific blame:
Who to blame? I'll go with law enforcement. I was assigned an article once that said that a rape takes place every three minutes in North America alone; God knows what the number is worldwide. Many rapes are not reported. It is safe to say that is it futile to rail against dangerous male misconceptions of sex, and women, and consent. The only thing that can prevent sexual assault is fear of consequences, a fear that is entirely absent in Egypt. Socially, people don't give a shit – it's the woman's fault, somehow, and apparently hormones serve as a complete defense to any crime. Egypt's criminal code provides for numerous avenues of protection against assault, sexual harassment, and even unpleasant language. However, these felonies are rarely prosecuted and even more rarely reported.
And so anti-sexism protests, so obviously justified and necessary, have taken this anti-government edge. And as the protests have been growing - first getting domestic coverage and then hitting the international wires by mid-November - the government had no choice but to begin cracking down.
But Mubarak is between two opposing forces, both of which are taking aim at him. On one side, he's being undermined by growing Islamist power - movements that are destroying whatever thin secular tradition the virulently anti-Israel pan-Arab movement built up during the Cold War. On the other side, Mubarak's being attacked by secularists because he can't control the cultural pathologies being introduced by this growing fundamentalist movement. So the government will do what they always do - arrest as many people as they can, and look for a way to get everyone to agree that social unrest is being caused by the West or by Jews.
This time, however, that tactic might not work. There are no Jews in those YouTube videos - and the Egyptian government is facing a mobilized blogging community that is quite pissed off about the arrest of fellow bloggers. And it was already pissed off about the Egyptian government's role in the original outrages - which is what got them arrested in the first place. The essence of political repression is control over information - which is literally impossible in a society that is simultaneously as advanced and as decentralized as Egypt is. These bloggers will eventually be freed, if only because Western bloggers - and then activists - and then government officials - will bring pressure to bear on Egyptian officials. And every day that they're in jail is another day that this issue spreads - and with it spreads awareness of the Egyptian government's incompetence.
Nonetheless, choosing a political side in this disgusting debacle is not trivial. The situation places advocates in almost the worst of all worlds. It's undeniable that our sympathies lie first and foremost, at least in the abstract, with the forces of political liberation. Even more so, in this concrete situation we should - as the Left used to say - demonstrate solidarity in every way with the Egyptian women being raped and the Egyptian bloggers being tortured. But the political considerations are difficult to weigh. If Mubarak is overthrown because of his regime's insipid inability to protect the physical well-being of women, what will replace him will be worse for those women. We honestly have no idea what concrete outcome we prefer to see after the short-term goals of liberating these bloggers are met. We just kind of wish there wasn't this massive fundamentalist movement of extremists who think that women exist to be domestic and sexual slaves to men, and that it wasn't sweeping large parts of the globe. Everywhere political Islam takes over, women become interpersonal and cultural punching bags for increasingly repressed fundamentalist societies. On the other hand, short-term political calculations that end by propping up strongmen are what got us into this situation in the first place.
It's almost like views on women might be particularly salient examples of more fundamental differences in civilizational sensibilities.
Just to let you know, neither of the two video's that you posted are actually video's of the Eid sexual harassment incident. The first video of the huge crowds on the street was shot in January 2006, and the second video was shot at the entrance gates to Cairo Stadium, where the football games are played (and no-one has said when it was shot).
It looks like there are videos on the incident are here and here, but they're Arabic language news reports and not eyewitness videos.
You know how we say that Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the world? Yeah:
92 percent of Egyptians see Israel as an enemy nation, over 50 percent view Denmark, US in same light. Only 2 percent call Israel friendly nation despite longstanding peace. It's been 27 years since the Camp David accords were signed, but the vast majority of Egyptians still see Israel as an enemy state. A poll conducted by an Egyptian state institute determined that Israel and Denmark were not only the least poplar foreign countries among the Egyptian public, but that they were also considered enemy nations.
In exchange for 92 percent of Egyptians considering Israel an outright "enemy", the US has been giving Egypt cutting-edge weaponry for well over a generation. And Israel gave up the buffer zone of the Sinai. And Egypt is getting Israeli assent and US cooperation on their fledging nuclear program.
Hey, with over 9 out of every 10 Egyptians committed to the destruction of Israel... you don't think that any of them are involved in the security services that are supposed to be stopping Palestinians from smuggling weapons into Gaza? Maybe - just maybe - this helps to explain how Hamas has built and armed an Hezbollah-like force in Gaza by smuggling in weapons from Egypt.
We're 95percent sure that the editor of Rantings of a Sandmonkey thinks we're just way too right-wing to be included within the spectrum of reasonable debate. Which is really not good for us, since our read of him is that - with a couple of anti-Israeli quirks - he is pretty much where the center ought to be. He's probably even right of center by Western standards. It's not even that he has any particular viewpoint that puts him in the center, although it works out that way - it's just that he just seems to really, really hate stupid arguments and stupid people. Especially stupid arguments made by stupid people to justify religious violence, which he calls out as such. If the Washington Post is the center-left (which it is) and they gave Hamas arch-terrorist and genocidal maniac Haniyeh a column to present 'his side' of the Jews are responsible for the world's wars debate (which they did) then not accepting obvious terrorist lies is about all you need to be center-right these days.
Anyway, we stole this picture from his blog a while back and haven't gotten around to posting it:
Please rank in order of irony. Best contribution gets a cookie, courtesy of MR. We have to make the Amazon Prime membership pay itself off by the end of the year:
* Your Guide to a Healthier You - This one's actually just kind of depressing. The current government does seem to be trying though, although obviously if the Muslim Brotherhood takes over doctors who don't think that women are inherently filthy are going to suffer the same kind of forced unemployment that they did in Afghanistan.
* Fashion Picks - There's a controversy raging in Egypt literally as you read this. The government tried to ban women from wearing face-covering veils inside the Cairo University dorms. The result was massive riots over a woman's right to cover herself in degrading garb. It's not hard to guess what direction this is going: Egypt just reversed its own ban on women wearing veils on satellite TV. They want to bring television more in line with increasing religious fundamentalism
* Red Alert: Your Feminine Queries Answered - For when Egyptian girls have that not so fresh feeling. "Red Alert" euphemisms for "Feminine Queries" is obviously meant to be intentionally ironic and funny. Right?
President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday called for Egypt to pursue nuclear energy, as the US ambassador said Washington would be willing to help its Mideast ally develop a peaceful program. Mubarak echoed a call made earlier this week by his son, Gamal, who many believe is being groomed to succeed his father. The proposal surprised some, who saw it as a jab at the United States, which is locked in a confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program.
And really, why wouldn't Washington help? It's not like Egypt is unstable or anything.
No matter how much strategic depth Israel gives away, no matter how many decades of US aid is poured in, peace deals with Israel's Arab enemies last only as long as Israel's enemies want it to:
Egypt's best-known democracy movement has switched causes and is now focused on demanding an end to the country's peace treaty with Israel. The campaign by the Kifaya group is a sign of how the war in Lebanon knocked momentum from democracy efforts and left many reform activists deeply resentful of the United States. Over the past two years, Washington has made promoting democracy a key part of its Middle East policy. But now reformists accuse Washington of supporting Israel in its offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas, which wreaked widespread destruction in Lebanon...
The Egyptian-Israeli treaty ended hostilities between the two neighbors, after four wars between 1948 and 1973, and is cited by successive U.S. administrations as a model for peaceful coexistence in the region. But it failed to dent the animosity most Egyptians feel for Israel...
"The most prominent casualty of Washington's policy during the Lebanon war was its program for democracy in the Middle East," said Amr Hamzawi, a Middle East expert at Carnegie Endowments, a Washington think tank. "When an elected government in Lebanon faced a challenge, the American administration blatantly took the side of Israel."
According to the professional sophisticates helping to decide the US State Department's Middle East policy, the Lebanese government doesn't really have much to do with this whole regional war thing. Alberto Fernandez (Director of Public Diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department) took pains to be very clear on this point in a conversation with Jim Zogby's Arab American Institute: "Fernandez rebuk[ed] Israel's position toward the Lebanese government. He specifically said: "If it gets me in trouble, it gets me in trouble. I don't care. The Israeli Government has said 'we hold the Lebanese government responsible.' The US Government has not said that, and we don't believe that.... We have been cognizant of the efforts of the Lebanese Cabinet to be responsible and to act in a mature and serious way. This is one of the best governments Lebanon ever had, it's a serious government, and the result of a democratic process."
(2) Stupid - If the vast majority of Egyptians want to renew hostilities with Israel then how does renewing hostilities with Israel reflect a failure of democracy promotion? Isn't it more the other way - populism enables Arab animosity towards Israel to become official policy, which is the one man-one vote-one time rightist critique of Bush?
(3) Doubly stupid - What does resentment toward the US have to do with Egyptian loathing for Israel, which is expressed in the country's rampantly anti-Semitic media in the form of Elder of Zion TV programs and horrifically vicious cartoons? Does the WaPo really want its readers to think that the reason that popular Egyptian resentment of Israel - or even the widespread idea that Egypt should withdraw from Camp David - began with Lebanon II? Do they know how to use Google?
(4) We'll agree it's true! - But this isn't because of US policy or anything Israel has recently done. It's because fundamentally Egypt gets to play the same nudge-nudge wink-wink that the rest of Israel's enemies do when they engage in peace negotiations: pocket tangible concessions, drag your feet on implementation until you're willing to break the treaty, and then break the treaty and renew hostilities from a stronger, reorganized position.
The former laundryman who sings a kind of Egyptian-folk rap has been widely panned by critics, but developed a huge following after the 2003 release of "I Hate Israel" and the anti-American and anti-Saddam Hussein "Hitting Iraq."
Following a similar formula, "For Only Two Soldiers" seems destined for success. In it, he exhorts "Oh Arab men, wake up." "One thousand times I warned of Israel, they thought I was kidding," the song opens. "The truth is now clear. Because of two soldiers, they make a big fuss."
Two soldiers and thousands of rockets, but that's not really what bothers us. Israel is not retaliating - they're fighting a war in every way imposed on it by Hezbollah. We don't want to bore you with this point, but again - retaliations are "conducted," but wars are "fought". Once a war begins, Israel is under no obligation to play with a handicap just because the other side was particularly stupid to antagonize it.
So Egypt is probably more than a little responsible for all of those weapons that have been finding their way into the Gaza Strip:
Since the pullout, Diskin said, Palestinians have smuggled three anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza compared to none before disengagement. He added that close to 200 RPGs and tons of explosives were also smuggled into Gaza on a monthly basis. "It is clear that our withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor and our reliance on the Egyptians has proven to be a failure," committee chairman Yuval Steinitz said. "The Egyptians are not acting like the Jordanians, who prevent weapons from being smuggled across the border. They sometimes stop the smuggling and sometimes don't, but in reality their behavior has drastically increased the amount of weapons smuggled into Gaza." Terror organizations, Diskin said, have used the last few months to build up their military forces and to develop long-range Kassam rockets.
And now they're acting all surprised and getting pissed off at PA Chairman Abbas because people are actually using all those weapons that they allowed across the border:
Egypt threatened to withdraw its support for the Palestinian Authority if the PA did not act to control the rampant anarchy in the Gaza Strip, according to a report in the London Arab newspaper Al Quds. The report claimed that following the incident at the Rafah border crossing in which two Egyptian soldiers were killed, Egyptian authorities delivered the threat to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as part of a specially delivered message. Egypt also threatened to withdraw its support for the peace process if the PA did not take the proper steps to restore order to Gaza.
Now, admittedly, Abbas is not on our Hanukkah card list. But Egypt's activities against Israel place them in at least a healthy amount of tension with at least a couple of treaties and not a few signed agreements. Someone should probably point that out, and also point out that you don't get to throw the glass of milk against a wall and then cry about all the liquid on the ground.
Egypt agreed on Sunday to reopen its border with Gaza Strip after Palestinian militants reached an agreement with European officials in which they promised to keep the area calm. The border was closed last Thursday after Palestinian gunmen belonging to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the Fatah party's military wing, shot dead two Egyptian police officers and injured some 20 others. During the incident, two bulldozers driven by Al-Aqsa militants demolished segments of the wall separating Gaza from Egypt.
MR will be operating a betting pool as to how long it will take for these terrorists' "promises" to become "negotiated agreements that Egypt has violated". Which will become "a justification to take action". We can be so confident because it's happened so many times before. Betting will stop as soon as the next wave of bulldozers leave the gate. Or crash into the gate, as the metaphor goes.
Preliminary results in Egypt's elections Thursday gave the leading
opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, a record 19 percent of parliament, with the ruling party and its allies holding an overwhelming majority after a four-week election with unprecedented political violence... The results mean the Brotherhood - a group that is banned but tolerated with restriction - has won almost six times the 15 seats it held in the outgoing assembly.
Fences to keep suicide bombers out are legitimate when they're built by Arab countries to protect Arab citizens from Arab suicide bombers:
Egypt has started to build a security fence around the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh to try to stop attacks on the town, security officials say. The officials said the fence would stretch for 20km (12 miles) and force vehicles wanting to enter the town to pass through one of four checkpoints. More than 60 people were killed in July when suicide bombers launched attacks outside two hotels and a market.
But a fence built by Israel to protect Jews from Arab suicide bombers is "Apartheid" - even if where its built in Gaza has allowed only one local suicide bomber to get through in five years and even if where its built in the West Bank causes an "absolute halt" in terrorist activities.
One Muslim protestor was killed and dozens more wounded in violent clashes with police in Alexandria amid mounting tensions in the Egyptian Mediterranean city over a Christian video, the interior ministry said. Following an earlier demonstration that had gathered at least 5,000 people, Muslims angered by release of a DVD by the Saint Girgis Church grouped outside the building again in the evening after breaking their Ramadan fast...
The protests came three days after a man lightly wounded a nun with a knife at the entrance to the same church, and a man who came to her aid was stabbed in the back. The play, performed by amateur actors, tells the story of a young Christian who converts to Islam and is exhorted by a sheikh to kill priests and destroy churches, according to the independent Al-Dustur paper. Performances of the play had to be abandoned after it sparked a public outcry.
Forty percent of the 3.6 million people living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip can't be sure of getting enough food, either because they can't get to it or because they can't afford it, the UN food agency said Thursday.
Israel is still in military occupation of the West Bank. They are at least partially responsible for taking care of the local population. This distinguishes the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, which is officially Not Israel's Problem Any More.
Foreign Minister Shalom has had it up to here with Egypt's unwillingness to fulfill treaty obligations:
Egypt is not doing enough to stop the flow of weapons into the Gaza Strip, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in a Saturday interview with Israel Radio... Shalom told Israel Radio that weapons smuggling is continuing. "The Egyptians didn't exactly succeed in stopping the transfer of weapons," Shalom said, adding that Israel is worried about the influx.
No one was under any illusions that the Palestinians would use the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to regroup and rearm. But they could at least pretend to try to care about perception - we're not asking for honesty, just a little concern for appearance's sake.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa on Wednesday blamed Israel for chaos at the border, as the frontier remained open for the third consecutive day and hundreds of people streamed freely from one side to the other. Addressing the GA, al-Kidwa said that the situation had been of Israel's making as it had insisted on a unilateral withdrawal from the area...
On Wednesday... Hamas members blew a hole in the concrete fence that runs along the border, having cleared the area to prevent casualties. Palestinian police did not intervene.
The Right often makes the point that Arab culture is marred by a resentful victimage - committed to blaming Israel and the West for all its failings, the Arab world is unable to progress because it is unable to admit the true causes of its decrepitude. And now, we are treated to the spectacle of the Palestinian Foreign Minister blaming Israel for... leaving the Palestinians alone.
Egyptian forces gun down Sinai terror suspect...
... Quickly admit mistake and issue apologize
... Are loudly not condemned by any international organization
... Does not threaten any dialogue, because Egypt just kills dissenters
Meanwhile the Egyptian government controls all funds from overseas, including from the U.S. government and churches, that might help strengthen civil society (something criticized in the March 2004 Alexandria Declaration issued by Arab civil-society groups). Yet it has received $59 billion in U.S. aid, and currently receives two billion a year.
Just like Lebanon did when Israel was withdrawing from the Security Zone, Egypt is promising to beef up it's security on the border if Israel withdraws from Gaza:
If Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip, Egypt will beef up police forces along the border and put into place officers capable of dealing with weapons-smuggling into Gaza, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Thursday after talks with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom in Cairo."
The difference is that Egypt is already treaty bound to prevent weapons smuggling across the border. But nobody really expects Arab countries to live up to their treaty obligations with Israel - Europe and their diplomatic allies instead have a fetishistic focus on process, as if the signing of a peace treaty is the same thing as achieving peace.
And while we're discussing this article, our give-them-an-inch department brought this little tidbit to our attention. I really don't understand why the State Department is allowed to interfere with anything - shouldn't they still be devoting all their time to explaining how nobody lost China?
Earlier Thursday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East David Satterfield said that the U.S. has not yet formulated a position regarding Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan and will decide to formally adopt the plan only after the administration receives some more answers from Israel.
Speaking in Washington, Satterfield said Israel must take into account that a disengagement must also be made in the West Bank, similar to the one Israel is considering for the Gaza Strip.
Satterfield also attacked Israel's settlement policy and said the increase of the settlements' size with the support of the Israeli government is reducing the chances of reaching a two-state solution.
Israel is expected to build the scaffolding, find the rope, and take the initiative to put their own head in the noose.
The IDF had to go into Rafah again this morning to destroy tunnels used to smuggle arms between Egypt and Gaza. This is becoming kind of a weekly routine, but it's a routine that may be on its way to ending. That morning, Uri Dan had pointed out why Peres's proposal to turn over security of Gaza to Egypt would be apretty horrible idea. Egypt would continue refusing to do any actual enforcement, and Israel would only be able to tolerate that refusal for so long before carrying out raids. And who knows whether or not those raids would go all the way to the source of those tunnels. And Peres, having been in several governments that had to go to war against the Egyptians, should know better by now.
How long before this really sad story gets blamed on the perfidious Jews?
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - A charter airliner with 141 people aboard - mostly French tourists - crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff on Saturday from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, officials said. No survivors were reported.
The Boeing 737 jet took off shortly before 5 a.m. (10 p.m. EST Friday) and quickly disappeared from radar about seven miles south of the airport, said airport officials using customary anonymity.
No distress signal was detected, according to officials at Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation.
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About
Omri Ceren is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.
