RobDownSouth
BoycotDivestSanctio
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2002
- Posts
- 78,397
Who unlocked the gate and left it open?
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Who unlocked the gate and left it open?
Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I’VE never been more worried about Israel’s future. The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.
This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.
Israel is not responsible for the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt or for the uprising in Syria or for Turkey’s decision to seek regional leadership by cynically trashing Israel or for the fracturing of the Palestinian national movement between the West Bank and Gaza. What Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, is responsible for is failing to put forth a strategy to respond to all of these in a way that protects Israel’s long-term interests.
O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy?
“The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman,” wrote Haaretz newspaper’s Aluf Benn. “The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform ... Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda.”
What could Israel have done? The Palestinian Authority, which has made concrete strides in the past five years at building the institutions and security forces of a state in the West Bank — making life there quieter than ever for Israel — finally said to itself: “Our state-building has not prompted Israel to halt settlements or engage in steps to separate, so all we’re doing is sustaining Israel’s occupation. Let’s go to the U.N., get recognized as a state within the 1967 borders and fight Israel that way.” Once this was clear, Israel should have either put out its own peace plan or tried to shape the U.N. diplomacy with its own resolution that reaffirmed the right of both the Palestinian and the Jewish people to a state in historic Palestine and reignited negotiations.
Mr. Netanyahu did neither. Now the U.S. is scrambling to defuse the crisis, so the U.S. does not have to cast a U.N. veto on a Palestinian state, which could be disastrous in an Arab world increasingly moving toward more popular self-rule.
On Turkey, the Obama team and Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers worked tirelessly these last two months to resolve the crisis stemming from the killing by Israeli commandos of Turkish civilians in the May 2010 Turkish aid flotilla that recklessly tried to land in Gaza. Turkey was demanding an apology. According to an exhaustive article about the talks by the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, the two sides agreed that Israel would apologize only for “operational mistakes” and the Turks would agree to not raise legal claims. Bibi then undercut his own lawyers and rejected the deal, out of national pride and fear that Mr. Lieberman would use it against him. So Turkey threw out the Israeli ambassador.
As for Egypt, stability has left the building there and any new Egyptian government is going to be subjected to more populist pressures on Israel. Some of this is unavoidable, but why not have a strategy to minimize it by Israel putting a real peace map on the table?
I have great sympathy for Israel’s strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends — and President Obama’s one of them — nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation.
Unfortunately, Israel today does not have a leader or a cabinet for such subtle diplomacy. One can only hope that the Israeli people will recognize this before this government plunges Israel into deeper global isolation and drags America along with it.
CAIRO — Egyptians have attacked another foreign embassy — this time that of Saudi Arabia.
If Israel were invaded Obama would issue a harsh warning that we may stop being her enemies "best friends" unless they withdrew...in the next 12 months or so.
thegatewaypundit.comKhaled al-Qoddoumi, the senior Hamas representative in Iran, announced today that the main objective of the Islamic Awakening is to bring Jerusalem back under Muslim control.
Iranian Fars News reported:
Collapse of dictatorial regimes by popular uprisings in the region has posed a major threat to the Israeli regime, a senior Palestinian figure said, and added that bringing Beit al-Moghaddas (Jerusalem) back to Muslim control is the main demand of the recent Muslim revolutions and growing Islamic awakening in the region.
The representative of the Palestinian Hamas movement in Tehran, Khaled al-Qoddoumi, pointed to the recent popular uprisings in the region and their effects on the Palestinians’ popular movements, and said, “Today, the enemy is really feeling a threat and danger because those regime which unfortunately served Israel’s goals and supported it have now collapsed.”
“Governments in Egypt and Tunisia that were supporters of the Israeli regime on the Middle-East’s political scenes have now collapsed and this is a threat to Israel, the enemy,” he stated.
Qoddoumi pointed to the expulsion of the Israeli envoy from Egypt and anti-Israeli demonstrations in Tunisia, and stressed that people in region want a return of Beit al-Moghaddas to Muslims.
“The return of Beit al-Moghaddas is the demand of Islamic awakening,” he reiterated.
He further stressed unity among Palestinian groups as a priority for all Palestinians given the changing climate in the Middle-East.
Egyptians raided the Israeli embassy in Cairo earlier this month and forced the Israeli ambassador to leave their country.
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/what-is-egypt’s-revolution-really-all-about/The stirring, iconic scenes of courage and national unity, sacrifice and magnanimity, have long since faded, like a discarded bouquet of lotus and jasmine.
They have been replaced with endless strikes; attacks on churches; countless, sometimes bloody, demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square; growing radical Islamist (Salafi) control of Sinai; cross-border attacks on Israel (and Israel’s inevitable response); and, finally, the sacking of a sovereign embassy with the ruling military’s apparent complicity. For the first time in Egypt’s five thousand years of Pharaonic-style rule, the people have put the top man on trial, but the exercise somehow seems cheap and tawdry.
Meanwhile, tourism has all but died and investment has retreated as chaos reigns and foreign currency reserves shrink to a memory. There is even talk of imminent mass famine, as Egypt can no longer afford to import staple foods and can’t even effectively get subsidized bread to those who actually need it.
By almost any measure, things looked better for most people under the reviled ancien regime. While violent crime (bag-snatchings, burglaries, petty thefts, domestic murders, kidnappings, and muggings) were on the rise in Mubarak’s last years, they have surged since his fall. One novelty of the new Egypt is an epidemic of attacks on police stations in which guns are stolen and people often killed. That simply did not happen under Mubarak.
Add the siege and destruction of state security headquarters around the country since Mubarak resigned in February and the growing boom in baltagiya (gang thuggery), and it all reinforces the impression that Egypt really is a country where mobs and criminals roam at will. That is true even if many places still seem more or less as safe as before. The reality hardly reaches the international media, whose representatives savor the still-thriving local bar scene. Yet even alcohol and Western beachwear may soon be banned if the Muslim Brotherhood, that they were praising only yesterday, and more openly radical Salafis, get their way.
According to activist/filmmaker Amr Hussein, in his new documentary, The Road to Tahrir, the January 25 Revolution actually began in September 2000, with the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada. That event drew mass protests all over Egypt. Passions were whipped up by the state-controlled media as well as by the opposition.
The “pro-Palestinian” (anti-Israeli) and anti-Mubarak elements brought together then, Hussein notes, later coalesced in 2008 in the April 6 Movement (itself aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood against Mubarak and the peace treaty with Israel). From this group arose the initially Facebook- and Twitter-driven 2011 uprising. So from the start, this movement was not just about the Egyptian state but also the Jewish one next door. Its major Islamist element’s appeals apparently provided most of the demonstrators after the first two days of protests in January. But that’s not what we were told at the time.
Given that the Mubarak regime banned me from entering the country last December, after twenty years of living there, I should have no reason to eulogize his rule. Yet I will — up to a point.
Of course, while some of Mubarak’s key polices were wise — notably, keeping the peace with Israel and reforming the economy — both done imperfectly, the uprising and military coup reacted to his rule’s worst aspects. The police were corrupt, as they had been before Mubarak and will be after him. Yet at least they were often there to protect people from crime.
The decline in tourism — down more than one third the second quarter of this year from the same period in 2010 — has been catastrophic. There has also been a total halt to building starts, at least in that sector. And there will likely be an Islamist plurality, if not majority, when elections are held. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has said it will permit no international monitors to ensure their transparency. Political parties are able to form more freely and media are less restricted than before, but bloggers and television have both seen crackdowns, and book censorship continues. The hated emergency law, in force almost continuously since 1967, has just been renewed for another six months. And twelve thousand citizens have been held for military trials since February — more than during the whole three decades of Mubarak’s arguably milder tyranny.
Poll: 35% of Egyptians Support Muslim Brotherhood
More than a third of Egyptians support the extreme Muslim Brotherhood movement, according to a new survey conducted by the Egyptian government’s media and decision-making support center.
The survey, the results of which were reported by the pan-Arab daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat on Wednesday, revealed that 35% of citizens support the Muslim Brotherhood while only 21% oppose the movement.
Cute site. The columnist is from Canada, and the link in his column to the survey takes you to search engine results that include the Wikipedia definition of "survey".
And if you can't, then fuck off.
No answer, and you can't follow directions either?That's funny...
...feel more manly now, child?
U.S. met with Egypt Islamists: U.S. diplomat
(Reuters) - U.S. officials have met members of the Muslim Brotherhood's political party, a U.S. diplomat said, after Washington announced it would have direct contacts with Egypt's biggest Islamist group whose role has grown since U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was ousted.
Washington announced the plans in June, portraying such contacts as the continuation of an earlier policy. But analysts said it reflected a new approach to the way it dealt with a group which Mubarak banned from politics.
Your reading assignment http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1235
Still think the protests in Egypt are about freedom and democracy?
And we're bigots for being intolerant of that.Seem Woman will soon be lower than Dirt.
As the chief spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said recently, [Grover] Norquist has become the "chief cleric of Shariah tax law" in America. Norquist has used his influence in Washington to propel the careers of people like Suhail Khan, a former Bush White House appointee, whose family founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. and held fundraisers for al-Qaida's No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Thanks to Norquist's sponsorship, Khan now sits on the board of the American Conservative Union, the group that organizes the largest annual conservative conference in the country, known as CPAC. Norquist also serves on that board and the board of the National Rifle Association – as well as the advisory board of GOProud, a homosexual group promoting same-sex marriage, open homosexuality in the U.S. military and hate-crimes laws.
Indeed, Norquist claims to see no conflict between Islamic, Saudi-style Shariah law and the Constitution. In fact, he says Islam "is completely consistent with the U.S. Constitution and a free and open society." Anyone who disagrees with him, like me, an Arab-American whose grandparents fled the Middle East for the liberty they found in America, is "Islamophobic."
Norquist is also behind the Republican candidacy of Imam Afif "David" Ramadan in Virginia's 87th legislative district. Who is Ramadan? Ramadan is married to the daughter of a Shiite general in the Lebanese intelligence service, Ghanda Abdul Rahman Zoghbi. As Kennth Timmerman, a veteran Middle East correspondent, writes, "How do you get to marry the daughter of a Shiite general in the Lebanese intelligence service, which has long been dominated by Iran's proxy, Hezbollah? Certainly not by being a secular Muslim – also known as an 'apostate' by Muslim believers – who embraces the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution over Shariah law?" Good question, indeed.