Reports say anger at the United States and Israel is widespread among the Egyptian crowds protesting against out-of-favor President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
The protesters hold Washington responsible for President Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship.
A Press TV correspondent says many slogans at Liberation Square are directed against the US, Israel and France.
This comes as Egyptian demonstrators gathered in Cairo’s Liberation Square on Sunday to honor the martyrs of 13 days of anti-government protests.
They have managed to stay in the central square, despite heavy army presence and attacks by pro-government thugs.
Protesters say their achievements in recent days have made it impossible for them to give up until President Mubarak quits power.
The developments come as the government has entered talks with opposition groups to discuss political reforms.
Egypt’s opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, has agreed to join talks with the government of President Mubarak but says that the meeting is “in no way in the form of negotiations, it is rather statement of our demands.”
Senior party officials said they would enter talks with Vice-President Omar Suleiman, but will drop out if the demands made by the protesters during the last two weeks are not met.
Earlier, the Muslim Brotherhood representative in Britain, Mohammad Ghanem, confirmed to Press TV that his party will hold talks with the government. However, he said the position of the Muslim Brotherhood has not changed.
The government has pledged to hold talks with all opposition parties to discuss democratic reforms that would lead to the replacement of President Mubarak.
The Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned in Egypt. The group, however, enjoys popular support.
Meanwhile, people and leaders around the world are rallying in solidarity with the Egyptian people’s protests against Mubarak.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for a democratic transition in Egypt as soon as possible.
Erdogan suggested that an interim administration be formed to pave the way for the fulfillment of the Egyptian people’s demands.
The Turkish leader said democratic change in Egypt would have a positive impact on the entire region.
Earlier, Erdogan called on the Egyptian president to immediately step down, saying Mubarak’s promise to resign in September is not enough.
The greatest danger to the Egyptian revolution and the prospects for a free and independent Egypt emanates not from the “baltagiyya” — the mercenaries and thugs the regime sent to beat, stone, stab, shoot and kill protestors in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities last week — but from Washington.
Ever since the Egyptian uprising began on 25 January, the United States government and the Washington establishment that rationalizes its policies have been scared to death of “losing Egypt.” What they fear losing is a regime that has consistently ignored the rights and well-being of its people in order to plunder the country and enrich the few who control it, and that has done America’s bidding, especially supporting Israel in its oppression and wars against the Palestinians and other Arabs.
The Obama Administration quickly dissociated itself from its envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner, after the latter candidly told the BBC on 5 February that he thought President Hosni Mubarak “must stay in office in order to steer” any transition to a post-Mubarak order (“US special envoy: ‘Mubarak must stay for now’,” 5 February 2011).
But one suspects that Wisner was inadvertently speaking in his master’s voice. US President Barack Obama and his national security establishment may be willing to give up Mubarak the person, but they are not willing to give up Mubarak’s regime. It is notable that the US has never supported the Egyptian protestors demand that Mubarak must go now. Nor has the United States suspended its $1.5 billion annual aid package to Egypt, much of which goes to the state security forces that are oppressing protestors and beating up and arresting journalists.
As The New York Times — always a reliable barometer of official thinking — reported, “The United States and leading European nations on Saturday threw their weight behind Egypt’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, backing his attempt to defuse a popular uprising without immediately removing President Hosni Mubarak from power.” Obama administration officials, the newspaper added, “said Mr. Suleiman had promised them an ‘orderly transition’ that would include constitutional reform and outreach to opposition groups” (“West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition,” 5 February 2011).
Moreoever, the Times reported, the United States has already managed to persuade two of its major European clients — the United Kingdom and Germany — to back continuing the existing regime with only a change of figurehead.
Suleiman, long the powerful chief of Egypt’s intelligence services, has served — perhaps even more so than Mubarak — as the guarantor of Egypt’s regional role in maintaining the American- and Israeli-dominated order. As author Jane Mayer has documented, Suleiman played a key role in the US “rendition” program, working closely with the CIA which kidnapped “terror suspects” from around the world and delivered them into Suleiman’s hands for interrogation, and almost certainly torture (“Who is Omar Suleiman?,” The New Yorker, 29 January 2011).
High praise for Suleiman’s work has also come from top Israeli military brass. “I always believed in the abilities of the Egyptian Intelligence service [GIS],” Israeli General Amos Gilad told American, Palestinian Authority and Egyptian officials during a secret April 2007 meeting whose leaked minutes were recently released by Al Jazeera as part of the Palestine Papers. “It keeps order and security among 70 millions — 20 millions in one city [a reference to the population of Egypt, actually closer to 83 million, and to Cairo] — this is a great achievement, for which you deserve a medal. It is the best asset for the Middle East,” Gilad said.
The notion that anyone, let alone US officials, could believe that Suleiman would lead an “orderly transition” to democracy would be laughable if it were not so sinister. Much more likely, the strategy is to try to ride out the protests and wear out and split the opposition, consolidate the regime under Suleiman’s ruthless grip with the backing of the Egyptian army, and then enact cosmetic “reforms” to keep the Egyptian people politically divided and busy while business carries on as usual. Under any Suleiman “transition” political activists, journalists and anyone suspected of being part of the current uprising would be in grave danger.
From the American perspective, the strategy can be likened to what happened in the summer of 2008 when the house-of-cards international financial system started to collapse. Think of the Tunisian regime of deposed dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as the investment bank Lehman Brothers. When a run on the bank began, the United States government refused to provide it with financial guarantees to bail it out, and it quickly went bankrupt.
But when the panic spread and even larger “too big to fail” financial firms including massive insurance company AIG began to see their positions suddenly deteriorate, the United States government stepped in to bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Egyptian regime is the AIG of the region and what we are seeing now is an American attempt to bail it out. If Egypt goes under, the United States fears that the contagion would spread as Arab publics realize that the US-backed despots who rule them can be replaced. The toppling of these regimes whose only promise to their people has been “security” is not the end of the world but the start of renewal.
Of course, no analogy is exact. Whereas, allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse was a calculated decision, the United States did not see the revolution in Tunisia, or the uprising in Egypt coming. “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton infamously declared on 25 January, the day the anti-regime protests broke out (“US urges restraint in Egypt, says government stable,” Reuters, 25 January 2011).
Clinton’s cluelessness is reminiscent of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice’s famous words (“didn’t see it coming”) in relation to Hamas’ victory in Palestinian legislative council elections in 2006.
As Helena Cobban has observed, the Israel Lobby, “AIPAC and its attack dogs,” have conducted such a thorough “witch-hunt” over the past quarter century “against anyone with real Middle East expertise that the US government now contains no-one at the higher (or even mid-career) levels of policymaking who has any in-depth understanding of the region or of the aspirations of its people” (“Obama’s know-nothings discuss Egypt,” 28 January 2011).
But it is even worse than that. The US “policy” establishment seems only capable of viewing the region through Israeli eyes. This is why for so many officials and commentators the concerns of Israel to maintain a brutal hegemony trump the aspirations of 83 million Egyptians to determine their own future free from the shackles of the regime that has oppressed them for so long.
And different futures are possible. On the minds of many observers is the “Turkish model” of constitutional democracy, economic resurgence and foreign policy independence, all under the rule of a “moderate” Islamist party. Turkey, once closely in the orbit of the United States, started to break out with its refusal to allow the US to use the country’s bases for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In recent years, Turkey has developed a deliberate “360 degree” foreign policy doctrine which includes maintaining relations with Europe and the United States, while restoring close ties with all its neighbors among them Iran and Arab countries, and assuming a greater regional mediating role. Since 2009, Turkey’s once close alliance with Israel has deteriorated sharply, even though ties have not been cut. These shifts, along with its ubiquitous consumer and cultural products have given Turkey enormous regional influence and appeal.
Turkey has its own specific history and is no more perfect than any other country. But the bigger point is that subservience to the United States and Israel is not Egypt’s only option. The worst case scenario from the American viewpoint is to have three major regional powers, Iran, Turkey and Egypt, that are not under Washington’s control.
Of course Turkey is carving out its own path and Egyptians are struggling to go their own way which may be very different. There’s no reason either to believe that Egypt would become “another Iran” as ceaseless Israeli propaganda suggests. But given a free choice, Egypt is not likely to serve the “interests” of the United States and Israel the way the Mubarak regime has.
One example is that Egypt might dispense with US aid and still come out ahead by simply selling its natural gas on international markets rather than to Israel at what is reported to be a deep discount. Another is that a truly independent Egypt would eschew serving as Israel’s proxy in enforcing the criminal siege of Gaza and stoking intra-Palestinian divisions.
By coming to the streets in their millions, by sacrifing the lives of some of their very finest, the Egyptian people have said that they and they alone want to decide their nation’s future. Mubarak as a person is already irrelevant. The confrontation is now between the Egyptian people’s desire for democracy and self-determination on the one hand, and, on the other, US insistence (along with its clients in Egypt and the region) on continuing the old regime. Let us offer whatever solidarity we can from wherever we are to help the Egyptian people to win.
In a meeting with Egypt’s opposition representatives, the government has made a range of concessions including the formation of a constitutional reform panel, release of political prisoners and the freedom of the Press.
Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is known to be cooperating with CIA, met a wide representation of major opposition groups on Sunday, on the 13th consecutive day of massive anti-government protests across the country.
Suleiman endorsed a plan with the opposition to set up a committee of judiciary and political figures to study proposed constitutional amendments that would allow more candidates to run for president and impose term limits on the presidency, the state news agency reported.
The committee was given until the first week of March to finish the tasks.
A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood commented on the outcome of the meeting saying, “We hope to take the country to stability, security and democracy, which can bring in the future prosperity, equality, justice and human dignity for all Egyptians.”
Millions of Egyptians took to the streets on Sunday to honor hundreds of protesters killed during the anti-government rallies of the past 13 days.
In the Egyptian capital, Cairo, tens of thousands of people have gathered in Liberation Square for what they have dubbed the “Day of Martyrs.”
Protesters are flooding into the heart of the city despite heavy military presence. The army has promised not to use force against protesters.
Protesters are demanding an immediate end to President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades in power.
They say they will not leave the streets unless their demands are met. They are now calling for fresh millions-strong marches across Egypt.
The UN says at least 300 people have been killed and thousands more have been wounded in Egypt in the nearly two weeks of protest against the government.
People around the world are rallying to show solidarity with the Egyptian people.
The publication of nearly 1,700 leaked files by Al Jazeera on negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority has been largely overshadowed by the uprising in Egypt. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter for the future of Israel/Palestine.
I recently caught up with Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Support Unit, a team that is mentioned throughout the “Palestine Papers” and where it is suspected the leak came from. Buttu discussed the meaning of the “Palestine Papers,” what they say about the “peace process,” and the current Egyptian uprising and what it may mean on the Palestinian street.
Alex Kane: Could you talk about your overall take on the leaked documents that have been published by Al Jazeera?
Diana Buttu: Having now gone through a lot of the documents—of course, not all of the documents, but many of them—the overall impression that I’m left with is that of a very powerful party, which is Israel, trying to continue their control and authority over a very weak party being the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But the story doesn’t just stop there.
I think that it’s become, at least clear to me and perhaps to others, that this mantra we’ve been hearing for many, many years—that we all know what a solution is going to look like, we all know what a settlement is going to look like—is actually not the case, particularly when you read the transcripts of the Israeli officials. That’s one major thing that I come away with.
The second major conclusion that I walk away with is that of a PLO leadership stubbornly sticking to one strategy, and only one strategy: negotiations, and only negotiations, despite the fact that there are so many other options out there. It’s as though they’ve cornered themselves by demanding negotiations, and then when they actually happen, they didn’t have any other strategy to get out of negotiations in the event that Israel was going to be stubborn.
AK: What would you say these revelations mean for the entire “peace process”?
DB: I don’t think there really is a “peace process.” There’s been a lot of process, but not a whole lot of peace, and I just don’t think that things are going to change. It hasn’t changed over the course of the past 17 years. I don’t think this is going to make the United States wake up, and it’s certainly not going to make the Israelis wake up, and in fact I don’t think the PLO will wake up, unless there’s some very serious dissent, and I just don’t see that happening right now, even though diaspora Palestinians are quite upset about what’s going on. But we haven’t seen that translate into anything on the streets of Palestine. I don’t think this is going to change anything in the “peace process.” They’re going to continue doing this over and over again because this is the way they’ve done it for the past 17 years, and unless there is a sea change of opinion that makes the PLO stand up and take notice or makes any of the other parties stand up and take notice, I’m afraid that it’s just going to be the same old, same old.
AK: Given that there’s been a muted reaction on the Palestinian street at the same time that there’s an uprising going on in Egypt, do you see any possible connection between these events in the future?
DB: Right now I don’t see that there’s going to be a connection. It’s important to step back: part of the reason why we’re seeing a muted reaction in Palestine is because of the way the documents were presented. Whether you believe the documents or you don’t believe the documents—and I have no reason to question the documents, particularly after members of the PLO have come out and verified the authenticity of the documents—the main problem is that they were presented in somewhat of a sensationalist way.
One example that I can give is that Al Jazeera tied the assassination of al-Madhoun, who is a member of Fatah, of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, to the Palestinian Authority (PA), and they tried to claim that because the Israelis made a request for this man to be assassinated, that somehow the PA acquiesced or condoned his killing. That’s a bit of a stretch. There is a lot of security cooperation that takes place between the PA and Israel—and it’s outrageous, it includes torture and mass arrest—but there was really no proof to bring it to the level that the PA was actually collaborating with Israel over this man’s killing.
And so, in the way that the documents were presented, the debate in Palestine now has not turned into a debate over the main issues, which are accountability, transparency, red lines, whether we should believe in this negotiations process, and whether the PLO has adopted alternative strategies. None of that is going to take place because instead the debate is currently over whether Al Jazeera crossed the line. And until we see something different, where it’s not a question of shooting the messenger, but we have the message that’s presented in a coherent way without the sensationalism, then I don’t think we’re going to have any real debate any time soon, unfortunately.
AK: Would you say that there’s been a marked shift in the negotiating posture of Palestinians since you last were part of a team involved in negotiations, is that shift represented in the “Palestine Papers,” and lastly, if so, what does that shift represent?
DB: Yes, there’s definitely a shift, and the reason why there was a shift is twofold. One is that the second intifada took place, and the PLO was suddenly stuck. Rather than capitalizing on the intifada, and the people power that it brought them, they ended up somehow being apologetic for the intifada and therefore backtracked on some positions. What were the positions they backtracked from? At the time that I was there, there was still a claim for the right of return.
It’s interesting, if you look at the documents from roughly 2000-2004, the positions that are taken are actually quite principled in some instances. For example, there is a demand for the right of return. There is the notion that all of the settlements are illegal. There is then a little bit of a backtrack by saying “land swaps,” but on a one-to-one basis. And so you see this kind of principled position, but then there’s a backtracking, and one of the reasons was the intifada and the complete failure on the part of the PA to use the intifada to their advantage, to actually harness popular support and alter their negotiating position.
The second reason, and I think this is the much more dangerous reason, is that during the period that I was there and a little bit after, you saw initiative after initiative come forward, and all of these initiatives, while never accepted by the PLO directly, were tacitly accepted by the PLO. For example, the Geneva Initiative was something that was never adopted by the PLO, and yet, you see a couple of things that are interesting. The first is those commercials you saw with Erekat and others in which they come forward and say “I need a partner”—those were all sponsored by the Geneva Initiative. And if you see, for example, the statements that American officials have come forward and said, they’ve all been saying the same thing, which is that “this reflects what happened during the negotiations.” But it didn’t. It reflects what happened after the negotiations fell apart. It was their own initiatives that they were putting forward—the Nusseibeh-Ayalon initiative, the Geneva Initiative—and this is where it becomes dangerous, because the Americans and others seem to assume that silence equals acquiescence. And unfortunately, the PLO falls into the trap of de facto acquiescing to these initiatives, when they align themselves with these things, such as they did with the various commercials, and when they don’t come out and completely reject them. I think this is why we’re now seeing a shift. While there were principled positions, if you believe in a two-state solution, the PLO has consistently undermined its own position because they didn’t really know how to deal with the intifada and because they never really objected to these major initiatives that were put on the table.
AK: And lastly: I know that you don’t think the papers will have a huge impact on the ground, but with the combination of what the “Palestine Papers” revealed and the unrest and uprising in Egypt, do you think that any of this popular anger in Egypt might be translated onto the street in Palestine and directed at either the PA or Israel?
DB: Optimism is one thing, but if I’m to speculate, I think the answer is going to be no. And I think it’s important to keep in mind that what’s going on in Egypt is a little bit different than what’s happening in Palestine, and there’s a lot of issues mitigating against another uprising.
The first is that the government of Salam Fayyad has tried to do a good job, using donor funds, to create a middle-class, and to give credit, and all of these sorts of things, and they’ve largely managed to silence a lot of dissent.
The second major factor is that there is a very repressive police regime that is now in place. It hasn’t been in place for as long as the Mubarak regime was in place, but nonetheless this is something new for Palestinians.
A third factor is that people aren’t really examining the merits of the papers, but rather in the way they were presented.
And the fourth thing is that the Palestinian street is already very divided, and if there’s one message that people are calling for, it’s that of national unity. And I think that people fear that going against the authority will somehow serve to undermine any attempts at national unity, even though there really are none right now. There also may be a fear factor of not wanting Hamas to take over.
It’s not ripe in the same way that Egypt was ripe. Again, not to say that it won’t happen. I just don’t think it’s going to happen in the short term.
Minimally explored in all the coverage of the momentous Egyptian uprising taking place over the last 10 days are the Israeli connections.
A central and critical reality is that it is US tax money that has propped up Hosni Mubarak’s despotic regime over the past 30 years, and that this money has flowed, from the beginning, largely on behalf of Israel.
Israel is generally a significant factor in events in the Middle East, and to understand ongoing happenings it is important to understand the historic and current Israeli connections.
The violent creation, perpetuation, and expansion of a state based on ethnic expulsion of the majority inhabitants has been central to Middle East dynamics ever since Israel was created by European and American Zionists in 1948 as a self-identified “Jewish State.”
Israeli leaders and outside observers realized from the very beginning that the only way to maintain such a violently imposed, ethnically based nation-state was through military dominance of the region. For Israel to achieve this military dominance required two things:
(1) The creation of a military more powerful than all the others in the region combined. Israel has achieved this through a uniquely massive influx of US tax dollars and technology, occasionally purloined but largely procured through the machinations of its lobby. (Among other things, Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, a fact almost never mentioned by American media or the American government.)
(2) The prevention of any other nation in the region from becoming a threat. Israel has attained this goal through several strategies: divide and conquer techniques, direct invasions and attacks (or pushing the U.S. to carry out attacks), and the propping up of despots who would openly or tacitly agree (sometimes in return for similarly large influxes of American tax money) not to support the rights of those oppressed and ethnically cleansed by Israel.
For the past 30-plus years, Egypt has been among those despotic regimes supported by the U.S. and Israel in return for turning its back on Palestinians.
The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 has occasionally been mentioned in news reports on the current uprising. That treaty was an arrangement in which the Egyptian leader of the time, Anwar Sadat, stopped opposing Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing of close to a million indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians (at least 750,000 in 1947-49 and an additional 200,000 in 1967). This removed the most populous and politically significant country from the Arab front opposing Israel’s illegal actions and led the way for other nations to “normalize” relations with the abnormal situation in Palestine.
In return, Israel gave back to Egypt the Sinai, Egyptian land it had illegally annexed in its 1967 war of aggression. (Egypt had almost managed to re-conquer this land and more in 1973, but the most massive airlift in American history, engineered by Henry Kissinger under pressure from the Israeli lobby, was sent to Israel, preventing this outcome.)
Also in return, the United States agreed to give Egypt more US tax money than any other nation, with the exception of Israel. Since 1979, Egypt has received an annual average of close to $2 billion in economic and political aid /a/ from American taxpayers (most of whom have known nothing about this use of our money). /3/ The arrangement has allowed Mubarak to stay in power for decades despite periodic attempts by Egyptians to free themselves from his ruthless rule.
At the same time, it’s important to note that the U.S., as broker of the peace treaty, gave Israel even greater rewards: guaranteeing Israel’s oil supplies for the next fifteen years; assuring Israel of American support in the event of violations; committing to be ‘responsive’ to Israel’s military and economic requirements; and promising a variety of major transfers of technology and aid, including $3 billion to relocate two Israeli air bases out of the Sinai, where, as journalist Donald Neff noted, they had no right to be in the first place.
In fact, the American financial arrangement with Israel, which had begun years before Egypt’s, has been far cozier than Egypt’s: Israel gets considerably more money from the US, even though its population is one-tenth of Egypt’s; there is little U.S. oversight of how it uses that money; and, unlike Egypt, which receives its allotment monthly, Israel receives its handout in a lump sum at the very beginning of the fiscal year (which means that Americans then pay interest for the rest of the year on money that the government has already given away, while Israel makes interest on it).
In the cases of both Israel and Egypt, the Israel lobby’s role in procuring this U.S. tax money has been central. While this fact is largely missing from US media reports and many liberal/left analyses, it is frequently referred to in Israeli and Jewish media. For example, a current Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report states: “The question of whether to stake a claim in the protests against 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy is a key one for the pro-Israel lobby and pro-Israel lawmakers because of the role they have played in making Egypt one of the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. aid.”
As conditions change in Egypt, U.S. lawmakers known for their allegiance to Israel are evaluating what to do about U.S aid. Many such Israel partisans have particularly powerful and relevant positions, such as Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the foreign operations subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee; Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Middle East subcommittee; Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Foreign Affairs committee and the author of last year’s sweeping Iran sanctions law; and Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev), member of the subcommittee on the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. A person close to the Israel lobby notes: “No matter what happens, clearly one of the top criteria Congress is likely to use is Egypt’s approach to its peace treaty obligations with Israel.”
Through the years a variety of Egyptian groups have opposed the Egyptian regime, some using violence (while the regime has used greater violence against them). This is virtually always reported without context and in extremely negative terms, without noting that it is routine for resistance movements to use violence; the American Revolutionary War was not known for its nonviolence. Yet, Israeli-centric U.S. media rarely discuss this.
In recent years, Mubarak has collaborated with Israel in closing off the Gaza Strip, largely imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, resulting in a humanitarian disaster in which children suffer malnutrition, stunting, and trauma, and 300 Gazan patients have died through lack of essential medical supplies or being denied exit passes for medical care. Egyptian citizens, furious at their nation’s complicity in this cruelty, have been powerless to stop it.
Israel has long worked to create enmity between Egypt and the U.S. In the early 1950s the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, hatched a plan to firebomb areas in Egypt where Americans gathered — and to make these attacks appear to be the work of Muslim extremists. The plot was discovered and caused a scandal in Israel known as the “Lavon Affair,” but few Americans have ever heard of it. Some analysts suspect that other such plots succeeded and that the little-known Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy ship USS Liberty may have been a similar false-flag operation. (Certainly, there is little doubt that the U.S. would have attacked Egypt if Liberty crewmembers had not succeeded, against all odds, in getting a distress signal out before Israel succeeded in sinking the ship with all men aboard.)
Another little-discussed result of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty was the creation of an international peacekeeping force in the Sinai, known as the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), charged with mediating between Egypt and Israel. It is telling that this force was not placed on Israeli land but instead occupies Egyptian territory.
Its current head is Ambassador David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served extensively in the Middle East, was Senior Advisor on Iraq for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and held a number of other high positions in the state department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.
In 2005 Satterfield was named as having provided classified information to an official of the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. According to documents, Satterfield had discussed secret national security matters in at least two meetings with AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen, who was subsequently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department (later quashed over the objections of the FBI.)
In 2004 Satterfield presided at a State Department conference on the 1967 war. A Washington Report on Middle East Affairs report on this conference stated that Satterfield repeatedly referred to Palestinian terrorism while failing to mention Israel’s brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians. The article reports “Satterfield’s remarks dampened audience expectations for an even-handed U.S. approach to peacemaking.”
Among those in the audience at the conference’s panel on the USS Liberty, though not on the panel itself were USS Liberty survivors, trying to tell their story. State Department moderator Marc Susser quickly cut them off, and his treatment of the survivors reportedly “bordered on abusive.”
Now, David Satterfield is heading up international forces occupying Egyptian land charged with being a “neutral” mediator between Egypt and Israel.
It is unknown whether his conversations with AIPAC continue.
11. Those Not Invited to Speak Steal the Show at State Department Liberty Discussion,” Delinda C. Hanley, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004:
The week that followed January 25, 2011, Day One of the Egyptian Intifada, saw two organized demonstrations in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv. Both protests included people of various ethnic identities, but were primarily made up of Palestinian-Israelis, and Arabic was the language of the angry chanting. I videotaped both of these demonstrations and subtitled the anti-Mubarak slogans into English and Hebrew, for the benefit of non-Arabic speakers. At the second demo I also interviewed a number of people on the street to contextualize how these protestors are being interpreted by average Israelis.
I believe that we owe a great debt to the brave souls in Tahrir Square and all across Egypt who are fighting for their freedom, for inspiring us to do the same. But I’m also thankful to them for shining a light so bright that it renders us all almost transparent, allowing us to see ourselves and easily understand all the other actors on stage. There are only two sides of the barricades: the side of freedom, and the side of control. Misr, thank you for the reminder; we need to make every day January 25.
As Palestinians are becoming increasingly confident about the authenticity of the Palestine Papers – 1,600 leaked documents that Al Jazeera began publishing on January 23 – they can also find little to be proud of in their contents.
According to Palestinian political commentator Mazin Qumsiyeh, the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat “comes out basically pleading and begging sometimes and other times using the presence of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to try and convince (American and Israeli) officials.” If the conduct of PA officials is not outright betrayal of the rights of their people, then it is, at best, degrading political groveling in exchange for factional gains.
Others have convincingly argued that such demeaning behavior is also indicative of the true nature of the negotiations. Palestinians are, in fact, the party desperate for a peace agreement, while the Israelis insist on arrogantly refusing all Palestinian initiatives – which often even surpass Israel’s and the US’s declared expectations. “The documents put to death the idea that Israel has no Palestinian ‘partner for peace,” argues US author and professor, Stephen M. Walt. They also “expose the bipartisan and binational strategy that Israel and the United States have followed under both Bush and Obama: to keep putting pressure on the Palestinians to cut a one-sided deal.”
The leaked documents – comprising mostly of Palestinian accounts of numerous meetings between Israel, US and Palestinian Authority officials – truly represent a convincing, and, in my view, a final argument against the sham dubbed the ‘peace process’. The so-called process, which commenced with the original declaration of principles in Oslo in 1993, has turned into a secretive barter between a rejectionist, but unified Israeli-American front and Palestinian officials who are largely focused on ensuring American aid and defeating their political rivals.
What is particularly odd is the fact that while Palestinian negotiators were conceding most of the Palestinian rights in occupied East Jerusalem, brazenly giving away the right of return for refugees, and offering territorial concessions to accommodate most of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, many in the American media were still talking of Palestinian failure to respond to Israel’s historic concessions. The Israeli generosity ruse had begun many years ago – back in the Henry Kissinger years when Arabs were constantly paraded for failing to live up to Israeli and American overtures. But the ruse was greatly cemented following the July 2000 collapse of peace talks between then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak’s “generous offer” – since proven untrue – continued to haunt Palestinians, who were derided for their supposed political inflexibility and “Arafat’s recalcitrance” (L.A. Times editorial, April 08, 2002).
Now Al Jazeera has revealed and verified hundreds of documents, spanning from 1999 to 2010, which show that the Palestinians’ generosity was truly extraordinary and far-reaching, if not a cause of utter shame for many of those involved.
The Palestine Papers revealed much about the skewed nature of the relationship between two parties who are purportedly in a state of conflict. As it turned out, the Palestinian leadership seemed to negotiate and offer the very opposite of what the Palestinian public truly desire.
According to one leaked document, Saeb Erekat gave away most of Occupied East Jerusalem, even as Israelis insisted on not yet discussing Jerusalem. On June 30, 2008, in a meeting that included Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s Foreign Minister and Ahmed Qurei, top Fatah official and former PA Prime Minister, Erekat declared: “It is no secret that on our map we proposed we are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim (the Hebrew word for Jerusalem) in history.”
Erekat’s personal offer was an extension of one proposed by Qurei himself, in a meeting two weeks earlier. Qurei “proposed that Israel annexes all settlements in Jerusalem except Jabal Abu Ghneim (Har Homa). This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition; we refused to do so in Camp David.” To further convince Israeli officials, Erekat “went on to enumerate some of the settlements that the PA was willing to concede,” according to Gregg Carlstrom in Al Jazeera. They include “French Hill, Ramat Alon, Ramat Shlomo, Gilo, Talpiot, and the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s old city. Those areas contain some 120,000 Jewish settlers.”
As for Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary – the third holiest of Muslim sites – Erekat offered ‘creative’ solutions, such as placing the Palestinian Muslim shrine under international supervision – thus ceding almost complete control over the occupied city.
This is barely the tip of the iceberg. The compromises are plentiful and they blatantly contradict international law, Palestinian national aspirations, Arab consensus, and even the declared official position of the Palestinian Authority itself.
The Palestine Papers also confirm that both sides are on more or less on the same page regarding the Palestinian people’s right to return, agreeing that such a right will not be carried out in any meaningful way. In an October 21, 2009 meeting with US diplomat and Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, Erekat stated: “Palestinians will need to know that five million refugees will not go back. The number will be agreed as one of the options. Also the number returning to their own state will depend on annual absorption capacity.”
The documents reveal much more, including, for example, that the PA’s strategy in crushing political opposition was the handy work of Britain’s intelligence service, MI6. This, of course, hardly compares to the American role, which has held Israeli interests and priorities as the backbone of American involvement in the talks.
The leaked documents have permanently damaged whatever little credibility the Ramallah-based authority still enjoyed among Palestinians. How much longer the PA can continue to serve any purpose is now unclear. What is certain, however, is that its purpose does not include exacting Palestinian rights or preserving the national integrity of the Palestinian people and the territorial integrity of a Palestinian state.
The Palestine Papers have made this very clear, and lashing out at Al Jazeera – as the PA is now doing – will change nothing.
The dramatic rise in food prices is fueling a great deal of discontent in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. It’s a deep undercurrent propelling many of the poor, who face prospects of starvation to resort to the streets and to violence. According to the United Nation’s Food Agency (Food and Agriculture Organization — FAO) world food prices are up for the 7th month in a row and are likely to surpass the record high reached in December 2010.
No end is in sight for this destabilizing battle with food price inflation in places like Egypt, where more than half of an average income goes for food. According to the State Department, more than 60 food riots occurred worldwide over the past two years.
In March 2008, a dramatic spike in food prices led thousands of people on the brink of starvation in Egypt to violently riot — sending a seismic shock wave through the Mubarak regime. After the Egyptian military was able to distribute enough wheat to dispel the rioting, efforts to stockpile wheat by the Mubarak government have failed, as food prices continue to hover at record highs.
The media is reporting many reasons for this problem ranging from soaring demand, cuts in food subsidies, droughts, and government mandates to use more grain-based biofuel. But, another significant factor is at play: unfettered speculation by investment banks. As noted in USA Today, in 2008, “the bulls may not be running on Wall Street, but they’re charging in the commodities pits.
At issue are the still deregulated commodity markets ushered in by the Clinton administration and the U.S. Congress with the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Before this law, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) served as a cop on the beat, enforcing rules that prevent the distortion or manipulation of prices beyond normal supply and demand. But Wall Street banks and companies such as ENRON and British Petroleum were determined to make a lot more money from speculation by exempting energy-derivative contracts and related swaps from government oversight.
For this reason, the 2000 law allows entities that have no stake in whether adequate amounts of food and fuel are available for ordinary people and commodity-dependent businesses to make huge sums of money by gambling with other people’s money.
Soon after passage of the 2000 law, “dark” unregulated futures trading markets emerged, most notably the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in London — created by Wall Street and European investment banks and several oil companies. A key practice involves “over the counter index trading” in which hundreds of billions of dollars of pension, sovereign wealth, and other institutional funds are used to flood “dark” commodity markets to buy and hold futures contracts without an expiration date or oversight. When it’s time to make money on a losing bet, these funds are withdrawn, causing commodity price crashes and economic instability.
These transactions don’t involve customary “bona fide” commodity traders, such as an airline company hedging on the price of jet fuel by purchasing futures contracts. As prominent hedge fund manager Michael McMasters noted before a U.S. Senate panel in 2008, this amounts to “a form of electronic hoarding and greatly increases the inflationary effect of the market. It literally means starvation for millions of the world’s poor.”
Some world leaders are willing to speak out against the pernicious role of “dark” commodity markets. Recently, French President Sarkozy warned of further unrest and even war at the Davos forum, unless commodity speculation is reined in — something that Wall Street and Republican lawmakers are bitterly fighting. The Dodd/Frank Financial Reform Law places some restrictions on this practice by the CFTC. In particular, the CFTC is beginning the process of weeding out “non bona fide” investment bank speculators.
True to form, House Republicans are demanding that the CFTC slam on the brakes. They’re planning hearings and legislation to hamstring these efforts.
The spontaneous mass uprising of ordinary people in Egypt and the Middle East against their authoritarian regimes has many root causes. One that deserves much greater attention is unfettered speculation by powerful private financial institutions that don’t care about world-wide starvation and its impacts. It’s distorting global food supplies.
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary from 1993 to 1999.
The situation in Egypt remains highly unsettled and the eventual outcome is still an unknown, but two things are clear: first that Obama is a failure, in spite of all his record of fine sounding rhetoric; and secondly, the empire struggles on, with as good a chance of winning this round with the Tahrir Square democracy protestors.
Obama’s speech in Cairo was essentially about terrorists, extremists, and the U.S. will to combat them, surrounded with a bunch of other nice language about friendship with Islam, democracy, and growing economies. Obama’s recent slow and ineffectual reaction to events in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt demonstrate the lie behind the fine sounding rhetoric of “hope” and “change” that he used in his election campaign and the fine sounding rhetoric of “democracy” used in his Cairo speech. At this point in time they are meaningless words in relation to events in Egypt.
Obama fits in very well with the military-industrial-political elite of the U.S., so well that he is incapable of acting in support of the very democracy ideal he purportedly wishes for the people of the Middle East. With a demonstration that was largely peaceful, that covered people from all facets of life in Egypt – save the military-political elite – Obama hesitated in support of real democracy in Egypt.
Unfortunately this is not surprising. The U.S. is meddling in politics throughout the region even though one of its favourite public mantras is about allowing no “foreign “ interference in the affairs of other countries, that they have to settle it themselves through dialogue and discussion. The U.S. is the most common foreign meddler in the region, using a variety of means to influence their control of the regimes, people, and resources of the region. The influence comes in various strands.
The most obvious is the military, with the unilateral military attacks and occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan being predominate. Further military support is provided to the autocratic regimes of the area – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan – who deny the very democracy the U.S. disingenuously calls for, and use it to support the elites who survive on the beneficence of U.S. foreign aid. That aid is frequently tied to military purchases from U.S. firms, thus recycling the U.S. dollar to maintain the electoral base in the homeland and the employees of weapons manufacturers across the states. The military complex also incorporates covert actions within the region, and supports the renditions and torture of “unprivileged enemy belligerents”, the new phrase incorporated into U.S. military law that removes all rights of being a person established over centuries of customary international law.
The current situation in Egypt reinforces how the military are tied in with their allegiance to the existing order. Their very passivity in controlling the reactionary pro-Mubarak thugs and police and allowing them into Tahrir Square in order to attack the democracy protestors signals their passive receptive allegiance to the existing regime. While they have not fired on the demonstrators, their passivity reflects Obama’s passivity in allowing the government time to try and implement some action that will allow it to stay in power, thus continuing U.S. hegemony in the region.
Economics is another area where there is a large influence. That cannot be isolated from the military as explained above with the circling loans for military hardware. The more powerful economic machine is that of neo-liberal free market capitalism. The “Washington consensus” that pushes those financial tactics is an economic order consisting of those countries – the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and the E.U. – along with the many associated non-government organizations and think tanks. The majority of the latter are actually funded by the governments of the countries they represent – at least within Canada and the U.S. This is coupled with the global institutions that collude for our overall governance, among the largest of which are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The many global financial agreements for “free trade” speak only to the free flow of finance capitalism, and not the free flow of labour and democracy.
Two facets of economic power are visible in Egypt: pre demonstration and post demonstration. Before the demonstration Egypt suffered from high inflation, high interest rates, rapidly increasing food prices, an employment situation wherein 51 per cent of employment is in the low wage service sector, an official unemployment rate of 9.4 per cent, and as with most economies, a rising and large gap between the few of the elites that have, and the many who struggle with little. That in short is the neo-liberal new economic order, the harvesting of the wealth to the few, abolishing as much as possible the labour unions, shifting manufacturing to low wage, poor working condition environments. This is coupled with massive financial aid from the government (taxpayers dollars) to the financial sector corporations of the world and the imposition of “structural adjustment programs” in other countries whose economies are suffering under the globalization of capital.
That is where the Egypt is now, on a dividing line. On one side is the old financial order that has created the demand of the demonstrators for both economic equality and for getting rid of the elitist autocratic political control. On the other is either a continuance of the same if Mubarak or his cronies stay in power, and even if not, the IMF has already hinted at the economic chaos that will follow the change of power, ready and waiting to step into the country with massive financial aid that will impose the same non-democratic financial regime on the country once again.
The empire is faltering, but it is still powerful. Obama is a failure in the context of his own words, but is operating well within the parameters of the Washington power structures. The combined forces of military and economic power are still very large and will continue to pose a great danger to the people of the Middle East. The fight for democracy and economic equality will continue on well after the success of the demonstrators.
The United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Mr. Maxwell Gaylard, has publically denounced Israel’s systematic destruction of rainwater collection devices, such as water cisterns, throughout the West Bank.
Mr. Gaylard remarked on 1 February 2011, “It is difficult to understand the reasoning behind the destruction of basic rain water collection systems, some of them very old, which serve marginalized rural and herder Palestinian communities where water is already scarce and where drought is an ever-present threat.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documented that in 2010 Israel demolished 27 water cisterns and other rainwater collection systems in the West Bank. Moreover, OCHA recorded that 15 water springs that connect to the Mountain Aquifer, the sole source of water available to Palestinians in the West Bank, were also destroyed. Israel takes more than 80 percent of water collected by the Aquifer, leaving Palestinians with less than 20 percent.
Communities throughout the West Bank have come to rely on such basic water collection mechanisms, such as holes in the ground, due to the economic unsustainability of tankered water.
Human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, have documented the untenable nature of water tankers, as they are forced to take circuitous routes to avoid military checkpoints and Israeli only roads that fragment the West Bank. These detours have resulted in steep increase in the prices of water.
Palestinian residents of the West Bank are required to acquire a permit for any structure in Area C, including water cisterns and holes. Permits are nearly impossible to obtain.
Despite these stringent permit criteria, the Alternative Information Center points out that destruction of water infrastructure is in violation of an Israeli-Palestinian joint agreement from 2001, the “Joint Declaration for Keeping the Water Infrastructure out of the Cycle of Violence.”
The joint declaration states, “The Israeli and Palestinian sides view the water and waste water sphere as a most important matter and strongly oppose any damage to water and wastewater infrastructure.”
According to Dr. Shaddad Attili, the Minister of the Palestinian Water Authority, water cisterns do not require a permit from the Israeli Civil Administration. Nevertheless, the Government of Israel has increased demolitions of cisterns.
“In addition to preventing the rehabilitation of Palestinian water cisterns, particularly in Area C, the Government of Israel has recently intensified its campaign of destroying these same cisterns. The rehabilitation of water cisterns does not require prior approval from the Joint Water Committee (JWC), nor does it require a construction permit from the Israeli Civil Administration,” Dr. Attili stated on 31 January.
What’s it like spending two years doing thankless work that, in the end, is going to be ignored by the very people who asked for your services? The members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have just found out. Their 662 page report is sinking rapidly into oblivion in official Washington, and is now destined to be of interest only to historians. This was fully predictable. The Commission was given a charter by Congress to tell us who, what, when, and where about the financial crisis, but they were not allowed to explain why. To understand why this crisis occurred would be stepping on way too many powerful toes in Washington, and for this reason the Commission was told not to make any policy recommendations to Congress that would help prevent such a crisis from occurring again.
Though toothless and hobbled by Congress, the Commission has issued a remarkable report, at least by Washington standards. The report reads like the work of an investigative reporter, filled with interesting anecdotes selected from hundreds of hours of interviews with financial experts and market participants. The chapters are organized chronologically from the start of the housing boom to its collapse. Hardly anybody comes out of this report looking good, but of the many people who have reason to hang their head in shame, none appear quite as damaged as Alan Greenspan. He and the Federal Reserve are fingered by the Commission for failure to regulate the banks and other players in the housing market.
The outcome of “Fed Lite”
The central bank operated a regulatory regime called “Fed Lite”, providing little regulatory oversight for the banks, and no oversight for the shadow banking system that blew up under the weight of excessive debt and sparse capital. Fed Lite was founded on Alan Greenspan’s near-religious belief that the markets always weed out inefficient players and excesses, and the Fed’s job therefore is to stay out of the way of the banks they are supposed to regulate. Greenspan later admitted to the Commission that he might have been a bit wrong about the wonderful self-correcting mechanism of the markets. He also admitted that he was out of his depth whenever the staff came to talk to him about technical matters like mortgages, the housing markets, derivatives such as CDOs, and so on.
This was the man who was dubbed “The Maestro” by Bob Woodward, but apparently nearly twenty years of hands-on experience running the central bank was not enough to educate him sufficiently to understand the housing market, much less detect a bubble in the making. Why was someone like him given such a position of power? The Commission is unable to explain this to us, and to do so would require going much further back in time than the housing bubble – in fact back to the 1950s, when Alan Greenspan sat at the side of Ayn Rand, as an Apostle of Selfishness and a prized member of her cult of Objectivists.
Greenspan Shrugged
In his professional life Alan Greenspan has never talked about his days with Ayn Rand, and curiously no one in Washington has bothered to ask him publicly about how much of her philosophy he believes. As Fed Chairman, if Greenspan was a maestro of anything, it was playing Washington politics, and he was always wise enough never to tip his hand on policy matters until he had to. By the time the Fed was ready to implement Fed Lite, the mood in Washington had already shifted in favor of the Republican campaign to reduce government regulation wherever possible. This meant not only allowing market operators to function unfettered, it meant giving the wolves access to the henhouse. Insurance and oil industry executives were allowed in to Congressional staff meetings to help write laws governing their industries. Bankers were appointed to top positions at the Treasury and the Fed. As far as Wall Street was concerned, the traditional balance between Greed and Fear was upended: Fear was banished and Greed was allowed to run rampant once bankers were given access to unlimited taxpayer money in the form of bailouts.
All of this was quite congenial to Alan Greenspan, the inventor of the “Greenspan put” – which was a phrase created by the market to characterize the promise by the Fed that any serious losses in the market could always be “put back” to the government. Time and again Greenspan oversaw one bank bailout after another, and then expanded the franchise to the hedge fund industry when he bailed out LTCM in 1998. By the time he retired from the Fed, the financial industry had become so large that the Greenspan put had become institutionalized, and is now referred to as the Bernanke put. The job of Chairman of the Federal Reserve apparently carries with it the promise to forever protect the markets from their mistakes.
Only the “Worthy” Succeed
This must be quite satisfying to Ayn Rand followers. In their mythology, only Worthy Individuals are allowed to succeed in life, by taking what they want from others, and fighting off the little people and bothersome bureaucrats who obstruct them because they are envious of anyone who succeeds. Alan Greenspan must view himself and the eminent people he associates with as the Worthy few, entitled to their wealth and position of power. As a Republican, Greenspan has had no problems with the evolution of his party into the protector of the privileged few – the Lucky Duckies who control nearly 90% of the wealth in America, and feel entitled to raid the Treasury whenever they need to cover up for their mistakes.
This is the problem the Commission has had in doing its work. It is operating in a political and social environment in Washington that for decades has glorified greed and selfishness, and so accepted are these qualities that an alternative universe where government helps the average person rather than just the wealthy person is simply too hard for people in Washington to imagine. The best the Commission can do is say “Alan Greenspan should have done this, and he shouldn’t have done that.” It cannot say that there is something deeply corrupting in the way politicians of both parties think and act in Washington.
That is also why this Commission is so very different from the Pecora Commission of the 1930s, which took as its job the exposure of corruption and fraud at the very highest levels of business and government. The evidence of corruption and fraud in the housing bubble and during the credit crisis is mounting every day, but no one of responsibility or power has been called to account. The Commission has apparently identified a few low level functionaries for the attention of the Justice Department, but it is unlikely that someone like Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide is ever going to wind up in court on fraud charges. There is no moral outrage in Washington anymore, because there is simply no telling whose head would not fall under the guillotine if the true extent of fraud and corruption were revealed.
“Greed is Good”
The American people don’t have much moral outrage either. For the longest time they bought into the Greed is Good philosophy as long as the stock market was going up, and the housing bubble was in the ascendant. Once both of these financial props collapsed, misery spread everywhere, but it wasn’t the misery experienced by our grandfathers, who lost all their wealth in the 1930s when the banks collapsed completely. Most Americans are holding on to some of their wealth, and 80% of them have full time jobs, even if the work is stressful and the benefits are disappearing. Unemployment checks are being extended for another year, payroll taxes are scheduled to be cut in 2011, and Ben Bernanke has spent over half a trillion dollars generating another stock market bubble. The wealthy are spending money, which helps the retail sales numbers look good, and the Fed assures us that inflation is not a problem, because the Fed excludes the price of food and energy in its calculations of inflation.
Of what use, then, is a Commission that explains why things really happen the way they do? No one wants to hear it – not the Congress, not the White House, not Republicans, Democrats, nor independents. No one wants to hear that the American Dream – which use to say that anyone could succeed in America with hard work – has been polluted by a wholly different American Dream, which now says you can succeed with the right connections and you can take what you want without any consequences. We have brought the philosophy of Selfishness to its logical conclusion, which has left us with a society of individuals who are isolated from each other, who have been stripped of any sense of community, and who have been taught to expect that government will be of no help to you unless your are in a position of privilege and power.
What America really needs is a Commission of Truth, that would outline how Selfishness became triumphant, how it has devastated our country, and what we as a community and as a nation must do about this. A Commission of Truth, however, needs to have an audience willing to listen to the truth, and such an audience does not exist in America. At least not yet – not until Americans have experienced the full, bitter fruits that a lifetime of Selfishness can produce.
There is a joke making the rounds in Egypt that Hosni Mubarak threatened to demonstrate in front of parliament and self-emulate himself if the Egyptian people refuse to step down and join the deposed Tunisian leader in Exile.
The octogenarian dictator is simply delusional if thinks he can hold onto power. By my estimates, he’ll be gone in a week or two – hopefully sooner. But before he gives up his throne, he means to dole out a severe dose of punishment to the 80 million ‘ingrates’ who have delegitimized his corruption infested regime.
Mubarak is a desperate and stubborn man. The disbanding of the police last Friday was a calculated attempt to manufacture chaos and terrorize the populace. It was supposed to be the perfect state crime. The police suddenly vanished abandoning even the prisons which are administered by the Ministry of Interior. With the gates thrown wide open, the criminal elements were let loose as the state controlled media started spreading false rumors of hysterical citizens being attacked in their homes. The crooks were joined by some members of the police force that were ‘on vacation.’ They obviously weren’t idiots. Instead of using the security void to attack apartments and homes, they targeted the national museum, upscale retailers, the gold market and malls.
Unfortunately for Mubarak, the Egyptian people disrupted the regime’s plan. All around the country, alert citizens immediately took control of security in their neighborhoods and within a few hours of the mysterious and still unexplained disappearance of the police, young men and old banded together to protect their families and their property. Defense committees were set up on virtually every block. It was a splendid show of community values and extremely effective. Put it this way – this was a bad week to be a burglar in Cairo.
The regime has yet to explain who gave the orders for the police to abandon their stations. When the plot fizzled, Mubarak fired Habib Adley, the interior minister and blamed the chaos on “foreign elements” – no doubt the diabolical Maltese Intelligence Agency working in coordination with Taiwanese drug cartels.
The objective of the government’s plot to foment chaos was to compel Egyptians to hide in their homes while “Daddy Mubarak” came to the rescue. The ensuing disorder was a great excuse to impose a curfew to disband the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and dissuade others from joining them. Mubarak and his henchmen might be creative but their attempt to spread panic was not exactly original. That’s pretty much what the American Army did when they invaded Iraq – they ordered the army and police to disband and unlocked the penitentiary gates.
A few days later millions of Egyptians ignored the curfew and took to the streets demanding that Mubarak step down. In Cairo alone, the crowd was estimated at a million plus and hundreds of thousands marched in Alexandria. Not a single policeman was there to ‘protect’ the peaceful demonstrators and there wasn’t a single casualty – not even a broken bottle. Demonstrators mingled freely with the army and even picked up the garbage. They had one basic demand – the immediate retirement of Hosni Mubarak.
But Mubarak wasn’t about to give up so easily. The next morning, ‘patriots’ from the disbanded police force, party loyalists and hired thugs started their own ‘demonstration’ and made their way to Tahrir square armed with clubs. They could have held a peaceful protest at some other location but they were hell bent on a violent confrontation. These ‘Hosnicrats’ were more or less the same elements that had intimidated voters and opposition candidates in the recent rigged parliamentary elections. Ominously, the Egyptian Army, which has so far played a neutral role, didn’t prevent Mubarak’s thugs from attacking the very same peaceful marchers that a day earlier had demonstrated that a million Egyptians could assemble and protest without throwing a single stone.
The night before, rumors of an organized attack by Mubarak’s mercenaries had circulated among the demonstrators camped out in Tahrir Square. Many decided to leave but those who stayed were determined not to be provoked. What followed was proof that the attacks in Tahrir Square were just another part of Mubarak’s plot to orchestrate chaos. The Army issued orders for both sides to clear the square and go home and refused to intervene to protect the anti-Mubarak protestors. As of this writing, dawn on Thursday, the Mubarak loyalists had started firing live ammo into the crowd. So far, eight demonstrators have been murdered and many more are wounded.
Mubarak despises his people more than they despise him. All he wants now is for his regime to survive and to restore a measure of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘stability’ – just enough to give his American patrons a fig leaf to allow Obama to turn a blind eye to what’s going down in Egypt. He now says he will step down at the end of his term and he promises to use his remaining time in office facilitating an orderly transition. The obvious danger is that he will also use the balance of his tenure to beef up his internal security apparatus, crack down on the opposition and roll out a red carpet for his party and his cronies to allow them to retain control by the time he leaves office.
At the very minimum, most Egyptians had expected Mubarak to make a conciliatory gesture and disband the National Assembly. Anyone who paid cursory attention to the last elections knows they were blatantly rigged; the National Democratic Party won something like 97% of the vote and virtually every seat in the chamber. The architects of the electoral fraud were absolutely shameless. The election was a farce and Mubarak and his cronies publicly flaunted their ability to fix the vote. There again, Mubarak didn’t care what Egyptians thought and neither did the Americans.
It takes a strong dose of repression and injustice to rile up a nation that abides by the law even when the laws are unjustly administered. If there is one thing all Egyptians fear more than a tyrant, it is chaos. And that’s precisely why Mubarak and his cronies are so determined to manufacture as much chaos as possible. The octogenarian dictator needs to be sent packing to Saudi Arabia before he causes more damage.
By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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