| THE HANDSTAND | FEB.MARCH2011 |
- CAIRO AND JERUSALEM - A CONTRAST OF ACTION
By Gilad Atzmon
Saturday, February 12, 2011
"It was the moral force of non-violence” stated President Obama in his first comment on the revolution in Egypt. Yet it is far from being clear who was the Egyptian Mandela, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King? I guess that in Cairo it was the people themselves who peacefully transformed their own reality.
Jerusalem, Zionists, and some elements within the Left have demonised Arabs, Muslims and Islam for decades. Yet the people of Egypt just proved how restrained and peace-seeking Islam is for real.
Unlike some of our blood soaked Western revolutions, in Cairo millions of Muslims waited for 18 days for their tyrant to internalise the message. Day after day, they stood in the streets demonstrating patience and determination; five times a day they joined mass prayers for goodness to prevail. They reminded us all that Islam is derived from the word Salaam. Islam is all about peace. It is inherently non violent.
The Egyptians masses were, no doubt, the best possible ambassadors for Islam and Salaam. In just more than two weeks they have manage to break down the Zionist driven phobia of Islam. In such a short time they have managed to plant the seeds of hope in our hearts. They in fact reminded us all what democracy and ‘will for freedom’ are all about.
Egypt, the biggest and most influential Arab country, launched its march to democracy yesterday. As we know, democracy in the Arab world means Islam. This week Westerners had a chance to discover this peaceful harmonious faith. In the recent days, many Americans and Europeans have miraculously recovered from the Zionist inflicted Islamophobic malaise. The fear of Islam and Muslims is drifting away. Plenty of us welcome the Egyptians and their true and natural choice; Islam, Salaam and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Two days ago, James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, was brave enough to admit that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is "a very heterogeneous group, they have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc… There is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally.” In case someone fails to read between the lines, America has just bought itself six months to amend its faulty Zionised foreign policy. America has a very short time to buy itself new allies in the region. For America and the West, this is a matter of life and death.
In the next few months our Western leaders will have to adapt to the new reality. I guess that in spite of their Jewish Lobby backers, they will have to be very quick to confess openly the power and beauty of Islam. They will have to appease a billion Muslims. And they should be quick to do so.In the coming days, Israel will have to face its own doomed reality. It is about to be shunned. The Jewish State is no doubt a dangerous entity, we can only pray that on its way down it won’t turn our planet into ashes. For those who fail to realise, Israel has accumulated enough destructive power to do so. Moreover, such an option is well imbued within the Israeli suicidal cultural narrative. I guess that the story of Biblical mass murderer Samson and the story of Masada are just two examples.
We better admit to ourselves that unlike Cairo, Jerusalem is inherently violent and lethal. The situation is certainly volatile. The biggest challenge for today’s world leaders is to peacefully dismantle the Jewish State without letting it celebrate its deadly symptoms.
america presumes it can manipulate the expexted secular egyptian election ?
While reading this it is wise to keep in mind the following spirit of truthful abuse written by As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab recently:Obama: friend of Mubarak to the every end
It will be remembered that this lousy clone of Bush has not once called for the ouster of Mubarak--for fear of antagonizing the Israeli lobby and its cheerleaders in Congress and the media. Look at this lousy speech on Egypt by Obama: it has the eloquence of George W. Bush. Nothing that Obama has said would not have been said by George W. and its handling of foreign policy has become a mere imitation of Bush's foreign policy and rhetoric--and Dick Cheney has indicated that recently. And notice Obama--trying to be cute--even cited and quoted from Egyptian slogans but he unsurprisingly skipped some of the most oft-quoted slogans by Egyptian protesters which dismissed Mubarak as mere agents of US/Israel.
If anyone wants to argue that Obama deserves credit for what happened in Egypt or in Tunisia, he/she either needs to rewind the TV screen, or take extensive Arabic lessons to follow the coverage of Aljazeera and the Arabic press directly, or even just read the official statements in English put out by White House and State Department during the crisis. If anything, Obama prolonged the ordeal of the Egyptian people and did everything in his power--just as Bush would have done--to keep the dictators in power. (thanks Sameer)
Obama Presses Egypt’s Military on Democracy
Speaking about Egypt from the White House, Mr. Obama said, “Nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”
By David R Sanger
Published: February 11, 2011
WASHINGTON — President Obama heaped praise on the peaceful protesters who deposed Hosni Mubarak on Friday, declaring, “Egypt will never be the same,” even as his national security team acknowledged that the swift uprising would almost certainly upend American strategy in the Middle East.
Ed Op for The New York Times
Crowds in Cairo on Friday erupted in jubilation at the news of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. President Obama praised the demonstrators, saying they “bent the arc of history.” Standing in the foyer of the White House, where just a week before he had started to press Mr. Mubarak for immediate reforms without calling for his resignation, Mr. Obama described the Egyptian uprising as a model of nonviolence and moral force “that bent the arc of history.” While comparing the 18-day protests to Gandhi’s peaceful resistance to British rule, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the student protests that brought down a dictator in Indonesia, he also set out a series of benchmarks that he said he expected the Egyptian military to follow, warning that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”
“That means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the Constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free,” he said. “Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”
Mr. Obama’s tone was optimistic, and he promised the crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square — which was listening to his brief broadcast live via Egyptian state television — continued American support for Egypt. That support, however, is likely to take new forms: Administration officials agreed that the $250 million in economic aid was a pittance compared with the $1.3 billion in annual military aid, and the White House and the State Department were already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties. Under Egypt’s current Constitution, alternatives to Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party are all but banned.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama promised “whatever assistance is necessary” to pursue a “credible transition to a democracy.”
But as he spoke, White House officials were assessing the longer-term impact of street revolutions that have deposed two dictators in less than a month, starting with the ouster of Tunisia’s leader, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Middle East leaders from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Yemen have moved to pre-empt similar uprisings. In Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which depended heavily on Mr. Mubarak, officials were blistering in their criticism of Washington, arguing that the United States abandoned a long-time ally without first building in guarantees that Egypt’s revolution could not be hijacked by religious extremists.
In his final press briefing at the White House on Friday, Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, told reporters, “I think it’s important that the next government of Egypt, as we’ve said in here many times, recognize the accords that have been signed with the government of Israel.” But other officials have acknowledged privately that if Egypt turns into a noisy democracy that includes the Muslim Brotherhood, there will undoubtedly be political debate in Egypt about whether the 1979 peace accord with Israel should remain in force. “We don’t think that there is any real chance the Egyptian military would have any interest in seeing the peace accord walked back,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said this week. “But it’s a warning we must issue.”
The Saudis, like Mr. Mubarak himself, portrayed the uprising as the creation of “foreign powers,” which was widely interpreted as code words for Washington and other Western powers. “We are astonished however at what we see as interference in the internal affairs of Egypt by some countries,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said Thursday, as Mr. Mubarak was still clinging to power. In an unusually direct shot at the White House, he said, “We are shocked to see that there are countries pre-empting even the will of the Egyptian people,” never addressing the fact that the protests in Egypt seemed both widespread and homegrown. While there are few signs yet of protests gathering steam in Saudi Arabia, the government there has taken steps to raise wages and try to keep the contagion from spreading across its own desert.Yemen and Syria, according to an analysis circulating in the White House, could be more vulnerable. But even as administration officials worried about how the protests could spread, they seemed to be all but inviting it in Iran. White House officials were clearly relishing the discomfort the uprising has created for Iran’s leaders. On Friday, White House officials noted that the Iranians, who initially greeted the protests in Egypt because they were aimed at a secular leader who had helped isolate Tehran, had changed their minds. They were blocking broadcasts by the BBC, and putting some opposition leaders under house arrest. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but urged Iranians to go out onto Tehran’s streets, in a repeat of the June 2009 demonstrations: “I say to our Iranian friends, Let your people march. Let your people speak. Release your people from jail. Let them have a voice.”
Just a week ago, trying to coax Mr. Mubarak to transfer his powers or leave office, Mr. Obama called the Egyptian leader a “patriot” who cared deeply about his country. On Friday, after Mr. Mubarak slipped out of Cairo, Mr. Obama mentioned him only once. Instead, he focused his comments on the young people in the streets, and a military that “would not fire bullets” into the crowds that gathered in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square. He struck a decidedly optimistic tone about Egypt’s future, repeating lines from his own presidential campaign in 2008, saying that Egyptians could now create a government that “represented their hopes and not their fears.” Even some outsiders who have been critical of the administration’s mixed messages during the Egyptian crisis — from its early declarations to Egypt as “stable” to its wavering on whether reform could happen with Mr. Mubarak still in office — said Mr. Obama struck the right tone on Friday. “He has done better than his government has done,” said Robert Kagan, a conservative scholar and essayist at the Brookings Institution.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 12, 2011, on page A7 of the New York edition.new york times
How Mubarak snuck out of Cairo
This is how Husni Mubarak was able to sneak out of Cairo. (thanks Khodor)
