While anti-Israeli attitudes are not uncommon in Egypt, they are becoming more virulent after the revolution so much so that 54 percent of Egyptians prefer annulling the peace treaty with Israel, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center.
The point of interest here is not to morally judge these attitudes, but to examine whether or not their underlying assumptions are logically justified. Three myths about Israel appear to continue dominating Egyptian public opinion:
1. Israel works to weaken Egypt
Common among conspiracy theorists in Egypt is the notion that Israel wants an Egypt that is weakened, divided, and torn by sectarian violence. Deputy Prime Minister Yehia El-Gamal stands out in expressing this notion while in office, though a considerable number of intellectuals and former high-level officials do not hide their belief in it. Typifying this view is the editor of the state-owned daily Al-Ahram who argued that Israel supports the counter-revolution forces in Egypt, citing the rumor that Israeli former chief of military intelligence confirmed his success in sowing seeds of division within Egyptian society.
In fact, a stable Egypt is in Israel’s interest. A divided Egypt might turn into another Iran, where organized Islamists took over a shattered state after a democracy-seeking uprising. Alternatively, it might turn into another Lebanon, where state weakness allows actors like Hezbollah to attack Israel at will. Would Israel be interested in creating a similar situation in which Jihadists join Hamas and operate from Egypt? Of course not.
At best, a chaotic Egypt might turn into a Mexico (or a Pakistan?) where another weak state fails to stop cross-border illegal immigration, drug and weapons trafficking. Thousands of African illegal immigrants enter Israeli territory from Sinai each year, despite measures taken by Egyptian authorities. Skyrocketing numbers of African infiltrators, drugs, let alone explosives, would reach Israel in case the Egyptian government loses control, or is domestically too busy to control borders.
None of these scenarios are good for Israel, and therefore it would certainly be interested not in undermining Egypt, but rather in an in-control, stable government in Cairo to keep the peace, and maintain order on the southern border.
2. Israel wants to occupy Egypt
The conventional view that Israel plans to occupy Egypt or re-occupy Sinai is part of a broader myth that Israel’s long-term strategic objective, out of Jewish religious beliefs, is to rule from the Nile to the Euphrates. Alleged “evidence” maintains that over the Knesset’s entrance hangs a map asserting that “the Land of Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates,” and that the Israeli flag’s two horizontal blue lines represent the Nile and the Euphrates rivers. Yet the truth is that there is no such a map in the Knesset, and the lines in Israel’s flag are derived from the design of the traditional Jewish prayer shawl.
The “Greater Israel” claim is as true as the contention that Muslims plan to establish a world-ruling Islamic caliphate. Some ultra-extremists might want to, but the vast majority does not even think of it. First, it would take a fairly insane Israeli leadership to bear the massive military and economic burden of invading a country of Egypt’s scale. Note that occupational experiences have exhausted Israel in areas as small as the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, and even the West Bank. Second, paradoxically, this claim contradicts another generally accepted view by the Egyptian public asserting that Israel is militarily superior and enjoys full, unconditional US support. Why, if this really is the case, has Israel not attempted an invasion? The answer is simple: Israel is satisfied with the current status-quo — in which, it perceives, Israel is the one deterring its neighbors and not vice versa — and is not interested in a territorial expansion that would go far beyond its capabilities.
3. Israel is all-powerful
Most Egyptians apparently believe that the premises of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, displayed in an Egyptian TV series titled “A Horseman without a Horse” in 2002, are true. Within this framework, obviously inflated notions — such as that Israel exploited agricultural cooperation with Egypt to either cultivate cancer-causing products in Egyptian soil or export these products to Egypt, and that the Mossad stood behind the December 2010 fatal shark attacks to hit tourism in Egypt’s Red Sea resorts — are easily accepted. Notwithstanding that such allegations have no factual or logical grounds, no one stops to ask why should an Israel facing serious security challenges (Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.) busy itself with that kind of stuff.
On a larger scale, Israel, or the Jewish people (as people hardly distinguish between Jews and Israelis), is viewed as a mighty force that rules the world through Jewish communities. It follows that any Israeli (or Jewish) economic or cultural activity in Egypt is seen as part of a “grand plan” to penetrate the society and gradually pervade all walks of life. While the Israel lobby in the US and elsewhere is truly powerful, the claim that the Jewish state controls the world provides, unfortunately, a tool to cover up one’s own failures than a realistic proof.
That these misconceptions are shared by a large part of the Egyptian public, which in a representative democracy will significantly influence the foreign policy agenda, is disappointing. That is because the revolution against the old regime has not yet removed old myths which deny the public opinion credible and informed judgments, regardless of whether a democratic Egypt would see in Israel a friend or a foe.
Amr Yossef is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
A rare voice of relative reason in The Daily News Egypt
A rare voice of relative reason in The Daily News Egypt:
Muslims want second mosque in Sofia
Photo: ReutersThe leadership of Sofia's mosque have said that the temple is now too small to hold the capital's Muslim community during Friday prayers and that the authorities should authorise construction of a second mosque.
In order to avoid future tension with other residents, and to prevent rallies such as that staged by Ataka members on May 20, they have also vowed to "reconsider" their policy of allowing worshippers to pray outside, hoping to reduce obstruction to pedestrians during prayer time.
They have also promised to reduce the sound on loudspeakers to the "bare minimum" so that the noise does not disturb the surrounding area.
In order to avoid future tension with other residents, and to prevent rallies such as that staged by Ataka members on May 20, they have also vowed to "reconsider" their policy of allowing worshippers to pray outside, hoping to reduce obstruction to pedestrians during prayer time.
They have also promised to reduce the sound on loudspeakers to the "bare minimum" so that the noise does not disturb the surrounding area.
Saudi Arabia calls for sharply lower oil prices.
“We don’t want the West to go and find alternatives,” Alwaleed, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, said in an interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” scheduled for broadcast today. “The higher the price of oil goes, the more they have incentives to go and find alternatives.”
The rebellion in Libya, political turmoil in Bahrain and speculative buying are responsible for driving oil prices to more than $100 a barrel, Alwaleed said. Crude for July delivery rose 36 cents to settle at $100.59 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange May 27. Prices have increased 35 percent in the past year.
Alwaleed, who owns Citigroup Inc. (C) shares and ranks 26th on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest billionaires with a net worth of $19.6 billion, said he continues to invest in the U.S. and that the nation is “down, for sure, but it is not out.” Standard & Poor’s lowered its U.S. credit-rating outlook on April 18 to negative, citing the widening budget deficit.
Saudi Arabia needs to enact laws that allow for greater public participation in government, Alwaleed said. U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration is seeking to encourage pro-democracy movements inspired by those that ousted longtime leaders in Tunisia and Egypt as part of the so-called Arab Spring to create broader, regional changes.
http://yourjewishnews.com/6904.aspx
Newt: In the 1990s, Who Cared About the 10th Amendment?
I've been working on other stuff today and couldn't keep track of the buffeting Newt Gingrich is taking even if I wanted to. Politico's scoop about the Gingriches' debt to Tiffany's is the kind of detail, like John Edwards' haircuts or Dan Quayle's spelling, that lends itself so easily to Jay Leno monologues that it might never fade. It's like watching a Street Fighter II character get flurry-slapped by E. Honda. And it's all happening to a fascinating candidate whom no one would call the frontrunner.
Phil Klein has a solid recap of Gingrich's air-clearing conference call, which succeeds in clearing very, very little. He's a prisoner of his record, which stretches back to times when Republicans entertained the idea of carbon caps, or health care mandates, or when they experimented with entitlement reform and got burned. He's failing litmus tests left and right. On the mandate:
read more: http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/05/17/newt-in-the-1990s-who-cared-about-the-10th-amendment.aspx
Phil Klein has a solid recap of Gingrich's air-clearing conference call, which succeeds in clearing very, very little. He's a prisoner of his record, which stretches back to times when Republicans entertained the idea of carbon caps, or health care mandates, or when they experimented with entitlement reform and got burned. He's failing litmus tests left and right. On the mandate:
It's nonsense to start a conversation by going back 18 years and playing "gotcha." I was explaining the position of conservatives who were trying to defeat HillaryCare. In 1993, you had nothing like the current focus on the 10th amendment. You had nothing like the current desire to get power out of Washington. And you didn't have the sense of radicalism that Obama has injected into the system, in the sense of drifting toward a socialized bureaucratic structure that runs the whole country.
read more: http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/05/17/newt-in-the-1990s-who-cared-about-the-10th-amendment.aspx
Will Islam Destroy Itself?
In his address to congress, Netanyahu said that militant Islam threatens Islam. As if there were any such thing as a non-militant form of Islam. An ideology that was militantly expansionistic from birth. And yet that expansionism does threaten it.
If an ideology fighting a simultaneous war on nearly every continent sounds familiar, it should. The new Islamic crusade is just as arrogantly overextended. Just as certain that it can win every battle because it's destined to. That its inherent superiority makes it unbeatable. And that its enemies are cowards who are easily tricked and even more easily beaten.
Petrodollars and Jihadis are being rushed to conflicts around the globe. And Muslim countries are racing to acquire nuclear weapons, even though it puts their own populations in the firing line of a nuclear war. Muslim terrorism is turning immigration into a national security issue. And Sharia is raising hackles even among many liberals. The arrogance and hubris of the Islamic crusade for a new caliphate has made too many enemies, too fast. And it relies on Western complicity and money. That remains its weak point.
Had Muslims focused on domestic revolutions, most of the world would have let it go. Western countries have lost their enthusiasm for armed interventions on behalf of tyrants. And if foreign businessmen can learn to live with Dubai and Saudi Arabia, they would have accepted similar transformations in Egypt and Syria. Muslims could have assembled a Caliphate with hardly an objection from abroad. But instead they spent more time focused on conquest, than on revolution.
Like an amateur gambler flush with his winnings, the Imams and Mullahs swelled with pride and decided they couldn't lose. They wouldn't just bring down their own countries, instead they would tie everything together and pull it all down. Use terrorism to blackmail and intimidate the West. And then use that as a lever for regime change. It's working quite well so far. But then again most battle plans work, when the enemy is hardly fighting back.
The Islamists are assembling too many enemies too fast, to consider what would happen if those enemies united against them. They have spent too much time gloating over the Western dependency on their oil and their immigrants to think about what will happen the day the oil pipeline and the immigration pipeline are cut off. Like the Nazis, they are spending too much time moving pins on a map to note all the places where they are advancing, all the wars they are fighting and all the mosques they are building, to take the time to realize how vulnerable that makes them.
Fortune rewards the aggressor who takes the initiative. But that's only until he overreaches. And then the other side takes the initiative.
By the end of 1941, Hitler was actually taking the initiative against America, which last time around had decisively turned the tide. There's hardly a more clear cut case of completely forgetting the lessons of a war that you had actually fought in. But the Nazi drive to power had been built on denying the real political, military and economic lessons of WW1. The assertion that Germany lost because it was betrayed, doomed it to lose a second time.
The Islamists suffer from the same problem. Their denial of history dooms them to repeat it all over again. Their assertion that Islamic states are immune from the social and economic problems of secular states means that their aspirations for a Caliphate will fall apart into bickering and civil war. And their belief that Islamic warriors are any better than ordinary tribals armed with machine guns and RPG's has been disproven on countless battlefields. The myth of the suicide bomber is the last resort of a delusional ideology trying to deny its own human vulnerabilities.
Racial and religious doctrinal purity does not equal omnipotence. And Islamic expansionism is due to relearn the same lesson that World War II meted out to the aggressors. The Caliphate and Third Reich are the vision of maniacs and demagogues trying to turn back the clock to a mythical past. Building castles in the sand by a bloody shore.
The obsessive petrodollar construction projects of Dubai have something of Albert Speer about them. Huge tasteless buildings constructed to show the grandeur of a regime, even while revealing its lack of taste and creativity. And its underlying insecurity. The Nazi, Communists and now Muslims obsession with constructing gargantuan inhuman structures reveal some of the insecurity behind the violence. Giant concrete and steel security blankets by vicious men terrified of their own mortality.
Insecurities lead to grandiosity. The tilting shots of Leni Riefenstahl depicting the Aryan man as more than human, or the Muslim martyr who willingly kills himself for the Jihad, share a common contempt for humanity. And beneath that contempt a craven fear of being merely human.
The ambition of the Caliphate conceals its own rot. The graffiti portraits of martyrs on walls turn them into museums of fear. The grandiosity of a worldwide Jihad is not the work of strongminded men, but of weak ones. The Jihad is not on the march because it is strong, but because it is unable to offer any real solutions to domestic problems. All that Islamic groups do is offer subsidized services and bribes in exchange for popular support. The same cheap trick that every Muslim and even non-Muslim government does.
Like Nazism and Communism, the Islamic utopia is unsustainable. A fool's dream overseen by greedy thieves and guarded by vicious butchers. And like them it gains credibility only from extending the conflict. From positioning itself as the force of light standing against the darkness. And like them, Islam destroys the societies it takes over in order to continue a war that has no purpose except to disguise the foolishness of its doctrines and the incompetence of its visionaries.
The inherent social instability of Islam necessitates its expansionism. Just as the economic instability of National Socialism made Kristalnacht and the invasion of Poland necessary for the Nazi elite. Or the economic failures of Soviet Communism made its own expansionism inevitable. A strong warlike country's ideology doesn't fail internally, until it also fails externally.
Western socialists need immigrants, but even they have their limits. And that limit will be reached when they realize that Islamic immigration and violence makes their dream of a new Europe and a world united under international law null and void. Even without that, their welfare state utopias have a limited lifespan. And when those utopias collapse, they won't have much use for immigrants. Or for the violence they bring with them.
Islam is overreaching badly. Its political successes have inflamed its sense of destiny. But politics turns. And unlike a high tech society or a competent military-- the political advantage and wealth that comes from an addiction to oil are both vulnerable to sudden change. The wheel of history is turning. And while Muslims are confident that it is turning in their direction, they would do well to remember that the glorious days of mastery they are trying to recapture came to an end for a reason. That the ruler of history raps hardest the knuckles of those who refuse to learn its lessons. And that they have now become its worst pupils.
Jerusalem Arabs ask Israel to remain in control
Ryan Jones
The Israeli Knesset's Interior Committee met on Monday to discuss future control of Jerusalem as pressure mounts for Israel to surrender the city's eastern half to the Palestinian Authority.
Among those slated to address the committee were Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem who want to continue living under Israeli sovereignty.
That these Arabs would risk their lives to come forward and request to remain part of Israel debunks the international misconception most recently enunciated by US President Barack Obama that the Palestinian Arabs cannot reach their full potential or live dignified lives while under "Israeli occupation."
It also provides further evidence for the conclusion of Israel Today's recent cover story revealing that many Palestinian Arabs do not want an independent state, and already live in peace and prosperity with their Jewish neighbors.
Monday's Knesset gathering was called by lawmakers who are growing increasingly concerned over how parts of eastern Jerusalem are slowly falling under the de facto control of the Palestinian regime.
"Signs of Israeli sovereignty are disappearing in parts of Jerusalem that are behind the partition fence and their place is being taken by hostile elements," wrote the lawmakers. "This, despite the lack of any decision by the Knesset or the government on the matter."
They warned that this "impotence leads to the de facto division of Jerusalem."
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/tabid/178/nid/22808/language/en-US/Default.aspx
That these Arabs would risk their lives to come forward and request to remain part of Israel debunks the international misconception most recently enunciated by US President Barack Obama that the Palestinian Arabs cannot reach their full potential or live dignified lives while under "Israeli occupation."
It also provides further evidence for the conclusion of Israel Today's recent cover story revealing that many Palestinian Arabs do not want an independent state, and already live in peace and prosperity with their Jewish neighbors.
Monday's Knesset gathering was called by lawmakers who are growing increasingly concerned over how parts of eastern Jerusalem are slowly falling under the de facto control of the Palestinian regime.
"Signs of Israeli sovereignty are disappearing in parts of Jerusalem that are behind the partition fence and their place is being taken by hostile elements," wrote the lawmakers. "This, despite the lack of any decision by the Knesset or the government on the matter."
They warned that this "impotence leads to the de facto division of Jerusalem."
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/tabid/178/nid/22808/language/en-US/Default.aspx
Has Obama Lost Middle East Credibility?
What's the Latest Development?
Longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says President Obama has missed many opportunities to promote pro-democratic reform in the region while maintaining alliances with some of its most repressive regimes. "Obama's failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the U.S. most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime...but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive..."
What's the Big Idea?
While State Department officials talk openly about cultivating goodwill in the Middle East by supporting pro-democratic reform, have decades of double talk made American foreign policy Orwellian? And to what degree will Obama support a Palestinian state? "Obama says no Palestinian state must be declared at the U.N. But why not? Who cares in the Middle East what Obama says? Not even, it seems, the Israelis. The Arab spring will soon become a hot summer and there will be an Arab autumn, too. By then, the Middle East may have changed forever. What America says will matter nothing."
Read it at The Independent
Gaza: Sheikh Yassin's house declared heritage site
Hamas to open home of spiritual leader killed in 2004 to visitors, turning location into historical landmark
The Hamas government decided to open the home of its former spiritual leader and founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated in 2004, to visitors.
A Hamas official announced the decision will allow visitors to learn more about Yassin's "Jihadist career" as well as his activities against the "Israeli occupation."
"The goal is to commemorate his image in a place which saw him devote his life to the distribution of Islam," the official remarked.
Sheikh Yassin's wheelchair
Hamas prime minister in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh gave his blessing to the project, saying: "It will help us revive the memory of the Sheikh amongst the Arab and Islamic population."
Visitors will be able to see the many pictures hanging in Yassin's living room, including photos with such leaders as Former Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The wheelchair he used to get around the house and his conference room will also be on display.
The house. Books and photos
Abu Bilal Yassin, the person tasked with maintaining the site, said the home embodies "the history of the Palestinian people's resistance as well as Yassin's life."
Hamas made sure to preserve and display, for the first time ever, the wheelchair Yassin sat on when he was assassinated, as well as the blanket he covered himself with that day.
"We've transformed the house into cultural and intellectual reference points to show how modestly he lived. We'll open the house for visitors so they will learn about the Jihadist life of the Sheikh," Abu Bilal said.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4075509,00.html
Elior Levy
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