Saturday 5 November 2011

The Battle for Egypt

The Army Strikes Back; A Turning Point

By Barry Rubin, PJ MEDIA

This is of tremendous importance. Only hours ago I wrote about how the Egyptian military felt forced by circumstances to play a bigger, longer political role in order to stem anarchy and prevent Egypt from becoming an Islamist state. Here’s more evidence of that happening.

In an editorial that reflects also the Obama Administration position, the Washington Post explained that the army having political power is bad and civilian rule is good:

    “The generals’ justification for their proposed decree will sound familiar to any student of the Mubarak regime: They claim to be protecting the country from Islamic fundamentalists, who appear likely to capture a plurality of seats in parliament.”


I understand this point and the value of electoral democracy. But in Turkey the European Union, on similar principles, helped destroy the military’s influence and ushered in an era when an Islamist regime...

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Jerusalem and the US Founders

Editorial of The New York Sun

Many of us will be watching the Supreme Court of the United States Monday, when the justices are scheduled to hear one of those only-in-America cases, where a child is challenging one of the most powerful of the government’s secretaries. Rick Richman of Jewish Current Issues has written about it today on Contentions. The youngster in the case is a nine-year-old American boy, Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky. The secretary he is suing is Hillary Clinton. He is asking the court to order her to carry out a law requiring the state department accede to his request that the papers memorializing his birth stating that, when he was born at Shaare Zedeck hospital in the western part Jerusalem, the country he was born in was Israel.

Mrs. Clinton actually voted for the law before she refused to carry it out. That was back in 2002, when she was a member of the Senate, which passed the law on a unanimous vote. Now she is claiming that it would infringe on the...

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“Musloid” now in Urban Dictionary, Entering Mainstream Usage

Name for the enemy spreads rapidly
by Bill Levinson

Name the Enemy “Musloids” to Control the Argument contends,

    The concept that the power to name a thing is the power to define that thing is thousands of years old, and was once accorded magical powers. We recently got a lesson in this concept ourselves when a reader pointed out that “West Bank,” which we have used conversationally, is the enemy’s name for the Israeli territory of Judea and Samaria. We accordingly propose the use of “Musloid” to define and dehumanize Islamic supremacists, the self-proclaimed enemies of Civilization.

The article adds that “Musloid” means similar to a Muslim but inferior to one, just a humanoid resembles a human but is not equal to one. The fact that the word has only two syllables as opposed to “militant Muslim,” “jihadist,” or “Islamic supremacist” also invites its widespread use. Ann Barnhardthas used the word frequently on...

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Is the US a friend or enemy of Israel?

By Ted Belman

This question always elicits different opinions. Obviously, in part, the answers depend on one’s definition of “friend” or of “enemy.”

The most famous articulation of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Israel was made by Henry Kissinger in 1975 when talking to an Iraqi diplomat. To wit:

    We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world … We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions

Before the ’67 War, U.S. policy was mostly hostile in that the U.S. imposed an embargo on arms to Israel for 20 years, from ’47 to ’67; was passive during the War of Independence, expecting Israel to be defeated in short order; and ordered Israel out of Sinai after Israel conquered it in the Sinai Campaign.

This policy was ameliorated in the aftermath of the ’67 War as reflected in Res....

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‘Orientalism’ For Dummies

Editor’s note: Dr. Yasser Dasmabebi holds the Edward Said-Noam Chomsky Linguistics Chair at Abdul Abulbul Amir University in Cairo. READ THIS. ITS TONGUE IN CHEEK

By Dr. Yasser Dasmabebi, FRONT PAGE MAG

Being a renowned and brilliant linguist such as I am, on October 26, I innocently, and full of optimism and good-will, had published in Front Page Magazine — a war-mongering, racist site if ever there was one, judging from its unsavory readership and ignorant authors! — a glossary of useful terms and expressions meant to help delineate and define what speakers and writers mean when they use certain, shall we say, “explosive” words and phrases when describing so complex a circumstance as, as I wrote, “today’s (and yesterday’s and tomorrow’s) Mid- east.”

Inasmuch as it seems that your culture and mine are teetering on the edge of conflict, I believe that persons of good-will, such as myself, need to do what what we must to make certain that misunderstanding and...

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Nasrallah: Hizballah can fight Israel without aid from Iran or Syria

DEBKAfileExclusive Report November 4, 2011,

The Lebanese Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, while inspecting his fighting units in the last two weeks, has briefed commanders on updated operational plans for firing 10,000 rockets at Tel Aviv and Israel’s air force and reserve mobilization bases in a surprise attack, debkafile’s military sources report.

“The Zionist enemy cannot stand up to a salvo on that scale,” he told them. “He can’t locate our secret launching bases or put a stop to a missile offensive that is sure to determine the war’s outcome.”

He assured the troops that Hizballah is capable of fighting Israel without Iranian or Syrian help.

In answer to questions, Nasrallah said the militia must be prepared to fight Israel without outside military assistance. “We don’t know in what situation our war may find Iran. We do know Bashar Assad has been fighting a rebellion for the past ten months and is in no...

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Glick indicts UNESCO and exposes Obama

By Caroline B. Glick, JEWISH WORLD REVIEW

You have to hand it to the Palestinians. They decided to abandon the peace process and seek international recognition of the “State of Palestine” — a state in a de facto state of war with Israel. And they are pursuing their goal relentlessly.

This week their efforts bore their first fruit with the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) vote to accept “Palestine” as a full state member.

It is not a coincidence that the PLO/PA decided to apply for membership for “Palestine” at UNESCO first. Since 1974 UNESCO has been an enthusiastic partner in the Palestinians’ bid to erase Jewish history, heritage and culture in the Land of Israel from the historical record.

In 1974 UNESCO voted to boycott Israel and “withhold assistance from Israel in the fields of education, science and culture because of Israel’s persistent alteration of...

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Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel