Tag Archives: Cairo

Anatomy of a Coverup

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We now have whistle blowers set to testify that what happened in Benghazi is very different than what the Obama administration has told us. We also have the proof that the Benghazi talking points were scrubbed. The question being asked now is why did Hillary Clinton and so many top administration officials, including General Petraeus, go to such extraordinary lengths to present a false narrative?

Daniel Greenfield has written a very good explanation of the Obama administration’s foreign policy towards the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in his piece, “Obama’s Big Brotherhood Bet” at Front Page that helps answer this question:

In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. He skipped the gaming tables at the Omar Khayyam Casino at the Cairo Marriott and instead went over to the Islamist baccarat tables at Cairo University and bet big on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama had insisted on Muslim Brotherhood attendance at a speech that was part apology and part abandonment. The apology was for American power and the abandonment was of American allies.

The text of the speech was largely inconsequential in the same way that most of the words that scroll across the teleprompters of politicians are. In politics, the speech is often the medium while the timing, the audience and the location are the message. And the message was that the Brotherhood’s hour had come.

Obama was following through on an idea that had long been an article of faith on the left. The idea was that the United States had invested in a defunct status quo and that our biggest problems were our allies. The only way out was to toss them all overboard.

Generations of diplomats had griped from their walled compounds in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Doha that many of our problems in the region would go away if Israel somehow went away. But this was bigger. It involved dumping every single allied government in the region to start fresh with new governments elected through popular democracy and enjoying popular support. It would be a new beginning. And a new beginning was also the title of the Cairo speech.

The idea wasn’t new, but it was right up there with proposals to unilaterally abandon our nuclear arsenal or dedicate ten percent of the budget to foreign aid; ideas that a lot of diplomats liked, but that they knew no one would ever be crazy enough to pull the trigger on.

And then Obama tried to pull the trigger on two out of three. What he wanted was for the Brotherhood to win so that it could make the War on Terror irrelevant.

As much as the advocates of smart and soft power insisted that Islamic terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, they knew better. They knew that Al Qaeda wanted to create Islamic states that would form into a Caliphate. Central to its thinking was that it would have to fight to create these states. But what if the Caliphate could be created without a war?

To make it happen, all America had to do was surrender the Middle East.

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The Obama administration, with it’s cultural relativist world view, believes that BOTH Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda can be moderated by making a  transition to democracy with our help. There has been an Orwellian re-branding of the word terrorism in order to sell this idea to the public as well as a denial of the so called al Qaeda “franchise’s” ideological links to “core” al Qaeda. So when the al Qaeda militia we were partnering with (Feb. 17th Martyrs Brigade) to protect the embassy actually assisted al Qaeda members from Yemen and possibly Egypt to attack and kill our people in Benghazi, they had to cover that up or risk Obama losing the election. Hillary Clinton went to extraordinary measures to change the Benghazi talking points in order to protect her political future as well as Obama’s. As a bonus, she managed to insert the lie of the “offensive” video tape in order to advance the campaign to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Walid Phares: ” These forces were not on the map as a threat to US national security because of a political determination that they were on the right side of history, and they were perceived as in transition to integration.”

Clare Lopez: “The real issue — which is what the CIA, the State Department or anyone in the U.S. government has been doing backing regime change operations across the Middle East and North Africa region in the company of and for the benefit of Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood jihadis — never gets addressed, much less explained by the ARB or anyone else.”

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Rape and the Islamic Doctrine That Allows It

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Egyptian woman

Historically and juridically, Islam sanctions FGM for Muslim females and rape and sexual slavery of non-Muslim females. Westerners determinedly avoid the topic altogether.

By Clare Lopez:

The first time that many Americans and others in the West became aware of the extent of the mistreatment of  women in Muslim-majority countries was on February 11, 2011, the night that Hosni Mubarak’s government fell in Cairo and CBS News correspondent, Lara Logan, was brutally sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square.

Yet, those already familiar with the Egyptian street know that the brazen sexual harassment of women has been a feature of public life there for a long time. After all, this is an overwhelmingly Muslim country where statistics show more than 90 per cent of women undergo genital mutilation (Female Genital Mutilation-FGM), whose fundamental purpose is to destroy female sexuality—not only so that men may more easily control their own women but in an attempt to remove ostensible “provocation” from men who are raised from infancy in an environment of permissiveness to believe they are superior to women.

And while Western feminist groups determinedly avoid the topic altogether, international organizations charged with studying the treatment of women around the world typically take pains to avoid any insinuation that either FGM or rape of women and girls has anything to do with Islam. Unfortunately, both do. Doctrinally, historically and juridically, Islam sanctions FGM for Muslim females and the rape and sexual slavery of non-Muslim females.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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Cairo: Mob Attacks Coptic Christians in Cathedral

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Egyptian Coptic Christians mourn after a previous attack. (Photo: © Reuters)

Tue, April 9, 2013:

Egyptian state media reported that one person was killed and more than 80 wounded in clashes at the St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in central Cairo after a funeral service for four Egyptian Christians killed in sectarian violence with Muslims.

Hundreds of Christians were under siege inside Cairo’s Coptic cathedral as security forces and local residents, some armed with handguns, launched a prolonged and unprecedented attack on the headquarters of Egypt’s ancient Church.

At least one person was killed and at least 84 injured as Christians inside the walled St Mark’s cathedral compound came under a frenzied assault from their assailants.

Following the funeral service, thousands of Christians poured out on to the street and began chanting slogans against Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian President and long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Copts chanted, “With our blood and soul we will sacrifice ourselves for the cross.” They shouted slogans calling for the departure of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood movement as the coffins were carried head-high into the church.

The funeral was for four Copts who were killed in the city of Khosous, about 10 miles (15km) north of Cairo, after inflammatory symbols were drawn on an Islamic institute, provoking an argument. A melee ensued and the four Copts, along with one Muslim, were killed.

Witnesses reported that the violence at the funeral began when a mob attacked the mourners as they exited the cathedral, pelting them with bottles, stones and petrol bombs. The Christians responded by throwing stones back until police arrived and attempted to quell the unrest, firing tear gas into the cathedral compound. After being hit by rocks thrown from the roofs of nearby buildings, the mourners were reportedly forced back into the cathedral compound.

Read more at The Clarion Project

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The Obama Administration’s Disgraceful Muslim Brotherhood Policy

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aap_3281_MAR04_egyptker2_800x6001-450x337By :

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, which has the support of the Obama administration, has just issued arrest warrants for five activists on false charges that they allegedly used social media to incite violence against the Muslim Brotherhood.  These activists include a blogger who played a key role in the 2011 revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi was following through on his threat to the National Salvation Front and other opposition groups, which he issued last Sunday in the wake of clashes between protesters and the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo: “There is a president of the republic and there are emergency measures if any of them makes even the smallest of moves that undermines Egypt or the Egyptians. Their lives are worthless when it comes to the interests of Egypt and Egyptians. I am a president after a revolution, meaning that we can sacrifice a few so the country can move forward. It is absolutely no problem.”

In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood itself filed complaints against 169 opposition figures, which included a former presidential candidate who now works in television.

At the same time, sexual assaults against women have skyrocketed during the Morsi regime’s rule. And the Islamists who have been elevated into power blame the women for the violence against them. For example, an Islamist police general and lawmaker was quoted by the New York Times as proclaiming that “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

Read more at Front Page

 

Obama’s mysterious visit

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US President Barack Obama delivers address to the Muslim World at Cairo University in Cairo Egypt

US President Barack Obama speaks on American foreign policy at Cairo University in Cairo Egypt on 04 June 2009. The much anticipated address was aimed at challenging Muslim perceptions about the US.

By Caroline Glick:

Why is US President Barack Obama coming to Israel today? In 2008, then president George W. Bush came to celebrate Israel’s 60th Independence Day, and to reject Israeli requests for assistance in destroying Iran’s nuclear installations.
In 1996, then-president Bill Clinton came to Israel to help then-prime minister Shimon Peres’s electoral campaign against Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu.
It is possible that Obama is coming here in order to build up pro-Israel bonafides. But why would he bother? Obama won his reelection bid with the support of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Their support vindicated his hostility toward Israel in his first term. He has nothing to prove.
It is worth comparing Obama’s visit to Israel at the start of his second term of office, with his visit to Cairo at the outset of his first term in office.
Ahead of that trip, the new administration promised that the visit, and particularly Obama’s “Address to the Muslim World,” would serve as a starting point for a new US policy in the Middle East. And Obama lived up to expectations.
In speaking to the “Muslim World,” Obama signaled that the US now supported pan-Islamists at the expense of US allies and Arab nationalist leaders, first and foremost then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Moreover, in castigating Israel for its so-called “settlements”; channeling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by intimating that Israel exists because of the Holocaust; and failing to travel from Cairo to Jerusalem, preferring instead to visit a Nazi death camp in Germany, Obama signaled that he was downgrading US ties with the Jewish state.
In sharp contrast to the high expectations the Obama White House cultivated in pre-Cairo visit statements and leaks, Obama and his advisers have downplayed the importance of his visit to Israel, signaling there will be no significant changes in Obama’s policies toward Israel or the wider Middle East.
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 Through the radical Left, Obama may intend to foment a pressure campaign to force the government to withdraw unilaterally from all or parts of Judea and Samaria, as Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. If this is Obama’s actual policy goal, it would represent a complete Europeanization of US policy toward Israel. It was the EU that funded radical leftist groups that pushed for Israel’s unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005.
And in the past week, a number of commentators have spoken and written in favor of such a plan.
Caroline Glick: “The presence of Jews on the West Bank has nothing to do with prospects for peace”. From the debate “Israel is destroying itself with its settlement policy: If settlement expansion continues Israel will have no future” which took place at the Royal Geographical Society on 15th January 2013. : h/t BNI
Caroline Glick is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Security Policy. She is also the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post and Director of the Israel Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She serves as adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and is the author of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad (2008) She holds a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, served as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1997-98, and regularly briefs senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern. She lives in Jerusalem. A former officer in the Israel Defense Forces, she was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians and later served as an assistant policy advisor to the prime minister. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the widely-published Glick was an embedded journalist with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. She was awarded a distinguished civilian service award from the U.S. Secretary of the Army for her battlefield reporting.

OIC Ramps Up ‘Islamophobia’ Campaign

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kaffash20130201102509687-450x332By : The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has long been on the forefront of the Islamist mission to establish the equivalent of Islamic blasphemy laws in the West.  Now, during its 12th Islamic Summit held in Cairo February 7-8, 2013, the OIC set forth new and creative ways to silence, and ultimately criminalize criticism of Islam.

The OIC is a 57-member state organization that claims to represent 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe.  As the second largest international organization in the world, behind only the UN, and as the largest Islamic organization in the world, it is obviously quite powerful.  Though it is arguably the largest voting block in the UN, most people have never heard of it.

One of the OIC’s primary aims for at least the last fourteen years has been the international criminalization of speech that is critical of any Islam-related topic, including Islamic terrorism, Islamic persecution of religious minorities and human rights violations committed in the name of Islam.

Since 1999, the OIC has set forth UN resolutions that would “combat defamation of religions.”  These resolutions condemned criticism of religion, but in the OIC’s interpretation, it applied only to Islam.  True statements of fact constituted no exception.

Support for the resolutions declined once the United States and other Western countries caught wind of the true meaning of “defamation of religions” and its inevitable chilling effect on freedom of expression.

In 2011, at the State Department’s request, the OIC drafted an alternative resolution that was intended to retain freedom of expression and still address the OIC’s concerns about alleged Islamophobia.  The result was Resolution 16/18 to Combat Intolerance Based on Religion or Belief.

The US State Department and numerous Christian organizations were elated, believing that the OIC had abandoned its mission to protect Islam from so-called “defamation,” and instead replaced it with the goal of protecting persecuted religious minorities from discrimination and violence.  In other words, many assumed a paradigm shift away from providing legal protections to a religion and toward legal protections for people.

But the OIC had some very creative interpretations of the language embodied in the new resolution.  By its manipulation of words such as intolerance and incitement, giving new meanings to what many thought was plain English, the OIC made it clear that it had not dropped its ultimate goal of protecting Islam from “defamation.”

Read more at Front Page

OIC Seeks Global Watchdog on Free Speech

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Rashad Hussain,

Rashad Hussain,

By Clare Lopez:The 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) met in Cairo, Egypt February 6-7, 2013 with a full agenda of issues to address.

The U.S. Special Envoy to the OIC, Rashad Hussain, attended. One of the key takeaways from the two-day Heads of State Summit appears to be a renewed commitment to the Istanbul Process, the OIC-initiative to criminalize criticism of Islam globally.

According to Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, director of cultural affairs at the OIC general secretariat and spokesman for the OIC secretary general, the next session of the Istanbul Process will be held sometime in the spring of 2013 and will focus anew on getting individual nation states to draft laws that would criminally sanction “denigration of religions.”

Read more at Radical Islam

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Cairo Institute for Human Rights Director Says Obama’s Support for Muslim Brotherhood Led to Rape, Torture and Murder

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potus-morsi-obama-550x343-450x280By Daniel Greenfield:

I’m really glad that we have a Nobel Prize winning leader in the White House who has ended the policy of supporting brutal tyrants in the Middle East who terrorize their own people.

Oh wait… we don’t.

Bahieddin Hassan, the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, has written an open letter to Obama asking him to end his policy of supporting the Islamist tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr President, when I spoke with you in 2010, I asked why the US administration condemns repressive practices in Iran while remaining silent when Arab regimes engage in the same violations. Over recent months, statements by your administration have similarly failed to address violations and have even blamed protesters and victims for violence committed in the context of demonstrations. Indeed, the stances of your administration have given political cover to the current authoritarian regime in Egypt and allowed it to fearlessly implement undemocratic policies and commit numerous acts of repression.

Hassan accuses Hussein of using the Muslim Brotherhood’s own talking points in the administration’s statements supporting Morsi.

Is it a coincidence that the statements issued by your administration reflect the same political rhetoric used by the new authoritarian regime in Egypt? But when these statements come from the world’s superpower — the one most able to have a positive or negative impact on policies in Egypt and the region, not to mention the biggest donor and material supporter of the Egyptian regime for the past 35 years — they become lethal ammunition, offering political protection to perpetrators of murder, torture, brutality and rape.

Hassan describes the crimes and atrocities being perpetrated by the Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood regime.

Read more at Front Page

Also see: EGYPT: Death by Muslim Brotherhood torture chambers (barenakedislam.com)

Egyptian Official: Beating of Naked Man Was Pre-Planned

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demonstrators in CairoArutz Sheva:

A former Egyptian presidential candidate told Al Arabiya TV in an interview on Sunday that the brutal dragging and beating of a naked man near the presidential palace last week was previously planned by the interior ministry in an effort to terrorize the public.

Ahmed Shafiq, who lost the presidential race to Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last year, said the widely circulated video of 50-year-old Hamada Saber was intended to send a message of fear to those protesting in the streets against the brutal reign of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The torture is a “new style of exaggerated terrorism used against the Egyptian citizens that will lead only to violence and hatred of the regime,” Shafiq told Al-Arabiya.

Meanwhile, Saber on Sunday blamed police for the abuse after initially claiming they saved him from protesters.

The presidency described the footage as “shocking”, prompting the interior ministry to order a rare investigation.

While Saber first insisted that police had saved him from protesters, he then changed his account– which was bitterly contested by relatives who said he was being coerced– when prosecutors showed him the video footage, the official MENA news agency reported.

The man, who said he was shot in the foot during the clashes, explained that he initially blamed protesters to “contain the crisis,” the agency reported.

Saber, who has been transferred to a public hospital, said he changed his account and told the “truth” after his family “renounced me…and all of Egypt was angry and people made fun of me on Facebook.”

The main opposition National Salvation Front (NSF) has called for the resignation of Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim over Saber’s beating.

The beating was “an inhumane spectacle… no less ugly than the killings of martyrs, which is considered a continuation of the security force’s program of excessive force,” the opposition bloc said, according to AFP.

Ibrahim ordered a probe into the incident and said he would resign if “that’s what the people want,” his office said.

On Mistaking Mohamed Mursi For His Mask

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by Raymond Stock
Foreign Policy Research Institute
February 2013

“You know, when it comes to Egypt, I think, had it not been for the leadership we showed, you might have seen a different outcome there.” — President Barack Obama, “60 Minutes,” January 27, 2013

imagesCA6KQ9BHWith President Mohamed Mursi’s proclamation of a “new republic” on December 26, after the passage of a Constitution that turns Egypt into an Islamist-ruled, pseudo-democratic state, the “January 25th Revolution” came to a predictably disastrous (if still unstable) terminus. As momentous for world history as the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran (should it hold), it represents the formal—if not the final—victory for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in its 84-year struggle for power in the land of its birth. Indeed, 2012 will likely be remembered as the year that Islamists made the greatest gains in their quest for a new caliphate in the region. And without a drastic change of course by Washington, 2013 might surpass it by far in progress toward the same, seemingly inexorable end.

Egypt, the largest Arab state, the second largest recipient of U.S. military aid, and our second most important ally in the Middle East, is now in the hands of a hostile regime—an elected one at that—which we continue to treat as a friendly one. Even if the sudden outburst of uncontrolled violence along the Suez Canal since January 26—coupled with escalating political and economic tumult in Cairo and elsewhere—leads to a new military coup, it would likely be managed by the MB from behind the scenes. The irony and the implications are equally devastating. This new reality threatens not only traditional U.S. foreign policy goals of stability in the oil-rich Middle East and security for Israel, but also America’s declared support for democracy in the Arab world. Moreover, the fruits of Islamist “democracy,” should it survive, are catastrophic to the people of Egypt, the region and beyond.

How did all this happen? And what role did the U.S. play?

Excellent piece on the revolution in Egypt and the role Barack Obama has played in it. Read it all at Middle East Forum

Also see Ryan Mauro’s interview of Raymond Stock: Egypt Expert: Morsi Confidently Fooling West at RadicalIslam.org

Raymond Stock

Raymond Stock

Raymond Stock is a Shillman/Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and former Visiting Assistant Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Drew University. He has a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania.Stock lived in Egypt for 20 years and was detained at Cairo Airport in December 2010 and deported back to the U.S. due to his 2009 Foreign Policy Magazine article criticizing then-Egyptian Culture Minister for his policies and anti-Semitism.

He is currently working on a biography of Egyptian Nobel laureate in literature, Naguib Mahfouz.

Raymond Stock: The Arab Spring & Egypt’s Nuclear Weapons Program: