5.2.11
USrael really hearts Arab dictators and torturers-in-chief
Israeli government officials started out urging the Obama administration to back Mr. Mubarak, administration officials said, and were initially angry at Mr. Obama for publicly calling on the Egyptian leader to agree to a transition.
“The Israelis are saying, après Mubarak, le deluge,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. And that, in turn, Mr. Levy said, “gets to the core of what is the American interest in this. It’s Israel. It’s not worry about whether the Egyptians are going to close down the Suez Canal, or even the narrower terror issue. It really can be distilled down to one thing, and that’s Israel.”
A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said on Friday that administration officials were reassuring the Israelis that “we fully understand Israel’s security concerns, and we’re making clear that our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable.”
More obscenely, the US seems to be backing Omar Suleiman, newly appointed vice-president and torturer-in-chief, as a gesture toward protesters...
A portrait of Omar Suleiman form The Atlantic showing that Suleiman is no newcomer in the Mubarak regime (october 2003).
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Since March 29th 2006
3 comments:
Personally I’m convinced the US is just buying a bit of thinking time for USrael. Clinton would sell her granny for an extra week to steady Netanyahoo’s nerves. Suleiman? Who cares in the US ‘administration’? They’ve supported far worse than him. Once you’ve supported bin Laden, there’s not much lower you can sink. But they’d temporarily forgotten that bin Laden hadn’t forgotten US crimes elsewhere.
Still, let them support Suleiman, in the end it will make them look as up to their usual tricks again and this time even ordinary Americans are beginning to take note. I feel for the Egyptian people, who will suffer with their lives, just because America’s bad habits will die hard…
Mean while Peres the Plonker is still singing the praises of Mubarak and he’s supposed to be a ‘liberal’. Seriously, we’re gonna have to rethink some terms when all this is over…
Gert,
I visited Egypt few years ago ad promised myself not to visit again. Border control was brutal, the police was everywhere, you can feel the fragility of the state, but what saddened me was the poverty of the egyptian people. 40% of Egyptians live under the UN poverty line which is 2 dollars per day. A public servant salary is 80 dollars per month. To give you a point of comparison: The middle income in Syria is 500 dollars while goods cost more in Egypt then in Syria because of tourism.
Near Giza pyramids, the policemen who are supposed to maintain order and protect tourists were begging for money in not a so subtle way. They looked miserable in their dusty uniforms.
I was struck how much the Egypt I visited was different from the Egypt my parents knew and told me about. The Egypt my parents knew had hope, greatness, and joie de vivre, which made it the center of the Arab world.
Camp David was disastrous. Mubarak knew it better than anybody else and this is why he was able to cash on this fake peace by promising the west and USrael stability over an unwilling population that was reduced to a state of slavery. Few weeks before the revolution in Egypt and after the first uprisings in Tunisia Mubarak was reassuring everybody that Egyptians turn in the street only when they lack food. How dare! Ugly old man...
80 dollars a month? I know an IT engineer who earns 80 dollars a month… in … wait for it… Bangladesh!
I nearly fell off my chair when Jeera mentioned 40 – 70 billion $ for Mubarak’s and his family’s personal fortune. Seriously thought I’d misheard, 7 billion perhaps, but surely not 70! And still, it’s true (40 – 70 billion USD). A laughing cow, laughing all the way to the bank. The best friend of the ‘only democracy in the ME’… If ‘realpolitik’ now doesn’t die then we in the West have sold our souls to the Devil, completely… Who coined the phrase ‘Satan’s excrement’ for oil?
Meanwhile we still get snippets on Jeera from American tourists who ‘all my life I wanted to see the pyramids! (cackle, cackle)’ (try Las Vegas) and can’t see g-ddam anything else!
Tell you what though: the Euro Ziobot blogs, they are eerily quiet now.
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