WarSclerotic

Raping women in Tahrir NOT ‘red line’: Egyptian preacher Abu Islam.

Thursday, 07 February 2013

( Islamist reasoning { or lack thereof } generally reserved to Israel, now being extended to women.  It’s always their fault by definition. – JW )

Abu Islam said women activists are going to Tahrir Square not to protest but to be sexually abused because they had wanted to be raped. (Al Arabiya)

Former PM: Egypt’s government nearing end of the road – Israel News, Ynetnews.

From his hiding place in Abu Dhabi, former Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik slams his homeland’s current regime, implies Muslim Brotherhood is ‘insane’

Reuters

Former Egyptian prime minister and air force pilot Ahmed Shafik, who ended his career amid corruption allegations and fled to the Gulf, is confident that with Egypt in turmoil seven months into its experiment with Islamist rule, its often-reviled political old guard will eventually be seen by Egyptians, and by Washington, in a more kindly light.

“Egyptians reject the current regime,” said the last prime minister of Hosni Mubarak, the president who was ousted in 2011 after three decades in power.

“They do not reject the regime from nothing, they reject it as a result of the actions that have taken place over the last seven months … It has not been a success.”

Turmoil

“There’s is a new system for terrorizing the Egyptian people and this is an indication of anxiety within the upper levels of the regime and of the nearing of the end of the road.”

He spoke to Reuters in a gated luxury hotel-managed villa in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, where he fled with his daughters and grandchildren in June 2012, two days after his opponent, Mohammed Morsi, was declared president.

Shafik says Egypt’s first popularly elected president is driving the country deeper into political, economic and social turmoil and as a result will lose power.

In recent months, opposition groups have criticized Morsi’s perceived drift towards authoritarianism, which they say fueled unrest this year in which at least 59 people were killed.

Shafik after 2012 election (Photo: EPA)

Shafik said the government’s inexperience is to blame and – in a reflex from the Mubarak years – said “terrorism” was embedded in the now-dominant Islamist political groups. Morsi’s roots are in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928.

“The situation is not stable,” Shafik said. “You can’t bring a group from nothing to suddenly running a country of 90 million people with a lot of problems and a sensitive geographical location.”

Combative

He said he did not intend to leave Egypt forever and would return “when the time is right”, despite being on an official watch list over graft charges which he dismisses as politicized.

“I decided to leave because I couldn’t guarantee what would happen … When you have someone who is opposing you who is sane you would be reassured about his reaction, but when you have someone opposing you who is insane then you don’t know how he’ll react,” he said.

Shafik speaks loudly and moves constantly. He also carries himself in a combative, stubborn manner, a trait reminiscent of his old boss, Mubarak, Egyptians close to the old guard say.

In a military career spanning four decades, Shafik served as a senior fighter pilot under Mubarak’s command, and was credited for shooting down two Israeli aircraft in the October 1973 war.

Shafik predicted Washington’s view of Egypt’s political Islamist rulers would become steadily less benign.

“The US used to think that empowering Islamist political parties would bring an end to Islamist terrorism,” he said.

“Only recently did they find out that Islamist terrorism is embedded within these parties,” he said.

The United States, which was a staunch ally of Mubarak until he was overthrown in 2011, is now trying to build a dependable relationship with Morsi.

Is Khamenei rejecting direct nuclear talks or just negotiating?.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made some comments that certainly sound like a repudiation of Vice President Biden’s offer of direct negotiations. Iran’s political system is noisy and complicated, but Khamenei’s support is considered crucial for any major foreign policy decisions. So these comments would seem to be bad news for any direct talks – and especially for the multilateral summit scheduled in Kazakhstan later this month.

So how firmly did Khamenei slam the door on America? “Some naive people like the idea of negotiating with America, however, negotiations will not solve the problem,” he said in a speech that was covered by state media. “American policy in the Middle East has been destroyed and Americans now need to play a new card. That card is dragging Iran into negotiations.”

That seems pretty categorical. But he also qualified his comments by saying that the reason negotiations can’t work is because the United States has “a gun” held up to Iran, which presumably means sanctions and the threat of military force. “You Americans have pointed guns toward Iran, but at the same time you want to negotiate. The Iranian nation will not be intimidated by these actions,” he said.

“Those newcomers to the U.S. foreign policy scene are repeating the negotiation issues like previous administrations, and they say the ball is in Iran’s court. The ball is really in the U.S.’s court and you have to reply.” Khamenei added, “Negotiations with threats and without good intentions have no meaning.”

Those comments sound less like a categorical rejection of negotiations than a description of why he thinks that they can’t happen under the current conditions. In other words, “the ball is really in the U.S.’s court” seems to suggest that Khamenei is laying down a pre-condition to direct talks. It’s not clear what that pre-condition would be, though; ”pointed guns” is awfully vague. (As a side note, you have to love that America has gotten the austere, supreme religious and political leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran to use tennis metaphors.)

If – if! – Khamenei’s speech was in fact intended to lay down some sort of pre-condition, and there’s no reason to be certain that he was, then there would be good and bad news there. The good news would be that he is at least open to the possibility of talks and that the challenge now becomes how to negotiate for the negotiations. Not exactly peace in the Middle East, but it’s a start.

The bad news would be that Khamenei seems to be insisting that American coercion – the “pointed guns,” whether sanctions or threat of military force – has to be separate from any negotiations. This position is functionally impossible, of course: America’s overwhelming military and economic superiority, not to mention its successful diplomatic isolation of Iran, are probably the best tools that Washington has for ever getting Tehran to the negotiating table.

Sadly, whether you read Khamenei’s comments as an outright rejection of talks or as a subtly presented pre-condition for them, either probably reinforces the status quo. “There is a deal on the nuclear issue that can be agreed upon any time both sides are interested in an agreement,” Dan Drezner writes at Foreign Policy. Whether or not Khamenei is any closer to accepting that deal, he’s still not there.

Abbas to Ahmadinejad: Talk more about Palestine than destroying Israel – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas tells Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that his anti-Israel remarks harm the Palestinian cause, an Egyptian source says.

By Jack Khoury | Feb.07, 2013 | 1:33 PM | 6

Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Morsi. Photo by Reuters

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make more public statements about creating a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, and fewer public attacks against Israel, an Egyptian source told Haaretz.

The source, who has knowledge of the details of the meeting between Abbas and Ahmadinejad in Cairo on Wednesday, told Haaretz that Abbas demanded the Iranian president talk more about the importance of establishing a Palestinian state and less about “wiping Israel off the map of the Middle East.”

According to the source, Abbas made it clear to his Iranian counterpart, at the meeting on the margins of the summit of Islamic states, that Israel has been taking advantage of his comments and using them against the Palestinians. Therefore, Abbas said, it is important for a state like Iran to talk more about the rights of the Palestinians, the need for an end to the occupation and the struggle for the establishment of a state within the 1967 borders in accordance with principles outlined by the international community.

Contrary to reports that relations between Abbas and Ahmadinejad were warming, Dr. Samir Ghattas, a Palestinian commentator who directs a research center in Cairo, told a Nazareth radio station on Thursday that the Palestinian president’s remarks about the conflict remain unchanged: “[Abbas] doesn’t change his stance vis-a-vis one leader or another and his stance vis-a-vis the president of Iran hasn’t changed since the two met in August on the sidelines of the Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement [in Tehran].”

Then too Abbas stressed the importance of the establishment of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders, said Ghattas, and this was later conveyed in Ahmadinejad’s speech at the United Nations, when he spoke about the rights of the Palestinians and attacked Israel for violating the Palestinians’ rights but refrained from statements about destroying Israel.”

It should be noted that the relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Iran has generally been tense, especially in recent years. Abbas and Fatah have accused Iran of supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad and of contributing to the failure of reconciliation between the Palestinian rivals. At the meeting in Tehran, Abbas even made a crack about Ahmadinejad, who spoke about his love for the Palestinians; Abbas told him publicly that he expects him to “fall in love with all the Palestinians and not just some of them.

Palestinian media did not feature the meeting yesterday prominently. Palestinian news agency Wafa released a short statement to the effect that the two leaders met for a brief conversation, in which they discussed the UN General Assembly decision to recognize Palestine as a non-member observer state, the crisis in Syria and other issues raised at the Cairo summit.

Abbas has gotten some flak since Wednesday, following two slips of the tongue during his speech: He addressed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as “Mr. President Mohammed Hosni” and rushed to correct himself, and he then thanked King Mohammed V of Morocco, when one of the members of the delegation reminded him that the current king is Mohammed VI, and that Mohammed V was no longer alive.

Ali Khamenei shuts door on direct nuclear talks with US.

DEBKAfile Special Report February 7, 2013, 3:55 PM (GMT+02:00)

Khamenei rejects talks with Washington

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned down the US offer of one-on-one talks on its nuclear program Thursday, Feb. 7,  just 24 hours after US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that due to budgetary constraints, the US could only keep one, not two, US aircraft carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf, and had cancelled the departure of a second carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman.
The ayatollah in a speech posted on his web site accused the US of proposing talks while “pointing a gun at Iran.”

On Saturday, US Vice-President Joe Biden suggested direct talks – separate from the wider international discussions scheduled for Feb. 26 in Kazakhstan between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. No previous negotiations in this format over the years have ever produced a breakthrough.

Biden said Washington was prepared for direct talks with Iran “when the Iranian leadership, supreme leader, is serious”. “That offer stands,” he said later, “but it must be real and tangible and there has to be an agenda that they are prepared to speak to. We are not just prepared to do it for the exercise,” he said.

But the ayatollah said such negotiations “would solve nothing.” He added: “You are holding a gun against Iran saying you want to talk. The Iranian nation will not be frightened by threats.”

Wednesday, the US widened sanctions on Iran for tightening the squeeze on Tehran’s ability to spend oil cash.

The cancellation of the Harry Truman’s departure for the Gulf leaves a single US aircraft carrier in the vast naval region of the Persian Gulf, Mediterranean and southern part of the Indian Ocean bordering on Africa, debkafile‘s military sources report, and no US fleet presence opposite Syria.

Khamenei’s rejection of Washington’s latest offer of direct talks followed the new US ban imposed Wednesday on the transfer of revenues from Iranian oil exports to its coffers. The money will henceforth be available only for the purchase of goods in the countries of destination for Iranian oil.
Senior American officials said that this sanction would significantly restrict Iran’s freedom to use its oil income at will.

Khamenei did not say so specifically, but his rejection of dialogue with Washington was undoubtedly influenced by President Barack Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel. By the metaphor of “holding a gun against Iran,” the Iranian leader was not just reacting to the new sanctions; he was also hitting back at the White House announcement’s stress that the president’s talks with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would focus on Iran and Syria – as debkafile reported Wednesday.
The expectation is that Obama and Netanyahu will confer on the military option both governments have reserved for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program.

Khamenei’s rejection of face-to-face talks does not cancel the international negotiations scheduled to take place in Kazakhstan. It does, however, render them more pointless than ever.

Israel Hayom | Is Turkey leaving the West?.

Recent steps taken by the government of Turkey suggest it may be ready to ditch the NATO club of democracies for a Russian and Chinese gang of authoritarian states.

Here is the evidence:

Starting in 2007, Ankara applied three times unsuccessfully to join as a guest member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (informally known as the Shanghai Five). Founded in 1996 by the Russian and Chinese governments, along with three (and in 2001 a fourth) former Soviet Central Asian states, the SCO has received minimal attention in the West, although it has grand security and other aspirations, including the possible creation of a gas cartel. More, it offers an alternative to the Western model, from NATO, to democracy, to displacing the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. After those three rejections, Ankara applied for “dialogue partner” status in 2011. In June 2012, it won approval.

One month later, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he had told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, “Come, accept us into the Shanghai Five [as a full member] and we will reconsider the European Union.” Erdoğan reiterated this idea on Jan. 25, noting stalled Turkish efforts to join the European Union.

“As the prime minister of 75 million people, you start looking around for alternatives,” he said. “That is why I told Mr. Putin the other day, ‘Take us into the Shanghai Five; do it, and we will say goodbye to the EU.’ What’s the point of stalling?” He added that the SCO “is much better, it is much more powerful [than the EU], and we share values with its members.”

On Jan. 31, the Foreign Ministry announced plans for an upgrade to “observer state” at the SCO. On Feb. 3 Erdoğan reiterated his earlier point, saying, “We will search for alternatives,” and praised the Shanghai group’s “democratization process” while disparaging European “Islamophobia.” On Feb. 4, President Abdullah Gül pushed back, declaring, “The SCO is not an alternative to the EU. … Turkey wants to adopt and implement EU criteria.”

What does this all amount to?

The SCO feint faces significant obstacles: If Ankara leads the effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the SCO firmly supports the beleaguered Syrian leader. NATO troops have just arrived in Turkey to man Patriot batteries protecting that country from Syria’s Russian-made missiles. More profoundly, all six SCO members strongly oppose the Islamism that Erdoğan espouses. Perhaps, therefore, Erdoğan mentioned SCO membership only to pressure the EU, or to offer symbolic rhetoric for his supporters.

Both are possible. But I take the half-year flirtation seriously for three reasons. First, Erdoğan has established a record of straight talk, leading one key columnist, Sedat Ergin, to call the Jan. 25 statement perhaps his “most important” foreign policy proclamation ever.

Second, as Turkish columnist Kadri Gürsel points out, “The EU criteria demand democracy, human rights, union rights, minority rights, gender equality, equitable distribution of income, participation and pluralism for Turkey. SCO as a union of countries ruled by dictators and autocrats will not demand any of those criteria for joining.” Unlike the European Union, Shanghai members will not press Erdoğan to liberalize but will encourage the dictatorial tendencies in him that so many Turks already fear.

Third, the SCO fits his Islamist impulse to defy the West and to dream of an alternative to it. The SCO, with Russian and Chinese as official languages, has a deeply anti-Western DNA and its meetings bristle with anti-Western sentiments. For example, when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad addressed the group in 2011, no one refused his conspiracy theory about 9/11 being a U.S. government inside job used “as an excuse for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and for killing and wounding over a million people.”

Many backers echo Egyptian analyst Galal Nassar in his hope that ultimately the SCO “will have a chance of settling the international contest in its favor.” Conversely, as a Japanese official has noted, “The SCO is becoming a rival bloc to the U.S. alliance. It does not share our values.”

Turkish steps toward joining the Shanghai group highlights Ankara’s now-ambivalent membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, starkly symbolized by the unprecedented joint Turkish-Chinese air exercise of 2010. Given this reality, Erdoğan’s Turkey is no longer a trustworthy partner for the West but more like a mole in its inner sanctum. If not expelled, it should at least be suspended from NATO.

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum

Israel Hayom | On Obama’s Israel trip, ideas yes, demands no.

U.S. officials say no breakthroughs are expected during the president’s trip and reviving peace process in the near term is not seen as realistic • White House emphasizes that the president’s focus will be brokering a new beginning with Netanyahu.

Israel Hayom | Iran’s troubles in Syria.

Egyptian-Iranian relations and fears of Supreme Leader’s rule.

Thursday, 07 February 2013

The visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Egypt is the first of its kind since the two countries severed their diplomatic ties in 1979. (AFP)

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The visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Egypt is the first of its kind since the two countries severed their diplomatic ties in 1979. Relations soured even more after the Shah of Iran was buried in Egypt and after a street in Tehran was named after late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assassin Khaled el-Islambolli, who was later glorified in an Iranian documentary. Although Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi had said, when he was head of the Freedom and Justice Party, that he would not receive the Iranian chargé d’affaires in Cairo as long as the Iranian regime supported the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, he extended an invitation to him through Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi. The minister had visited Egypt in January to attend the Islamic Summit.

On January 23, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would visit Egypt on February 6-7 in response to an invitation extended to him by Mursi in order to attend the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit held in Cairo, Fars News Agency reported. The agency quoted Salehi as saying Iran is doing its best to establish strong ties with Egypt, especially as the two countries move forward.

Egyptians expressed a lot of reservations about the visit not only because of the Iranian regime’s foreign policy, but also owing to growing fears of an establishment modeled after the velayat-e faqih system. Fears are augmented as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood give themselves increasing power, such was obvious in the new constitution. Times magazine also published a story on January 20 about a meeting held between Qassem Suleimani, head of al-Quds Brigade in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and Essam Haddad, the presidential advisor for foreign affairs. The latter, however, denied the meeting and the magazine did not retract.

Several revolutionary figures in Egypt responded to Iranian attempts at bridging the gap between the two countries which started with statements issued by Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in praise of the January 25 revolution. Praise was echoed by their Syrian ally Bashar al-Assad before the his regime was threatened by the wave of revolt that swept the region. The uprising in Syria gave rise to a discourse that saw the Arab revolutions as the road to a new Sykes Picot agreement. In this context interaction between Egypt and Iran started to become more intensive and Egyptian popular delegations to Iran reached 18 between April and November 2011.

With the post-revolution economic crisis that hit Egypt and the controversy over the International Monetary Fund loan, the Egyptian ruling clique was not in favor of upsetting anti-Iranian Western powers or Egyptian factions concerned about Shiite infiltration, yet at the same time did not want to lose Iran’s support. But what could Iran, a country already suffering under the yoke of international sanctions and swept with protests against the deteriorating living standards and the collapse of the local currency, offer to a country like Egypt?

On February 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed his optimism about the visit. “The political geography of the region will undergo a major change if Egypt and Iran take a common stance on the Palestinian cause,” he was quoted as saying by Fars News Agency. The president stressed the importance of Egyptian-Iranian relations for the two countries as well as for the entire region. According to the Egyptian Middle East News Agency, Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi held a meeting with his Iranian counterpart at the airport in which they discussed the latest developments in the region and the means of resolving the Syrian crisis while avoiding military intervention. They also discussed enhancing ties between the two countries.

This wave of optimism started fading when al-Azhar’s grand imam called upon Iran to stop interfering in the affairs of Gulf countries. In this statement, al-Azhar’s grand imam called upon the Iranian president to respect the sovereignty of Bahrain and other countries, to treat Sunni minorities in Iran as first class citizens, and to issue a religious edict that prohibits insulting the prophet’s wife Aisha and his companions. The shock reached its peak when a Syrian man tried to assault Ahmadinejad on his way out of the al-Hussein Mosque in Old Cairo. Riot police had to interfere after dozens of Islamists rallied to protest the visit because of the Iranian president’s support for the Syrian regime.

Several similarities can be detected between the rhetoric of the Egyptian president and that of his Iranian counterpart even though the latter enjoys fewer powers compared to those of the country’s supreme leader. There are also organizational similarities between the two regimes, which were made clear with the recent emergence of semi-militias modeled after the Basij. In addition, a system of governance similar to that of velayat-e faqih is also being established in Egypt with the increasing growth of a religious authority that is supported by the constitution.

Even though the Turkish model seemed like the most likely to be applied in Egypt following the revolution, the Iranian model now seems more plausible with the dominance of Islamist factions, the marginalization of the army and the exclusion of civilian powers and minorities in drafting the new constitution. The developments in Egypt are also seen as similar to those that took place in Iran in 1979 when the revolution was rendered Islamic even though it was started by civilian factions. The two countries are also following the same tactics as far as crushing opposition is concerned and the assassination of Tunisian opposition figure Choukri Belaid stirred speculations about a possible scenario in Egypt, one similar to that which took place in Iran after the revolution.

At the external level, Egyptians are concerned about Iran’s role in supporting the Syrian regime, which is contradictory to the general sentiment in Egypt. Egyptians are also confused about their president’s ambivalence towards the Syrian revolution, for while he repeatedly declared solidarity with the Syrian people, he now seems to prefer adopting the Russian and Iranian approach of reaching a political resolution that avoids military intervention. The Egyptian regime is also not clear about Iranian intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries in the region like Lebanon and Iraq.

The tension between Iran and Gulf countries, whether in relation to the nuclear issue or the occupied Emirati islands, widens the gap between Iran and the Egyptian people who have strong ties with the Gulf, especially on the religious level.

The Salafi al-Nour Party was the most critical of Ahmadinejad’s visit among Islamist factions. The party’s statement pointed out the role Iran is playing in supporting Shiite militias in Iraq and Lebanon and in destabilizing the Gulf region and warned of the dangers of Shiite infiltration. The statement also stressed the necessity of stopping the injustices inflicted upon Sunnis in Syria and Iran.

On the other hand, the main opposition bloc, the National Salvation Front, did not issue any statements against the visit despite fears among civilian powers about the establishment of an Iranian model in Egypt. The front was also absent from the scene during the last aggression on Gaza and throughout the Syrian revolution in addition to its inability to coordinate with its counterparts in other post-revolution countries like Tunisia and Libya.

Ahmadinejad’s visit could have offered the front and all civilian powers an excellent opportunity to lash out at the totalitarian nature of the velayat-e faqih system and theocratic regimes and to establish a comparison between their members and those of the Iranian opposition as well as between minorities in Egypt and their counterparts in Iran.

This visit should encourage the front to reconsider its position and the same applies to all civilian powers and civil society organizations. All of those are in bad need of self-criticism in order to exert more effort on the ground instead of focusing on abstract stances.

Khamenei rejects US offer for fa… JPost – Iranian Threat – News.