WarSclerotic

Egypt’s Morsi ordered held over Hamas contacts | The Times of Israel.

( Really?  The head of MB held in Egypt over contacts with Israel’s primary Palestinian enemy?  That’s unbelievable!  “SHHhhhhh……” –  JW )

Hours before rival protests, interim rulers in Cairo announce investigation into 2011 jailbreak by Islamists

Supporter of Egypt’s ousted president Mohammed Morsi in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday, July 25, 2013. (photo credit: AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

CAIRO (AP) — An investigating judge has ordered the detention of Egypt’s ousted president over alleged contacts with Hamas to help in his escape from prison in 2011, the official state news agency reported Friday in the first official word on his status since a military coup on July 3.

The MENA news agency said Mohammed Morsi has been detained for 15 days for investigation into the charges. His detention can be extended as the inquiry continues. The news agency indicated that Morsi has already been interrogated.

The news of Morsi’s detention comes hours before pro- and anti-Morsi camps are expected to large rival protests in Egypt and may inflame already tense streets.

The case concerns the mass jailbreak of dozens of Muslim Brotherhood leaders during the popular uprising in 2011 that toppled Morsi’s predecessor, President Hosni Mubarak. There have been many reports in Egyptian media that the Brotherhood collaborated with Hamas, its Palestinian wing, and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon to arrange the breakout.

Muslim Brotherhood officials have said they were aided by local residents in breaking out of prison, not foreigners.

Egypt’s military has been holding Morsi in an undisclosed location since deposing him on July 3.

The MENA report said Morsi is being investigated over allegations of collaborating with Hamas “to carry out anti-state acts, attacking police stations, army officers and storming prisons, setting fire to one prison and enabling inmates to flee, including himself, as well as premeditated killing of officers , soldiers and prisoners.”

On Thursday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on Egypt’s interim rulers to release Morsi and other members of the Muslim Brotherhood or “have their cases reviewed transparently without delay.”

In a statement Thursday, Ban urged “the interim authorities to end arbitrary arrests and other reported forms of harassment.”

Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who ousted Morsi, took many by surprise when he announced this week that he wanted people to take to the streets in large numbers on Friday to give him a popular mandate to take the necessary measures against “violence and terrorism.”

El-Sissi’s call was widely interpreted as a prelude to a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group from which Morsi hails, and other Islamists who have been camped out for about a month at sit-ins in Cairo and elsewhere calling for Morsi’s reinstatement.

That has hiked fears of a violent confrontation. Islamists also plan pro-Morsi rallies on Friday, raising the possibility of street clashes, as has happened repeatedly in recent weeks.

Islamists on Thursday lashed out at the military, saying el-Sissi’s call signals a plan to crush what they insist are their peaceful protests. The spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, hiked up his rhetoric against el-Sissi, saying ousting Morsi was a worse crime than if the general had destroyed the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site — an attempt to fire up the religious fervor in the pro-Morsi camp ahead of Friday’s rallies.

On the other side, state TV and pro-military private networks were doing their part to back el-Sissi: They announced that the wildly popular mini-series shown during the current holy month of Ramadan will not be aired Friday to ensure that large numbers go out onto the streets. Some of them were airing patriotic songs.

Late Thursday the White House said it would continue to avoid calling Morsi’s overthrow a coup, in order to keep sending $1.5 billion in aid to the country, seen as a stabilizing force in the region.

‘Ya’alon orders freeze in permits for EU projects in West Bank’ | JPost | Israel News.

Barred from Rouhani inaugural, Israel ‘not taking it personally’ | The Times of Israel.

Tehran’s annoucement that Zionist regime not invited to see new president installed is ‘a little pathetic,’ official says

Iran’s president-elect Hasan Rouhani at a press conference, in Tehran on June 17, 2013. (photo credit: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)

Officials in Jerusalem were unruffled by Iran’s announcement this week that Israel is not being invited to the inauguration of president-elect Hasan Rouhani.

“We’re not taking it personally,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Paul Hirschson told The Times of Israel Thursday. “What is perhaps a little pathetic is that the Iranians felt the need to tell the whole world that they won’t be tainted by our presence. That says more about them than about us.”

On Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi blithely declared that Tehran had invited leaders of all countries to the August 4 event, except those of the United States and Israel.

“For the first time after [the] Islamic Revolution victory it is decided to invite foreign officials for the ceremony,” Araqchi said, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency. “We have invited all. The letter of invitation includes all countries, except the US and [the] Zionist regime [because] we do not recognize the latter as a country.”

Diplomatic ties between Jerusalem and Tehran ended formally after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, “so it’s not really a surprise that they’re not inviting us to official events in Iran,” Hirschson said. “At some point in the future we will have diplomatic relations again, and then we will invite them and they will invite us.”

Yigal Palmor, anotherForeign Ministry spokesman, said, “If we can’t go to Iran, we will bring Iranians over here.” He was apparently referring to the visit earlier this month of prominent Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who attended the Jerusalem Film Festival.

Still, the US and Israel won’t be the only nations missing Rouhani’s inauguration. According to the Guardian newspaper, Great Britain will not send any official representation to the event due to the European Union position that only Tehran-based diplomats attend. The British embassy in Iran has been closed since November 2011, when demonstrators stormed and vandalized the building to protest sanctions London had imposed on the regime.

However, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said last week that London is “ready to improve our relations on a step-by-step basis” if Tehran showed goodwill in the nuclear question.

The US cut all relations with Iran in 1980, as a direct result of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, during which Islamists held more than 50 Americans for 444 days in the embassy building. Last year, Canada followed suit and cut diplomatic relations with Tehran.

Meanwhile, Israeli leaders continue to call for an escalation of sanctions against Iran.

“Iran must stop all enrichment. It must remove all the enriched nuclear material from its territory. It must shut down the illicit nuclear facility in Qom. And all work on plutonium production must cease,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday in Jerusalem. “I believe, Mr. Minister, that the pressure on Iran must increase because that’s the only way we’ll see a real change in Iran’s behavior.”

Also on Wednesday, International Relations and Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz met with Hague in London, telling the British foreign secretary that Rouhani “is laughing all the way to the bomb.” The only way to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is to increase sanctions and combine them with “a substantial military threat.”

Israeli official: Turkey looking to humiliate Israel, not reconcile with it | JPost | Israel News.

The morbid reality of Arab civil war – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

Hisham Melhem

In the last few weeks and months I have engaged in a daily morning morbid ritual; reviewing the harvest of blood by compiling the number of victims of the Arab civil war raging in Syria and Iraq with its occasional visits to Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. The statistics are frightening: more than 5000 people a month are being killed in Syria. More than 450 people were killed this month in Iraq. In Egypt more than 150 people were killed in the political violence that followed the June 30 overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi. In Lebanon more than 50 people were killed last month.

In Iraq, Syria and Egypt a virulent, atavistic strain of terrorists in the mold of Al-Qaeda are waging a savage war on everything modern, civil and moderate.

The new Arab civil war has pushed the Arabs on the trail of a long journey into the night, where there is no dawn in sight.

 

Hisham Melhem

In Syria state institutions are fraying, society is fragmenting and the continuation of the fighting means that Syria could reach a state of ‘soft partition’ where its sectarian and ethnic components will continue their existential struggle for a long time. In Iraq the security situation has relapsed to the previous hell of 2006 and 2007 and the country is slouching on the road to sectarian and ethnic partition. In Egypt large swaths of Sinai are not under the control of the government and the political and religious polarizations have reached unprecedented levels; with each group demonizing their opponents with astonishing zeal.

Arab cold war turns hot

In 1965 the distinguished academic Malcolm Kerr (born, raised and assassinated in Beirut) published a short classic study titled The Arab Cold War: Gamal Abd al-Nasir and his rivals where he analyzed the state of inter-Arab relations in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s , particularly the interplay of political/ideological rivalries for the leadership of the Arab world between the camp of ’progressive’ Arab nationalists led by Egypt and the camp of conservative Arab monarchies led by Saudi Arabia and the personalities dominating that period, particularly that of president Nasser of Egypt. In subsequent editions Kerr carried the saga until Nasser’s death in 1970. This Arab cold war was a subtext of the wider cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In this Arab cold war the competition was among states and it was waged on the political/ideological plain and was not based on sectarian or religious basis. Yet, there was a military dimension to this war where the competitors opted to fight each other by proxy in the limited hot conflicts that occurred in Lebanon, Jordan and particularly Yemen. The role of the major non-Arab regional players; Iran, Turkey and Israel in the Arab cold war was very limited. In the current bloody Arab civil war we see a more assertive Turkey and Iran competing vociferously to shape the future of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and even Egypt. There is a harsh geo-political reality that drives many Arabs into a state of denial: Eastern Arabs live in the shadow of their non-Arab neighbors.

In the various theaters of the Arab civil war of today, we see some Arab states in addition to Iran, Turkey (and occasionally Israel), along with radical Islamists, providing arms, material and men, and playing an active role in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts which have morphed recently into one civil war fought on a wider front including Lebanon. What makes this civil war especially dangerous and likely to rage for a long time, is the fact that it began in the wake of the Arab uprisings and after a tremendous and popular mobilization that did not exist before. In this new environment, populism, which is always worrisome, became more deadly when it was infected with the raw and primitive strain of sectarianism that almost demolished the political boundaries of the supposed sovereign states of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

The new Arab civil war has pushed the Arabs on the trail of a long journey into the night, where there is no dawn in sight. Some see this as the inevitable birth pangs of a new political order characteristics of transitional periods. There is no doubt that the best description of the complexities and pains of transitional periods was the one given by the brilliant Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Morbid indeed.

______________
Hisham Melhem is the Washington bureau chief of Al Arabiya. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. Melhem’s writings appear in publications ranging from the literary journal Al-Mawaqef to the LA Times, as well as in magazines such as Foreign Policy and Middle East Report. Melhem focuses on U.S.-Arab relations, political Islam, Arab-Israeli issues, media in the Arab World, Arab images in American media. In addition, Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. Twitter: @Hisham_Melhem

Gaza authorities shut down Al Arabiya office – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

Official: Egypt army gives Brotherhood 48 hours to join roadmap – Alarabiya.net English | Front Page.

Defying US warnings of civil war, Egyptian military to crack down on armed protest and mounting terrorism.

Egyptian Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisis addresses the nation

Braving Washington’s warning of civil strife, Egyptian Defense Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi is not backing away from his resolve to quickly crack down, even by military force, on armed protesters using live bullets on city streets and generating chaos, on Salafist terror in Sinai coupled with a Muslim Brotherhood uprising, and on their Palestinian Hamas collaborators in the Gaza Strip. This is reported by debkafile‘s sources in Cairo.

When the Obama administration warned Gen. El-Sisi that his actions could generate bloodshed leading to an outbreak of civil war, the Egyptian leader replied that military inaction was the more dangerous course, because terrorism and live fire in protest demonstrations must be controlled forthwith before they too degenerated into civil warfare.
After failing to win the Egyptian defense minister around to its view, Washington announced it was suspending the delivery to the Egyptian air force of four American F-16 fighter planes, as a mark of the administration’s displeasure with the military leader’s approach. He showed no signs of being put off his plans.
Wednesday, July 24, after a week of surging opposition violence and attacks on Egyptian military positions in Sinai, Gen. El-Sisi’s turned to the Egyptian people in a television speech: “I urge the people to take to the streets this coming Friday to prove their will and give me, the army and police a mandate to confront possible violence and terrorism.”

In the past week, debkafile‘s military sources report, tens of thousands of Muslim Brotherhood protesters continued to fill the streets of Egypt’s main cities, demonstrating against the interim government and the military and demanding the reinstatement of ousted president Mohammed Morsi. Some groups have begun closing off entire city blocks, declaring them independently-ruled entities. These enclaves have been fortified with sandbag barriers and sentries posted to check the documents of people going in and out. Entry is barred to those suspected of collaborating with the army and security forces.
Large photos of Morsi are draped over buildings along with banners of injunctions to obey no authority other than that of the elected president.
The generals fear that these “independent closed enclaves” could become the nuclei of a full-scale revolt which if not curbed in time could run out of control.
They are increasingly concerned by the spreading use of firearms by Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators against their opponents in Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura, Port Said and Ismailia.
An outright terrorist incident seen as an ill omen of Iraq-style tactics to come occurred in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura, 45 kilometers north of Cairo, Wednesday, when a bomb tossed from a passing car killed one person and injured seventeen. The Egyptian general staff believes that terrorist tactics may be filtering into the cities from Sinai.
debkafile‘s sources say that El-Sisi’s call for a mass demonstration of government supporters on Friday portends their first large-scale clash with Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators who will no doubt turn out in force. The army and police would intervene only after the confrontation begins. This tactic carries a high risk of becoming the match which ignite civil war in Egypt.
In Sinai, the Muslim Brotherhood is activating the machinery for an armed uprising in collusion with Salafits linked to al Qaeda and the Palestinian Hamas by means of escalating attacks on Egyptian military and security targets.

In a meeting on Thursday July 25 at the Egyptian General Staff headquarters, Gen. Ahmed Wasfi, commander of the Second Army, and Gen. Osama Askar, commander of the Third Army, who are leading counter-terror operations in Sinai and against the Gaza Strip, reported that they expect to report the success of their campaign by the middle of next week.
debkafile‘s military sources cannot confirm that the Egyptian military campaign has made any advances in the field.

Syria: disillusioned rebels drift back to take Assad amnesty – Telegraph.

( If true, it’s too late for the West to make a difference. – JW )

Hundreds of men who took up arms against President Bashar al-Assad are defecting back to the government side, The Telegraph has learnt.

A member of the Free Syrian Army aims his weapon as fellow fighters stand behind him in Deir al-Zor  Photo: REUTERS

Obama halts delivery of four F-16 jets to Egypt amid unrest – World News.

( Moslem Brotherhood?  No problem.  Government of the people?  That could be a problem… – JW )

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has delayed the delivery of four U.S. F-16 fighter jets to Egypt because of the country’s political unrest, officials said Wednesday – reversing earlier assurances from the Pentagon.

Pentagon spokesman George Little said the U.S. no longer believes it is “appropriate to move forward with the delivery” of the jets.

The announcement contradicted statements two weeks ago by Pentagon officials that the U.S. would continue to send the jets as part of a large arms package.

Washington’s annual $1.5 billion aid to Egypt has been under the spotlight since the July 3 ousting of elected President Mohammed Morsi by the country’s military.

The army has installed an interim government and says it will seek fresh elections, but supporters of Morsi – including regional allies such as Turkey – have denounced the move as a coup.

U.S. law requires that aid be cut off to a country that undergoes a military coup, but Western leaders have stopped short of declaring the July 3 transition as such.

Egypt is the second-largest recipient of USAID support, after Israel. Almost all of it comes in the form of military funding that is mandated to be spent with U.S. defense companies. In 2011, a Cornell economist estimated that U.S. aid made up one-third of Egypt’s broader military budget, the Washington Post noted.

Little said Obama made the decision to delay the delivery “with the unanimous consent” of his national security team.

He would not elaborate on what had happened in Egypt to change the administration’s mind over the delivery, saying the decision was based on “the dynamics on the ground in Egypt,” which he described as “a fluid situation.”

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called Egypt’s military chief Gen. Abdel Fatah el-Sissi  earlier Wednesday to inform him of the decision.

Little said the call “lasted quite a long time” and that the pair discussed Sissi’s speech urging mass demonstrations.

Little refused to say whether the U.S. now believes the situation in Egypt represents a military coup.

The jets were supposed to be delivered to Egypt by the end of the month. They are part of a package to provide 20 F-16s to Egypt over the course of the year. Eight jets have already been delivered.

Egypt already has more than 200 F-16s. The order was placed more than two years ago when President Hosni Mubarak was still in office.

NBC News’ Alastair Jamieson contributed to this report.