Islamists are targeting Egypt

By Ted Belman

David Warren is a conservative Canadian Journalist, second only to another great Canadian journalist, Mark Steyn.

Like everyone else he has a vital interest in American foreign policy. Here is his score card. The ultimate Islamist victory is the successful Invasion of Egypt.

[..] We (the U.S. and allies) are winning in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and losing everywhere else. The Syrians are now murdering independent Lebanese politicians with impunity. The pressure on Iran has been relieved. Pakistan is teetering towards a civil and military collapse from which only the Islamists can gain. Islamist demands for the imposition of Shariah, and for the legal persecution of religious minorities, have entered the mainstream of political life in countries that were once free of religious zealotry — Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Islamist terrorists are winning effective control over the remoter Muslim-settled regions in many countries of Asia and Africa, creating streams of Christian refugees from the southern Philippines, of Buddhist refugees from southern Thailand, of Christians and Animists fleeing south across the breadth of Africa.

Saudi-sponsored Wahabi Islam is consolidating its hold over the mosques of the West, and radicalizing the huge Muslim immigrant communities that have congregated in almost every major European city. Across Europe, and increasingly in North America (and as we’ve seen in Canada in the obscene “human rights” trials of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant), the most radical Muslims are exploiting state multiculturalism, to score victories over free speech and win pathetic apologies from anyone accused of the thought crime of “Islamophobia.”

Islam is a broad and ancient religion — we are not discussing that, today. We are discussing instead the contemporary reality. For internationally, Islam has been morphing into a violent and puritanical cult. Yet this very large and very hard fact is being rendered undiscussable, in historical or any other terms.

While President Bush was throwing money into a recession in Washington, unprecedented Islamist demonstrations were erupting across Egypt, almost unreported in our media. As I was beginning to explain in my Saturday column, Witless in Gaza, it is not generally appreciated that Hamas, which controls Gaza, is of Egyptian descent. It is an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose own origins were Cairene. In effect, the Muslim Brotherhood have established their own sovereign beachhead in Gaza. And by the brilliant stroke of blowing down the wall at the Egyptian border, they have now invaded Egypt proper.

Among the slogans being shouted in Egypt’s streets: “Arm us, train us, send us to Gaza!” And, “O rulers of Muslims! Where is your honour, where is your religion?” And, “We will take to the streets, even if we are all tried in military courts!”

The rhetorical target is Israel. The actual target is the “moderate” Egyptian government, and the response to these rallies, from the authorities, and from Egypt’s formerly-articulate “middle class,” is panic. The great majority of Egyptians may well want nothing to do with the conversion of their country into another Iran, but dare I say, they will not be consulted. In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

The Bush administration’s lame duck strategy for dealing with this, is to refer back to the “roadmap to peace,” and increase pressure on Israel to surrender “occupied territory.”

The formerly “occupied territory” of Gaza has already been fully surrendered, to Hamas. What was gained?

Whatever is surrendered to these people increases their power. There is one and only one possible strategy for resisting the advance of radical Islam — and I mean, “Islamism,” not conventional Islam. And that is to confront it, and destroy it, wherever it appears. The most disastrous possible policy is to appease it.

And don’t miss his other article

Witless in Gaza

The biggest spectacle of the week, was the “breakout” from Gaza of several hundred thousand Palestinians, after Hamas agents took out much of the high wall that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt, in a series of explosions after months of undermining the structure with acetylene torches and similar labour-intensive tools.

The media accounts of this event were incoherent, and understandably so. For even people in the Bush administration were puzzled, and I found myself being asked if I could explain it to more than one of them. When the people who supposedly control the CIA and the State Department are reduced to asking armchair journalists to explain breaking news, well: the world is in a fine state, isn’t it?

My first comment, at least to them, had to be: “So why did you fire all your neoconservatives?”

This is the abusive term the “liberal” media used to describe a small group of invariably Jewish intellectuals who played advisory roles in the Pentagon and White House during President Bush’s first term. They were very American Jews, incidentally, not Israelis — but we’ll concede they were naturally disposed to the survival of the tiny nation that holds a significant portion of the world’s Jewish population. It is an interest that coincides with America’s desire to survive, and the significance of these “neocons” was, that they could speak Arabic, Turkish, Persian. They knew the region intimately, and a large part of their function, at senior levels of the U.S. government, was to explain nuances of foreign language and thinking to people who speak only English, if that.

I am thinking of one in particular, who once briefed the White House on the nature of Gaza’s population. The word “Palestinian” is used to describe them for reasons of political correctness, but among the first things to know is that the Strip was part of Egypt prior to 1967, and to this day, the Arabic spoken there is closer to Cairo’s than to Jerusalem’s. Between those people, and the “Palestinians” autochthonous to the West Bank (who were Jordanians, prior to 1967), are many differences in style and outlook. To call them “one people” is misleading.

What these two “Palestinian” peoples have in common, is political radicalization. Verily, there was one thing the Israelis did wrong, when they were stuck with the “occupation” of both territories, after the Six Day War. They failed to inculcate self-government on a modern Western model. It is too late for that, now, and both territories will remain, for the foreseeable future, in the grip of murderous political and religious fanatics, styled “Fatah” (West Bank culture) and “Hamas” (Gaza culture), competing to attack Israel in the moments when they are not attacking each other.

The antecedents of Hamas are the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and there should be no illusions about them. The Egyptians themselves know what they are dealing with, and that is why the Egyptian government was maintaining a wall between Gaza and current Egyptian territory even more formidable than the wall Israel maintains. For Gaza has become a cancer that threatens the domestic peace of Egypt more than Israel — whereinto Hamas merely lobs Kassam missiles.

More things to know. There has been, recently, no “Israeli blockade,” such as has been mentioned ad nauseam in the media. Israel and Egypt conduct more or less the same policies in managing the border, and both are happy to let goods and services — other than weapons — into Gaza. Neither is eager to let anyone or anything out, for obvious reasons.

Take for example the endless media reports of poor Gaza Palestinians suffering from power shortages. Most of the electricity for the territory is supplied from Israel, from a single generating plant in Ashkelon. This has continued to flow, under contractual arrangements, while alas demand has been outstripping supply on the Gaza side. Israel herself has power-supply problems, and one of them is that Hamas continues to fire Kassams daily towards Ashkelon.

Let me parse that out. Israelis working in the Ashkelon power plant routinely risk their lives, to supply electricity to Gaza.

Hamas blew up the wall with Egypt, quite obviously, to facilitate major weapons shipments, and abet devilry in Egypt itself. (Never forget the Muslim Brotherhood connexion.) The masses who then availed themselves of the openings in the wall, went shopping. Much of this was, in effect, a duty-free binge, for things like cigarettes, which are taxed much higher on the Gaza side, both formally, and informally through racketeering — the way everything else is “managed” by Hamas. Israel has nothing to do with that.

David Warren