For Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, more battle tanks and jet fighters are on their way from the United States.
Cairo’s military link to Washington has remained intact, meaning the U.S. will continue to modernize the biggest military in Africa — even as President Mohammed Morsi has decreed near-absolute power for himself and his supporters and opponents battle outside his palace.
Analysts say Egypt’s military buildup presents risks for Washington — and Israel — with the growing influence of the Brotherhood, whose overriding goal is to establish Shariah, or Islamic, law worldwide.
A Pentagon statement to The Washington Times on Thursday said: “We are always reviewing our foreign assistance to make sure foreign assistance advances U.S. objectives and is being used for the right purposes.”
Good grief! Morsi is grabbing dictatorial power for himself, Sharia Law is looming in Egypt, and the threat Egypt poses to Israel is growing. Yet, we are arming those that would seek Israel’s destruction, and ultimately ours too? Frank Gaffney shares my concern
“My principal concern with the Obama administration’s approach to Egypt is they seem oblivious to the fact it is now in the hands of a regime that is deeply hostile to the United States and certainly poses an immediate threat, I believe, to our friends in Israel,” said Mr. Gaffney, who runs the Center for Security Policy. “Under those circumstances, it is alarming that they are continuing to arm Egypt in a way that can only exacerbate the threat.”
Mr. Morsi, a Brotherhood leader before his election, relies on the global fraternity as a power base.
“There are two things that are troubling,” Mr. Gaffney said. “One is the sheer quantity of the weapons that these enemies of the United States have inherited, let alone those they will be getting if we continue to make arms sales with them. The second is the quality of these weapons.”
Gaffney is right. This will lead to no good, stupidity on this scale always does.
It seems like Egypt is once again descending into chaos with these violent clashes between Morsi’s supporters and his detractors. According to the report below, just last night’s clashes left 5 dead and 600 injured. The military has finally moved in and ordered people to leave the presidential palace area but they are supposed to return later.
YAHOO NEWS – The Egyptian army deployed tanks and gave both supporters and opponents of Mohammed Morsi a deadline to leave the area outside the presidential palace Thursday following fierce street battles that left five people dead and more than 600 injured in the worst outbreak of violence between the two sides since the Islamist leader’s election.
The intensity of the overnight violence, with Morsi’s Islamist backers and largely secular protesters lobbing firebombs and rocks at each other, signaled a possible turning point in the 2-week-old crisis over the president’s assumption of near-absolute powers and the hurried adoption of a draft constitution.
Opposition activists defiantly called for another protest outside the palace later Thursday, raising the specter of more bloodshed as neither side showed willingness to back down.
But the army’s Republican Guard, an elite unit assigned to protect the president and his palaces, gave protesters on both sides until 3 p.m. (1300 GMT, 8 a.m. EDT) to clear the vicinity, according to an official statement. The statement also announced a ban on protests outside any of the nation’s presidential palaces.
Here’s a video of some of the clashes. As the video opens you’ll see the Muslim Brotherhood offices in Cairo on fire as protesters are burning whatever they can of Morsi’s party:
The Muslim protests were planned back in August – before the film was ever released.
The protest in Cairo was organized by the terror group, Jamaa Islamiya. USA Today reported:
The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.
On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and “defend the prophet,” Trager said.
Zawahiri justified al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in an interview with Al Jazeera last month.
In watching the unfolding misunderstanding in the Middle East, I now fully understand the wise words initially issued that in part read,
“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”
My question is why won’t Christians in the United States show the restraint now being displayed by believers in the Middle East?
While I am personally God-fearing, I don’t belong to an organized religion in the United States that can range in size from the mom-and-pop to the small corporation. What does bother me are the thin skins of Christians worldwide who take to the streets in murderous hordes whenever anyone expressing free speech makes any kind of statement or gesture that offends their religious feelings.
We should all be inspired by the restraint shown by those in other religions whose tenants are under constant attack and ridicule and respond with kindness and prayer.
We should also condemn the acts of Christians, especially in the United States for their stiffening attempts to create a theocracy, where all are forced to become Christian and any attempt to flee that theocracy can be met with imprisonment or even violent death.
How dare we, for example, treat our women as second-class citizens under the name of Christianity. When are we, as a so-called civilized nation, going to end of oppression in the name of the Bible? In many countries around the world, women are free to pursue happiness in any way they choose, unlike here as we’re constantly reminded by our more enlightened progressives, where we continue a “war on women”.
Be sure to read the rest folks, it speaks volumes about how the Left and its sick obsession with “equality” never allows it to see the facts right in front of their faces.
And yet, on September 11th, our embassy is attacked by radical knuckle dragging Jihadist swine, andWE apologize?
A mob of protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound in Cairo and tore down its American flag on Tuesday, replacing it with a black flag commonly associated with Islamic terrorists.
The protesters were angered by a film that allegedly insults Muhammad, and attempted to raise a flag with the message “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger,”Reuters reports. Muhammad is the prophet of Islam.
Warning shots were fired, but no one was injured.
The Associated Press reports that no embassy personnel were inside the compound at the time. Tuesday was the eleventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed over 3,000 Americans.(SEE ALSO: U.S. negotiating $1B aid deal with Egypt)
The name of the offending film was not mentioned, but demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans and held up shredded pieces of the American flag.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statementthat it “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”
“Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy,” the statement read. “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”
Oh no! Not hurt feelings! Are you kidding me? Muslims cannot take having their egos bruised? They cannot be offended without resorting to violence? Cry me a river! Tell you what, how about this, the next time any embassy of ours is attacked, we shoot dead every SOB attacking it, pull our people out, close the embassy, and leave a sign readingDO NOT MAKE US COME BACK! Instead we act like cowards? Good freaking grief!
Look, this is not complicated at all. If I offend someone, and I surely offend many every day on this blog, and they attack me physically for that offense, I do not owe them anything. Well, except for an ass whipping.
In a related post, RS McCain has a great post up about this. I think McCain AND his son, who is joining the Army, understand what I mean! And God bless a protect Bob McCain!
The other day I asked my wife where our 19-year-old son Bob was.
The answer: Hiking up a mountain with an 85-pound pack.
He recently enlisted in the Army, having scored a near-maximum on the ASVAB test, and will report to boot camp in a few months — some kind of delayed-entry deal — as an aspiring candidate for the elite Special Forces. Already a Red Cross certified lifeguard, he is so fired-up that he’s voluntarily doing PT (physical training) in advance, which is why he hiked up the mountain with an 85-pound pack.
Because he is preparing to kill our nation’s enemies.
My wife is concerned for our son’s safety. No, dear — let our nation’s enemies worry about their own safety. Because he’s coming to kill them.
Egyptian protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy on Tuesday, tore down the American flag and burned it during a protest over what they said was a film being produced in the United States that insulted Prophet Mohammad. . . . Once the U.S. flag was hauled down, some protesters tore it up and showed off pieces to television cameras. Others burned the remains outside the fortress-like embassy building in central Cairo. . . . “This movie must be banned immediately and an apology should be made,” said 19-year-old Ismail Mahmoud, a member of the so-called “ultras” soccer supporters who played a big role in the uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak last year.
Hey, Ismail: Do you think this flag-burning stuff is smart? You want to turn this into war? You want my son to come kill you?
I don’t know anything about this movie you and your “ultra” mob are all excited about, Ismail, but attacking a U.S. embassy isn’t the kind of thing that Americans take lightly, no matter what gutless apologies you get from the pussies at the State Department. And the same goes for that mob of violent savages in Benghazi:
Gunmen and security forces clashed at the U.S. consulate office in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on Tuesday as the armed group protested over a film being produced in the United States, a security official said. . . . “There are fierce clashes between the Libyan army and an armed militia outside the U.S. consulate,” Abdel-Monen Al-Hurr, spokesman for Libya’s Supreme Security Committee, said. “The U.S. consulate’s security guards inside the building fired at the militia as it was trying to enter and attack it.”
See, I’ve got skin in the game, so to speak, and this is what enrages me about the folly of appeasement, which only invites such attacks.
Go read it all! I think RS McCain might agree with me that we need to fire whomever apologized, and do as Generals Stonewall Jackson or George S Patton might do
Annihilate these savages. Hunt them down and kill them, and kill any of those other vicious fanatical bastards who try to stop us.
The Left loves to laud the greatness and wonder of the “International Community”. Myself, I think the opinion of the so-called IC is about as worthless as tits on a boar. Rick, at Wizbang takes note of the IC’s Selective Outrage Syndrome over Israel daring to defend itself.
TWELVE Christian were murdered in Egypt. Two hundred and thirty-two people wounded. The death toll will surely rise as victims succumb to their injuries. And that’s just in the past few days. In the same time period, more Christians were killed in Egypt at the hands of Muslims than people killed in Syria or in Libya as a result of protests, riots and resistance.
Two churches in Cairo were burned in recent days. Over the past few months church property has being gutted, vandalised and violated with graffiti. Churches have been blown up.
An entire community – the Christian community in the new Egypt – is under attack. And the world remains relatively silent. There has been no significant religious outcry, political redress or diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks. There has been almost no media coverage as Egypt’s Muslims systematically, over the past few months, set about massacring Egypt’s Christians.
The world is not only standing idly by, it is enabling the massacre. The US naively expects that a new era, begun in new Egypt, will ripple to the rest of the Islamic world. So in the midst of these monstrous mass murders in Egypt, the US has decided to send an extra $US1 billion to help the Egyptians ease the economic crisis that emerged as a result of the ousting of Hosni Mubarak on February 11. Muslims in Egypt are on the warpath – on the religious warpath – and the US is feeding them money.
See how the mind of the far left works, or does not work, I might say. Israel is attacked, defends itself, and the Left and their beloved IC, is outraged. Muslims slaughtering Christians for merely being Christian? No biggie! You seem the Left loves to speak of “equality”, but clearly, to them certain people, and certain religions, are more equal than others.
Several thousand supporters of President Hosni Mubarak, including some riding horses and camels and wielding whips, attacked anti-government protesters Wednesday as Egypt’s upheaval took a dangerous new turn. In chaotic scenes, the two sides pelted each other with stones, and protesters dragged attackers off their horses.
The turmoil was the first significant violence between supporters of the two camps in more than a week of anti-government protests. It erupted after Mubarak went on national television the night before and rejected demands he step down immediately and said he would serve out the remaining seven months of his term.
Wednesday morning, a military spokesman appeared on state TV Wednesday and asked the protesters to disperse so life in Egypt could get back to normal. The announcement could mark a major turn in the attitude of the army, which for the past two days has allowed protests to swell, reaching their largest size yet on Tuesday when a quarter-million peace packed into Cairo’s central Tahrir Square.
Nearly 10,000 protesters massed again in Tahrir on Wednesday morning, rejecting Mubarak’s speech as too little too late and renewed their demands he leave immediately.
In the early afternoon Wednesday, an Associated Press reporter saw around 3,000 Mubarak supporters break through a human chain of anti-government protesters trying to defend thousands gathered in Tahrir.
Chaos erupted as they tore down banners denouncing the president. Fistfights broke out as they advanced across the massive square in the heart of the capital. The anti-government protesters grabbed Mubarak posters from the hands of the supporters and ripped them.
The two sides began hurling stones and bottles and sticks at each other, chasing each other as the protesters’ human chains moved back to try to shield the larger mass of demonstrators at the plaza’s center.
At one point, a small contingent of pro-Mubarak forces on horseback and camels rushed into the anti-Mubarak crowds, swinging whips and sticks to beat people. Protesters retaliated, dragging some from their mounts, throwing them to the ground and beating their faces bloody.
Protesters were seen running with their shirts or faces bloodied, some men and women in the crowd were weeping. A scent of tear gas wafted over the area, but it was not clear who had fired it.
The army troops who have been guarding the square had been keeping the two sides apart earlier in the day, but when the clashes erupted they did not intervene. Most took shelter behind or inside the armored vehicles and tanks stationed at the entrances to Tahrir.
Fox News has reporters on the ground, as well as analysts, who believe it’s a strong possibility Mubarak and his underlings are the ones arranging the pro-government, pro-Mubarak protests.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators swarmed central Cairo on Saturday in the largest demonstration yet against the rule of the country’s longtime autocratic leader, President Hosni Mubarak. The crowd went unchallenged by troops, who, in extraordinary scenes unfolding around the capital’s central Tahrir Square, smiled and shook hands with protesters and invited them up onto their tanks.
As a 4 p.m. curfew came and went, the square – which police had kept off-limits on Friday – was filled with people as far as the eye could see. The police seemed to have disappeared from the streets following vicious clashes the day before. The army had been hailed on the streets as a potential savior, with protesters giving soldiers thumbs up and openly imploring them to join their movement.
On Friday, the troops had appeared steadfastly neutral. Late Saturday, however, they were doing nothing to move demonstrators out of the streets, despite an earlier announcement by security services that anyone remaining in central squares or major roadways after 4 p.m. would face arrest.
Asked if they would enforce the curfew, soldiers said they would not.
“We are with the people,” said Ahmed, a 20-year-old conscript.
Soldiers accepted fruit, water and soda handed out by protesters in Tahrir Square and smiled as protesters chanted, “Go, Mubarak, go!” Children were hoisted up on tanks in the middle of the square to have their photos taken with troops as the hulking remains of the National Democratic Party headquarters building, home to Mubarak’s ruling organization, burned in the background.
“These soldiers are Egyptians, too. They are suffering just like we are,” said Khalid Ezz el-Din, a 50-year-old businessman who had come to the square to demand Mubarak step down.
Shortly afterward, a convoy of tanks rolled into the square, with as many as 20 protesters riding on each one. As the soldiers smiled and flashed peace signs, the protesters shouted “We are one!” and “Down with Mubarak!”
Earlier Saturday, there had been widespread looting in some neighborhoods of the capital – including the city’s upscale shopping district and the well-to-do suburbs. Government authorities blamed protesters run amok. But demonstrators claimed the destruction was perpetrated by plainclothes employees of the ruling National Democratic Party bent on sowing chaos to discredit the burgeoning pro-democracy campaign.
“We haven’t even broken a lamp,” said Mohammed Yahya, 23, a student protester. “All of this chaos is caused by the government, so they distort our image.”
In addition to waving banners reading, “Down with Mubarak,” protesters displayed new placards Saturday that read, “No looting.”
Aside from the army, there were few signs of government presence in the streets Saturday, although scattered loyalists remained. On one busy downtown street, a Mubarak supporter dressed in a finely tailored suit attempted to wipe away anti-government graffiti that had been sprayed on the burned-out carcass of an armored personnel carrier.
The capital had descended into near-anarchy Friday night, as the government sent riot police, and then the army, to quell protests by tens of thousands of demonstrators.
“We’re not going to stop until Mubarak leaves Egypt. We won’t accept anything less,” said Dalia Fou-ad, 29, who said she had participated in this week’s protests and would continue to do so.
Fou-ad and other demonstrators angrily dismissed as insufficient Mubarak’s after-midnight speech Saturday. In the nationally televised address, the president – who had not spoken publicly since the protests began Tuesday – announced he would dismiss his cabinet, but gave no hint that he intends to yield to protesters’ demand that he give up office. Egyptian state television said the cabinet officially resigned Saturday.
President Obama said a short time after Mubarak’s speech that he had talked with the Egyptian leader after he spoke and pressed him to make long-promised reforms. “What is needed are concrete steps to advance the rights of the Egyptian people,” Obama said.
News services, citing unnamed Egyptian officials, reported Saturday that 30 to 35 people, including 10 policemen, were killed in the week’s protests and that medical officals said 2,000 people had been injured. However, the casualty figures were impossible to verify.
Cellphone service was restored Saturday morning, 24 hours after a government-ordered communications blackout aimed at stopping Friday’s protests. Internet access remained blocked.
Smoke billowed Saturday from the hulking remains of the National Democratic Party headquarters building, home to Mubarak’s ruling organization. The building – a prominent symbol of 82-year-old Mubarak’s autocratic 30-year rule – was reduced to little more than a smoldering mound of concrete.
It remained unclear what role the Egyptian military might play. Mubarak, a former air force officer, draws much of his strength from the military, and any decision by the armed forces to withdraw support would mean the certain end of his rule.
But unlike the police, which unleashed an arsenal of weapons against the demonstrators, the military did not take any immediate action, and protesters gleefully welcomed the soldiers’ arrival in a thundering of personnel carriers.
Protesters were honking their horns in celebration and roaming freely through central parts of the city late in the evening, in defiance of a strict curfew. The night air was thick with black smoke, and the sounds of explosions, gunshots, sirens, cries and occasional cheers echoed through the darkness.
Y’all know who you are, and as I have said before you are wrong, yes far too many Muslims engage in, or supoport, or condone Jihadism, but certainly not all
Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.
“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.
Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.
“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”
darcprynce
Dave C
Gatordoug
