Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

While Egypt Burns
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily NewsThe Balfour Post - Sarah Stearn
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

“What happened in Egypt yesterday (June 3, 2013) was not a military coup. It was the army listening to the voice of millions and millions of Egyptians on the street. Many people seem to confuse one election with a democracy. One election does not a democracy make.We have to remember that Hitler and Hamas control of Gaza, let alone Ahmadinejad and Chavez also came into power though a process of elections.

On this cherished date, in particular, we have got to stop and reflect upon what a democracy truly means. It means freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, a free and independent judiciary, the right to petition the government, a separation of powers, and the rights of minorities. The radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood regime, dominated by Shariah law, had none of those checks and balances or religious freedoms.

At this time, while the real enemy that threatens to destroy Western civilization, as we know it, in our day, is radical Islam. This constitutes no less a threat than Nazism or Communism constituted in our parents’ generation.  We must never confuse a radical Islamist government with a democracy, no matter how it came into power.””Nero Fiddled While Rome Burned”Egypt is in flames. This vast nation of nearly 90 million people is convulsing.  The people are highly polarized, angry and malnourished. This is a nation in which America has invested over $50 billion of our national treasure, since 1979.  Egypt is a nation that is being strangled by economic mismanagement. The price of basic food items like fava beans and any other form of protein has risen astronomically, while most of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

Yet, most of the American foreign aid money is spent on the military.This is a nation whose Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi sentenced 43 NGO’s, including 16 Americans, to jail terms for crimes against the state this past April. This is a nation in which one American, Robert Becker, of the National Democratic Institute, was sentenced to 2 years in prison, and forced to flee Egypt, because of the crime of trying to help build the institutions of a democracy. This is a nation which raided the offices of Freedom House and the International Republican Institute, forcing their workers to flee for their very lives.This is a nation whose Coptic Christian minority of 8 million, along with the other religious minority groups have faced unprecedented abuse, killings, torture, discrimination and fear, since Mohamed Morsi’s assumed office in June of 2012.What many people might not be aware of is that there have been many efforts by members of Congress to end, alter or condition the aid to Egypt in an effort to promote democracy building, human rights and respect for the rule of law.

These include efforts by Senator Rand Paul,(R-KY), where as recently as today, he took to the floor of the Senate demanding to cease the $1.3 billion we give to Egypt a year, due to the despotic nature of the Muslim Brotherhood government.In addition to Senator Paul, Senators Marco Rubio, John McCain, and James Inhofe, have also introduced legislation to cease or condition Egypt Aid. In the House, similar legislation has been introduced by Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Vern Buchanan, Austin Scott, and Paul Gosar.Yet, Secretary of State Kerry, very quietly and behind closed doors in May of 2013 waived all Congressional conditions on aid to Egypt.This violates Public Law 112-74, which clearly spells out that in order to obtain American funding the Secretary of State must certify that, not only is Egypt honoring its peace treaty with Israel, but that it is “supporting the transition to civilian government, including holding, free and fair elections, implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association, religion and due process of law.”“This is not the first time that the Obama administration has waived provisions of the law in regard to military aid to Egypt.

The United States Department of State published an interview on September 29, 2011 with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sarif Amir of the Egyptian television station, Al Hayt, in which the former Secretary of State said:“I very much support continuing aid…We believe in aid to your military, without any conditions, no conditionality, I’ve made it very clear.”Since the election of Mohamad Morsi we, at EMET, have been warning that one election does not a democracy make. We Jews know through our long and painful history that Hitler also came in through a process of democratic elections, as did Hamas, in Gaza.

We have been saying that there have to be the institutions of a democracy in place: a free and independent press, a free and independent judiciary, freedom of religion, freedom for ethnic minorities, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition the government.Is this iron-clad commitment to pouring money down the sink-hole of Egypt, particularly military aid, to the repressive, Islamist government of Mohamad Morsi helpful? And for those who might say that military aid has resulted in the current pressure by the Egyptian Army against the Muslim Brotherhood, ask yourself why the Obama Administration warned, “the Egyptian military that it risked losing U.S. aid if it carried out a coup”.Just ask the millions of people on the streets of Cairo, today, who are holding up large signs in English and in Arabic, that read, “Obama supports terrorism.”Meanwhile, while this important regional player is imploding, Secretary of State Kerry is closing his eyes to the Egyptian convulsion and focusing his efforts on attempts to bring the Palestinians and Israelis together to the negotiating table in yet another re-run of the same old discredited “peace process.”

A process that is doomed to failure since the Palestinians have no real interest in peace.Kerry’s actions underscore the profound mis-reading of the Middle East and our nation’s single-factor analysis that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the most crucial factor to peace in the region. This analysis is not credible, while 100,000 Muslims have been brutally slaughtered by their own in Syria, Iran is assiduously working on becoming a nuclear power and Egypt is going down in flames and starvation.The inability of this Administration to develop a policy which reflects the Middle East as it truly is, only serves to further weaken America’s international standing and credibility.

Two Egyptian Officers Die in Ongoing Battles With Sinai Islamists
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Two Egyptian officers were killed Friday night defending government house in El Arish at the end of a day of battles between Egyptian forces and Salafist gunmen. The gunmen continued to shoot up military positions and vehicles in various parts of the northern Sinai town. From early morning, armed Salafists staged attacks on Egyptian security forces in Sinai, causing a number of casualties.
They fired rocket-propelled grenades at army checkpoints guarding El Arish airport near the Gaza Strip and Israeli border. Another attack targeted a police station in Rafah south of Gaza, close to the local headquarters of Egyptian military intelligence. DEBKAfile: The Egyptian army has imposed a blackout on the attacks. They are believed to have been more extensive than reported and entailed substantial casualties.

Tisha B'av and the Coming Temple
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newskhouse'org
Categories: Commentary;The Nation Of Israel

The Hebrew month of Av begins Sunday night, July 7th, and Jews will mourn through the final nine day of The Three Weeks of grief that began with the Fast of Tammuz and end with Tisha b’Av—the day commemorating the destruction of the Jewish temples.

All public transportation will be silenced, all restaurants will remain closed in Jerusalem the evening of July 15th as the sun sets. The Hebrew day of great tragedies, Tisha b’Av, will begin at sundown. In remembrance of the destruction of both the First and Second Temple on the 9th of Av hundreds of years apart, tens of thousands of Jews will gather at the Western Wall to pray and petition the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. 

Jewish hearts around the world will long in unison for the future Temple, the one to be established when the Messiah comes.

The Temple Mount

These next weeks, Jews look toward the Temple Mount with even more longing than normal. Israel has technically controlled the Temple Mount since the Six-Day War in 1967, but the Waqf, a Muslim council, manages the site. The Temple Mount is noticeably dominated by the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Israeli law is supposed to protect free access to the site, but the Israeli government enforces a ban on any non-Muslim prayer on the site in order to avoid Muslim riots.

Many Jews look forward to the day when the Messiah will come, when the Temple will once again rise up on the Temple Mount. A video by The Temple Institute shows a little boy and girl playing on the beach and building a replica of the Temple in the sand. The end caption reads, “The Children Are Ready.” The video had more than 400,000 views on YouTube after it was released last year.

Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute has long promoted this as a time of expectation for the Temple, rather than a time of mourning. This year in an article on the Fast of Tammuz and the beginning of the Three Weeks of mourning, Rabbi Richman wrote recently in The Jerusalem Post:

The fabricated tears of Tamuz are the romanticization of pain; being comfortable with the pain because it is what we are used to. This is what Maimonides alludes to. We can become so stuck in a place, so part of the cycle, that there is no way out of it.

But the whole idea of Tamuz is for us to confront those idolatrous forces within our own psyche. Parts of the Jewish mindset have been taken over. We have been lobotomized by the pagan mindset of weeping over Tamuz. The verse in Ezekiel [8:14] alludes to the weeping over our own lives, the tragic aspects of our lives, because self-pity feels so good. So we do it again and again, year after year.

Mourning for the Temple is not about crying over the past, or obsessing about something we cannot change; it is about becoming motivated to rise up from mourning, to transform this world into a place for the Divine Presence.

Holy Ground

While many patiently anticipate the coming Temple, not all Jews want worshipers, Jewish or Muslim, flooding the Temple Mount. Nobody is certain exactly where the Holy of Holies in the Temple was located, and these faithful Jews do not want the unwitting visitor to tread on that spot. Worshipers must first be cleansed with the ashes of the red heifer as required in Numbers 19 before Jews can worship freely in the Temple area.

East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been points of major contention in past efforts to negotiate a two-state agreement. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem, and the Jews do not want to give up this location that is so precious to Judaism. The world would never expect the Muslims to hand over control of the Kaaba in Mecca in order to keep peace, but the Jews are not free to worship on their holiest site because they fear Muslim violence.

Tisha B’Av

Many disasters have befallen the Jews on the 9th of Av throughout history. According to Jewish tradition, this was the day that God told the Children of Israel they were prohibited from entering the Promised Land because of disbelief. They were forced to wander in the desert forty more years until that adult generation had died out. That tragic day was just the beginning…

On the 9th of Av in:

•586 BC, Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the Babylonian captivity began;

•AD 70, the Second Temple, which stood during Christ’s ministry, was destroyed by the Romans precisely as Jesus predicted in Luke 19;

•AD 135, the famous Bar Kokhba revolt was squelched when Bethar, the last Jewish stronghold, fell to the Romans;

•AD 136, the Roman Emperor Hadrian established a heathen temple to Jupiter on the site of the Jewish Temple. Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan city, and renamed the land as Palestina, to distance its Jewish heritage. The date when the Temple area was plowed under by the Romans was the 9th of Av.

The day has continued to be associated with grief for the Jewish people throughout history. For example, Pope Urban II declared the Crusades on the 9th of Av in 1242. Accordingt to the Alhambra Decree, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 on this day (the same day that Columbus left on his westward route to the Indies). 

On the 9th of Av in 1942, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were mass deported to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. Thus the 9th of Av, Tisha B’Av, has become a symbol of all the persecutions and misfortunes of the Jewish people, for the loss of their national independence and their sufferings in exile. Above all, it is a day of intense mourning for the destruction of the Temple.

A Day of Mourning… And Future Joy

Tisha b’Av is marked with sadness and fasting from food and drink. Observant Jews avoid bathing or washing clothes or enjoying entertainment like music or movies. On this day the Jews are reminded of their tragic history.

Yet, this day is also expressly linked with Israel’s glorious destiny. The Jews also look forward to the ultimate rebuilding of the Temple, to a time when Tisha b’Av will become a day of joy and gladness (as it was foretold in Zechariah 8:19).

We do know that the Temple will be rebuilt because Jesus, John, and Paul all make reference to it (Matt 24:15; Rev 11:1, 2; 2 Thess 2:4). We also know that a future Temple will be desecrated by the Coming World Leader when he sets himself up to be worshiped (2 Thess 2:3–4). It is possible this prophetic event will also take place on Tisha b’Av—and may happen in the not-too-distant future.

Syrian - Hizballah Forces Close to Capturing Homs
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Assad’s army and Hizballah Saturday morning broke into the Khaldiyeh district of Homs, the last remaining rebel stronghold in the northern Syrian city. They go from house to house, executing any rebels they catch. DEBKAfile: The capture of Homs would round off Assad’s war gains in recent months covering a broad swathe of territory from Idlib in the north through Damascus and including the Horan province in the south.

Muslim Deaths in Egypt Clashes Rise to 36
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Officials say 36 people were killed and 1,079 wounded in Friday night clashes around Egypt involving opponents and backers of ousted President Mohammed Morsi, as well as security forces. Most of the fatalities occurred in big demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria.
In Cairo, Egyptian Apaches flying overhead, tear gas, automatic weapons and shot guns were used to drive back Muslim protesters surging toward the Republican Guard facility known as the “Officers Club” where former president Mohamed Morsi is believed held since he was deposed two days earlier. Ten demonstrators were killed and 240 injured.  Muslim protesters spread out across different parts of the city marking what they called their “day of rage.” Brotherhood Supreme Leader Mohamed Badie appeared before the demonstrators Friday night and told them to stay where they were until “we carry Mohamed Morsi out on our shoulders.”

Moscow & Beijing Welcome Egyptian Islamist Downfall As U.S. Comedown
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

The big bucks have started flowing to Middle East forces fighting the Muslim Brotherhood instead of bankrolling its rise to power.
This sharp reversal to US President Barack Obama’s plans suits Moscow and Beijing very well.
As a result of this reversal, the coup d’etat staged by the Egyptian military Wednesday, July 3, found President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government with empty coffers. Arab Gulf rulers had cut off aid to the struggling regime in Cairo and the petrodollars were being redirected to other causes, including the Egyptian opposition campaign for Morsi’s overthrow. (See preceding article.)
The Obama administration, for its part, was neither able nor willing to part with substantial aid funds for propping up the Islamist regime in Cairo, which anyway Congress would have blocked.
Chasing the money trail to the Middle East, The Financial Times learned from an interview with Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil this week that Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus was receiving half a billion dollars per month on a regular basis in open credit lines from Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.
They are helping us politically, militarily and also economically, said Jamil, adding sarcastically, “It’s not that bad to have the Russians, the Chinese and Iranians behind you.”
The secret key for Middle East forces to unlock the back door to international aid appears these days to be active defiance of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Russian President Vladmir Putin, who has opened Russia’s purse to the Bashar regime, is now applauding the military’s ouster of Islamist rule in Cairo.

Putin welcomes Egyptian coup as a Mid East defeat for Obama

His three reasons are disclosed here by DEBKA Weekly’s sources in Moscow:
1. He sees the transfer of Egyptian rule out of Muslim Brotherhood hands as capping his Syrian strategy for trouncing President Obama’s Mid East and Muslim policies and a giant leap forward for Moscow’s plans.
The Russian president is convinced the June 2009 speech Obama delivered at Cairo University offering American outreach to, and cooperation with, moderate Muslim forces, was nothing more than the preamble for the US president’s scheme to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power by engineering the “Arab Spring” two years later.
Putin refuses to believe the Arab Spring was a spontaneous popular revolt against autocratic rulers. He stands by his theory of an American conspiracy. The Russian leader has also sworn never again to let the US achieve a victory in an Arab land, in the way Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown and killed in Libya. He is pursuing this oath in Syria by frustrating Barack Obama’s pledge to force Assad out.
In meeting after meeting, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have failed to reach agreement on a political accommodation for stopping the carnage in Syria. Their last interview in Brunei on Tuesday, July 2, went on for more than two fruitless hours. After it was over, Kerry was forced to confess that the international summit – the only thing they agreed on in principle – was not imminent and unlikely to take place before the fall or early winter.
This grants Assad, Iran and Hizballah six more months to continue decimating Syrian rebel forces with a view to eliminating them or pushing them into neighboring countries.

Russia and China fear radical Muslim spillover into their borders

2. For Moscow, Egypt’s clockwork coup could not have come at a better time.
Together with Assad’s advances in the Syrian war, he sees the Brotherhood’s downfall in Cairo as a shot in the arm for Russia positions compared with waning US influence and prestige in the Middle East and the Gulf regions.
3. He intends to cash in on America’s fall from favor in Cairo as an opportunity for regaining lost Soviet-era influence in the most populous of Arab nations (Pop: 84 million) and further widening the gulf between Egypt’s generals and Washington.
DEBKA Weekly’s military sources detect preparations in Moscow to revive sales to Cairo of Russian arms to replace US weaponry - on the assumption that the Obama administration will disapprove of the military’s eviction of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Cairo and withhold arms and military aid.
4. Putin looks forward to the military caste in Cairo sharing intelligence with Moscow to help keep the Brotherhood, fellow radical Islamist elements and their destabilizing influence outside the gates of southern Russia, Central Asia and a hop and a leap from China.
He scented the expansionist tones rising from a meeting on June 15 of Egyptian Sunni Muslim clerics and their use of the term "infidels" alike to denounce the Shiites propping up Assad and Morsi’s non-Islamist opponents at home.
President Morsi himself used this platform to call for foreign intervention against Assad, a side swipe at the Egyptian Army for failing in its Islamic duty. The next day, the generals issued a pointed statement stressing that their only duty was to guard Egypt's borders.

Chinese Uighur Muslim extremists improve their terrorist skills in Syria

Both Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are on guard against the menace of a radicalized Islamist Arab world and its possible triumph in Syria surging across their borders and fueling Islamic extremism and terrorism within their gates. For both, the Egyptian army’s success in cutting the Muslim Brotherhood down in Cairo is a net gain.
For Beijing, this menace appears to be creeping closer, boosted by international Islamist interference.
At least 35 people were killed in the last few days in the worst outbreak of violence in the province of Xinjiang since July 2009.
Tuesday, July 2, The Global Times tabloid, owned by the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily, blamed outside influences for generating the new upsurge of trouble, pointing the finger at Syria, for the training of some 100 Uighur Muslim extremists. They were reported as having gone to Syria “to overcome their fears, improve their fighting skills and gain experience in carrying out terrorist attacks.”
The threat they pose is much greater than spontaneous ethnic violence to China’s effort to fight the Islamist separatist struggle in Xingjiang., the paper said.
The Global Times disclosed that a Uighur man who had fought in Syria was captured on his return home. The Syrian ambassador to Beijing was then quoted as confirming that at least 30 Uighur fighters had traveled to Syria from the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands (strongholds of al Qaeda and Taliban) via Turkey.

The international dimension of Islamic radicalism

This international dimension reinforces the Chinese government’s claims that the bloodshed in Xinjiang is orchestrated by Uighur extremists seeking to break away from China and establish an independent homeland, called East Turkestan.
In answer to a question, a foreign ministry spokeswoman in Beijing, Hua Chunying, said: “In recent years, East Turkestan terrorist forces have constantly strengthened collusion with international terrorist organizations, and this is a grave danger to China’s national security.”
Right after this story was published, US counterterrorism sources dismissed the Chinese allegations as having no basis in fact. Beijing, said those sources, was trying to tar Uighur national groups with the brush of radical Islamic terrorism.
Putin found this American comment uncomfortably familiar. It recalled the tactic pursued by successive US administrations (Clinton, Bush and Obama) to paint the Islamist Chechen uprising against Russia – as well as certain radical Islamists, Al Qaeda associates and violent Salafist groups - as national liberation movements.
Moscow – and now Beijing – refuses to accept this designation of groups which they regard as enemies. Having joined forces to beat down those perceived enemies in Syria, Putin and Xi will continue to work together to bring the new, post-Islamic Egypt, over to their side.

Let the Headlines Speak
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily NewsFrom the Internet
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

While Egypt Burns
“What happened in Egypt was not a military coup. It was the army listening to the voice of millions and millions of Egyptians on the street. Many people seem to confuse one election with a democracy.  

Egypt clashes after army fire kills Morsi supporters
More than 30 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in Friday's violence following the ousting of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi, it has emerged. At least 12 died in Alexandria, and eight in two separate clashes in Cairo, the Health Ministry said. The army removed Mr Morsi from power on Wednesday after millions of people protested over his leadership.  

North and South Korean talks on Kaesong economic zone
Officials from North and South Korea are holding talks on reopening the Kaesong industrial complex. The two sides sat down together on Saturday at the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone. Work at the factory park was halted in April amid high regional tensions.  

Iraq violence: Baghdad mosque suicide bomb kills 15
At least 15 people have died in a suicide bomb attack targeting a Shia mosque in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, officials say. More than 30 people were wounded in the attack, which happened during night prayers, AP news agency reported.  

Italian 'top mafia boss' caught in Colombia
Colombian police say they have caught the alleged boss of Italy's Calabrian mafia, who they described as Europe's most wanted drugs trafficker. Roberto Pannunzi was detained in a shopping centre in the capital, Bogota, authorities said. He had been on the run since 2010, when he fled from a clinic in Rome, where he was receiving treatment as a prisoner.  

EU threatens to suspend data-sharing with U.S. over spy reports
The European Union is threatening to suspend two agreements granting the United States access to European financial and travel data unless Washington shows it is respecting EU rules on data privacy, EU officials said on Friday.  

Europe’s Time to Fend Off Crisis May Be Waning
Portugal’s political sphere has hit a brick wall in governing recently, when prominent member of the minority coalition party Paulo Portas resigned, leaving Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho’s government in a tough position. A growing weariness of austerity has infiltrated Portugal’s political arena, as recession, and a need to comply with bailout lender demands have worn heavily on the country.  

Snowden gets Venezuela, Nicaragua asylum offers
The quest by NSA leaker Edward Snowden for a safe haven has taken a turn toward Latin America, with offers for asylum coming from the leftist presidents of Nicaragua and Venezuela.  

Switzerland Will Join Race to Be Trading Hub for China’s Yuan
Switzerland plans to bid to become an offshore yuan trading center in Europe, competing with Frankfurt and London to corner trade in the Chinese currency. “It is in Swiss interest to have a renminbi hub in the center of Europe,” Economy Minister Johann Schneider-Ammann said in Beijing today after signing a free trade agreement with Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng. While no official talks have taken place, Schneider-Ammann said he hopes the idea will become “more serious” in the coming weeks or months.  

Israel and Jordan Come Out Trumps. Qatar Loses Big
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

In the space of a few hours - and without lifting a finger - Israel won big from the lightning coup of Wednesday, July 3, which overthrew Islamic government in Cairo and restored the military to the center of Egypt’s political stage.
Those winnings came in five forms:
1. Since early 2012, when Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, encouraged by President Barack Obama, transferred power from the military council to civilian government, Israel and its armed forces have been on tenterhooks for their 1979 peace treaty with Egypt to dissolve in hostilities, although the Morsi government was pressured by the United States not to abrogate it.
This sense of menace was eased by the military takeover of government in Cairo.
2. The conventional wisdom shared by Israel’s strategists was that, one day, the Muslim Brotherhood would launch a jihadist war on the Jewish State, whether as rulers of an Arab nation, through its web of Brotherhood branches in other Arab countries - like the one fighting in Syria, or through a cross-Islam alliance of radicals between Sunni Cairo and Shiite Tehran.
This assumption has been shelved for now with a deep sigh of relief.

With the army ruling Cairo, Israel no longer fears a Muslim Brotherhood war

3. It was also taken for granted that, with the Muslim Brotherhood in power, Israel and Egypt would eventually come to blows over control of the Sinai Peninsula. When the territory descended into a lawless stronghold for Al Qaeda, other anti-Israel terrorists and criminal smuggling rings, Israel invested some $1 billion in building a fortified fence along the 260-kilometer border with Egypt to defend its southern region. Another $1 billion was spent to relocate military command centers and facilities opposite Egyptian Sinai after 30 years of calm under the rule of Hosni Mubarak.
Now that the Egyptian military is in charge again, the danger of a conflict with Cairo has receded.
This means that the military strength Israel started hauling to the South - the Adom Division and three smaller armored units - can be redirected to the more active northern front facing Syria and Hizballah.
4. The radical Palestinian Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip, which for a decade terrorized southern Israel with missile attacks, is substantially diminished in every way. Amidst an agonizing leadership feud between its pro-West, pro-Sunni faction and the group pulling the movement into the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah camp, Hamas has lost its parent and provider in Cairo.
This comedown will seriously detract from Hamas’s standing in the Palestinian community at large - not only in Gaza but also on the West Bank and in Jordan.
5. Almost overnight, Israel has sensed the loosening of the Muslim Brotherhood noose which up until this week was closing around the country from at least three directions

Jordan is in clover, Qatar counts its losses

Part of this improvement must be attributed to the blow the Egyptian Brotherhood’s downfall inflicted on the Jordanian Brethren, which also number many former Hamas followers, and their potency as a threat to the Hashemite throne in Amman.
Hitherto the most dangerous challenge to King Abdullah’s authority and the kingdom’s stability, Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood has had much of the stuffing knocked out of it by the unseating of Brotherhood rule in Cairo.
So, Jordan, like Israel, is by and large the winner from Egypt’s military putsch.
The biggest loser is Qatar which is caught by this disaster at a fragile moment in its own transition of power.
Tuesday June 25, the Qatari ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Kahlifa Al Thani informed President Obama of his abdication and transfer of power to his heir, 33-year old Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad.
Hamad bin Jassim, the prime minister, was also eased out of office.
Both he and the outgoing ruler pinned their entire inter-Arab policies on the propagation and shoring up of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Arab capitals.
Doha coordinated this policy with the Obama administration in Washington.

History’s practical joke

History may have been laughing up its sleeve when the leading champions of this policy were seen leaving office in Doha at the very moment that the beneficiary of their policy came crashing down in Cairo.
The noise of that crash must still be reverberating in the Qatari capital. The ex-ruler and ex-prime minister sank the round sum of $13 million in bolstering Muslim Brotherhood rule in Egypt. They were the bankers of President Mohamed Morsi’s government.
That colossal sum went down the drain in a brief moment on Wednesday, July 3, when Egypt’s military told Morsi he was no longer president of Egypt.
Will Qatar’s new ruler Sheikh Tamim be able to repair this hugely expensive error? The guessing is on in Gulf capitals.

Egypt’s Army Chief Flouted Obama's Warning to Desist from Coup
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Barack Obama’s meandering quest for a policy for post-revolution Egypt may best be summed up, if not pinned down, by his own words: The US would not consider Egypt an ally, "but we don't consider them an enemy.”
In an interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo, the US president characterized the post-Mubarak regime as "a new government that is trying to find its way." He warned that if this government took actions showing "they're not taking responsibility," then it would "be a real big problem.”
These comments, which were never clarified, were not made after Egypt’s masses rose up against President Mohamed Morsi on June 30, or his removal Wednesday, June 3 by a military coup.
They were uttered eleven months ago, on Sept. 12, 2012, at a time of violent Arab turmoil which specifically targeted the United States.
Crowds had just climbed over the walls of the US Embassy in Cairo, torn down the American flag and replaced it with the black flag of radical Islam.
In Benghazi, terrorists had attacked the US consulate and murdered an American ambassador and three staffers. Yet Obama had nothing definite to say about ties with Egypt, although intelligence reports disclosed that al Qaeda was behind the double attack in Benghazi and it was led by two Egyptians who were well known in Morsi’s inner circle.
This omission no doubt owed much to the US president’s reluctance to implicate the new Islamist regime in Cairo in an act of terror because he still hoped his blueprint for a new US-oriented Muslim Sunni axis, led by Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan and Qatar’s Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, would take off.

Obama’s hoped-for US-oriented Sunni bloc melts away

This alliance first went into diplomatic action two months later. In November, 2012, US Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton, orchestrated an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire which ended the military operation Israel had launched against the Gaza Strip in response to a long Palestinian rocket campaign. The ceasefire was negotiated in the nick of time to avert an IDF ground invasion of Hamas-ruled territory.
Where is this plan nine months later?
1. The Sunni bloc which the Obama administration worked so hard to fashion has since melted away.
2. None of the Muslim rulers designated to lead the venture remain in power - or else survive on shaky ground. Sheikh Hamad Al Thani retired last week and handed power to his 33-year old son Sheikh Tamim bin Khalif Al Thani; Erdogan is challenged by furious protesters; Morsi’s presidency was overthrown Wednesday, July 3, by the Egyptian military in response to the will of tens of millions of Egyptians; Hamas is deeply split between the pro-Turkey political bureau chief Khaled Meshaal, who endorsed the ceasefire with Israel and who was turned down in his recent bid for Turkish military aid, and the pro-Iran heads of Hamas’s military wing.
The pillars on which Obama erected his Middle East policy in the past year were broken reeds as far as Muslim rulers were concerned.

The military is king in two Arab capitals – not Muslim rulers

3. On the region’s Sunni streets, America fares no better: Most of the protests, especially the rallies this week in Egyptian cities, were as anti-American as they were anti-Muslim Brotherhood. Prominent among the banners were large placards depicting outgoing US Ambassador Anne Patterson, who is tapped as next Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, alongside those of Morsi. Both had large red Xes slashed across them.
Patterson is a strong believer in the Muslim Brotherhood as the bedrock of US Middle East policy, a view countered stridently by the Arab street. This week, the Egyptian people effectively bankrupted that perception.
4. In regional terms, and at the level of superpower rivalries, Washington’s venture into sponsorship of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood was equally disappointing. The Brotherhood’s role in the Syrian revolt is smaller than generally depicted in the West and its military clout has diminished since the uprising broke out in early 2011.
The military coup which unseated the first ever Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo is viewed in the Muslim world as a humiliating defeat for the movement.
(See a separate item in this issue on the effect of the Egypt uprising on the war in Syria)
It doesn’t matter to Muslims whether their brethren were beaten down by a popular uprising as in Egypt or in a bloody war as in Syria. The common factor is the same: The military has pushed the Islamist president out in Cairo and Syrian armed forces are keeping them out of power in Damascus. The army is king in two Middle East capitals.

Military chiefs reject Washington’s plan for defusing the crisis

In a bid to overturn this equation in Cairo, the Obama administration stepped in with two early morning phone calls Tuesday, July 2, hoping to head off a military coup - which in fact took place the following day. Obama called from Tanzania to promise Morsi US support if he was “more responsive” to the opposition’s demands, while Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey hinted on the phone to Egyptian chief of staff Gen. Sedki Sobhi that the annual $1.3 billion military allocation to Cairo might be in jeopardy in the event of a military takeover.
Neither talked directly to the man who held the key to resolving the crisis, Defense Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
Whereas in February 2011, Obama kept an open line to the former defense minister Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi in stage after stage of the Tahrir Square revolution which unseated Hosni Mubarak, the situation this time was different: Obama knew he would never talk Egypt’s current defense minister out of his resolve to get rid of the Islamist president, and so he decided not to risk a personal rebuff.
In the event, Egypt’s military chiefs ruled against Washington’s proposal for a way out of the crisis – as our Middle East sources reported - and opted instead to issue Morsi with a 48-hour ultimatum, which he greeted with defiance.

Egyptian uprising sends strong ripples to other arenas

Tuesday, July 2, Egyptian Interior Minister Gen. Mohamed Ibrahim made the gesture of placing at the disposal of the army all the police, internal security forces and intelligence agencies under his jurisdiction. This snatched away from the president and government the support of 300,000 service personnel, a force larger than the regular army. They were left without police or security protection alone with their own adherents.
The turbulence in Cairo has sent strong ripples out into other arenas. It is already eating away at US standing in the Persian Gulf and vis-à-vis Russia and China, as this issue reports in separate articles.

Another Sunni Bloc Takes Shape, This One Centering on Saudi Arabia and Egypt
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

The unsuspected links and connections among the prime movers behind Egypt’s military putsch against the Muslim Brotherhood of Wednesday, July 3, are beginning to emerge from the shadows.
Revealed here by DEBKA Weekly, for instance, is an intriguing facet in the career of Adli Mansour, 67, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, who was sworn in Thursday, July 4, as provisional president of Egypt.
For the past decade, it turns out, Judge Mansour served as a paid senior advisor to Saudi King Abdullah.
No one in Egypt knew this outside of top military and intelligence circles.
Egyptians are gaining an excellent judge, widely respected for his high integrity and known for his independent character. But they are also seating provisionally in deposed President Mohamed Morsi’s chair the man who performed liaison functions between the Saudi royals and their intelligence services, and Defense Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, chief of Egypt's armed forces and leader of the putsch.
The provisional president’s main duty will be to amend the constitution enacted by the Moslem Brothers during their one-year rule and oversee early presidential and parliamentary elections. Both Gen. Al-Sisi and Riyadh will no doubt make sure that he erases all traces of the ousted rulers’ ambition to enact the framework for a state governed by Islamic law.

Saudi-UAE funds pledged to keep Egypt’s economy running

On Thursday July 4, debkafile was first out with the exclusive revelation of Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s indispensable assistance in the overthrow of the Morsi regime. We also revealed that Gen. El-Sisi received two pledges from his two backers.
1. If the Obama administration cuts off the annual US aid allocation of $1.3 billion, Saudi Arabia and the UAE would make up the military budget’s shortfall;
2. The Saudis, UAE and other Gulf nations, such as Bahrain and Kuwait, will immediately start pumping out substantial funds to keep the Egyptian economy running. The Egyptian masses will be shown that in a properly managed economy, they can be guaranteed a decent, minimal standard of living and need not go hungry as many did under Muslim Brotherhood rule.
According to our sources, the Saudis and the UAE pledged to match the funds Qatar transferred to the Muslim Brotherhood’s coffers in Cairo in the past year, amounting to the vast sum of $13 billion.
For the first time since early 2011, Saudi Arabia and the UAE managed to intervene directly to throw a spanner in the wheels of the US-sponsored Arab Revolt or Spring, after they failed to hold the tide back in Libya, Egypt and thus far in Syria.
And also for the first time, a group of traditionally pro-US conservative Arab governments has struck out on its own to fill the leadership vacuum left by the Obama administration’s unwillingness to pursue direct initiatives in the savage Syrian civil war or forcibly preempt Iran’s drive for a nuclear bomb.

What happens to future relations with Washington

They aren’t done yet. They are planning to establish their own Sunni Muslim bloc, composed of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Egypt, to replace Obama’s failed initiative for a Sunni alliance partnered by Qatar, Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt.
This group has demonstrated that popular revolutions can be clean and swift rather than mired endlessly in the blood and savagery of internecine strife like the civil wars bedeviling Libya and Syria.
The future of this bloc is as unclear as that of Egypt. Its authors meanwhile need to answer four important questions:
1. Does the prime movers astonishingly swift and effective action behind America’s back presage more steps independent of Washington?
Or will Saudi King Abdullah and Gen. El-Sisi, Egypt’s interim strongman pending the election of the next president, beat a path back to the door of the White House in DC?
This question is problematic, since never before have Riyadh and Cairo harbored so little trust in an American president as they do today. This antipathy between the US administration and Egypt’s generals was dramatized Thursday, July 4, when the day after the military takeover, the administration ordered all non-essential US diplomatic personnel to "immediately" evacuate Cairo.

For Saudis, getting rid of Assad comes before dealing with Iran

2. How far will the burgeoning Sunni bloc be ready to go to challenge Iran and its nuclear program?
The answer depends on its members’ willingness to shoulder the Saudi king’s prime objective of ousting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
DEBKA Weekly's Gulf sources say that whether or not to negotiate with Tehran can only be decided when the Syrian war is finished and out of the way.
3. How is the Syrian war affected by the change in Egypt?
Because of the rationale set out in 2., the Syria war is likely to expand in the coming months - and not just because the US and Russia can’t see eye to eye on how to set up an international conference for a political resolution. (See the reference to the Kerry-Lavrov meeting in a separate item).
The new turn of Egypt’s political wheel offers an outside chance that Cairo, which has held back from intervening in the Syrian conflict, may be drawn by Riyadh into backing the war against Bashar Assad.
The Saudis will not let the Syrian ruler get away with enjoying the fruits of the Egyptian putsch they aided.
Assad was indeed the first ruler to congratulate Egypt on its coup and hail it as a lesson for political Islam that its aspirations to take over the whole Middle East had come to the end of the road.
4. Will the new Sunni bloc come to terms with Israel?
The moribund Sunni axis which the US fostered with Turkey and Qatar was open to military, diplomatic and intelligence cooperation with Israel. Will the Saudi-led bloc take this route? It is too soon to say.

Ahmad Shafik and the UAE Engineer the Egyptian Uprising
Jul 6th, 2013
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Commentary

The location of Egypt’s Tamarod uprising headquarters offers a window on the forces pulling the strings behind it the popular, military-backed overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood rule in Cairo on July 3.
That place was Dubai in the Persian Gulf, and its two engineers were the Egyptian politician Ahmed Mohamed Shafik and the Emirates’ police chief, Lt. General Dahi Khalfan Tamim.
Shafik ran against Mohamed Morsi for the Egyptian presidency in 2012 and was beaten by a nose - 48.27% to 51.73%. An ex-Air Force high-up, he served as Prime Minister of Egypt for the last two months (Jan. 31 to March 3, 2011) of the Hosni Mubarak era.
In September 2012, the Morsi government issued a warrant for Shafik’s arrest. But he had prearranged his getaway in good time and, before the warrant could be executed, he and his associates were on a plane to Abu Dhabi, which the Air Force had kept waiting since before the election.
On his arrival in the emirate, Shafik set about preparing a campaign for ousting President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood from power.
Amply subsidized by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, he transplanted his entire election campaign headquarters to its new address.

When will Morsi, now under arrest, join Mubarak in a prison cell?

For the field work at home, he hired tens of thousands of jobless party activists from Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the NDP, who were delighted to land a working wage; thousands more former senior officers from the different arms of the Egyptian military and intelligence services were sent out in the field.
Their paychecks were not covered through regular banking channels, but by cash smuggled through the halawa system from a hub in Dubai.
Shafik’s campaign approached its first peak June 30 when a roar went up from many millions of Egyptian throats across the country demanding that Morsi step down. The hard spadework of hundreds of former army officers in cities, towns and villages up and down the country paid off. The flames of the Tamarod protest erupted in at least 20 cities – not only huge turnouts in Cairo and Alexandria - but also the towns of the Nile Delta and smaller places.
> From his Dubai headquarters, Shafik took good care to maintain a distance between his campaign and any direct ties with his old boss, Mubarak, or the sons, Gemal and Alaa, and so forestalled allegations that he was hand in glove with the pre-revolution regime.
But Mubarak, his political instincts unimpaired at 84, sensed from his prison hospital bed what was up. He remarked that the uprising was well-organized and sure to succeed, adding wryly that he expected Morsi to join him soon in a prison cell.
The Egyptian politician’s remote-control campaign depended heavily on the wholehearted cooperation of the Dubai Police Commander.

Harsh anti-American language in the Gulf

Lt. General Tamim commands powerful intelligence networks outside the borders of the emirate, across the Persian Gulf and as far as the Gulf coastal towns of Iran. He has in recent years won a regional reputation as the mouthpiece of UAE rulers and influential interests for diplomatic and military issues on which they prefer not to openly commit themselves.
In January 2012, for instance, Tamim addressed a regional security conference in Bahrain capital of Manama, in harsher language on US Middle East polices than any Gulf official had ever dared use before.
He bluntly accused the United States of making Iran’s dreams come true, by overthrowing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, allowing Tehran to move in on Baghdad and failing to counter the export of Iran’s Shiite brand of Islamic revolution – another name for terrorism.
The US ambassador to Bahrain, Thomas Krajeski, stalked out of the room.
The emirates’ police chief went on to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood as an even greater menace than Iran.
On that occasion, Lt. Gen. Tamim acted out his role of airing thoughts which Gulf rulers preferred not to articulate publicly in person.
Tamim and Shafik picked Egyptian Defense Minister Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and the Nasserist politician Hamdeen Sabahi, who came in third in the presidential election, as the engines of the uprising, because both were considered antagonistic to Barack Obama’s policies and therefore less susceptible to demands not to go all the way and force Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood to leave.

Persian Gulf emirates line up against Muslim Brotherhood

Sabahi’s influence was discernible in the pro-nationalist, pro-Nasserist and xenophic fervor – especially against America – which, rather than anti-Islamic protest, unexpectedly dominated the slogans, chants and banners waving over the rallies assembled on Cairo’s streets and Tahrir Square on June 30. This strongly recalled the days of Abdel Gemal Nasser who ruled Egypt 50 years ago and set the region afire with pan-Arab, nationalist-socialist zeal.
Clearly, the Egyptian masses were staging a nationalist Arab uprising, supported quietly by the Gulf Arab emirates, in response to the Arab Revolt sponsored by America which brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
In the last DEBKA Weekly # 593 of June 28, we reported that the new Qatari prime minister and foreign minister appointed after the change of power in Doha had much in common.
Most strikingly, they are fierce opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which they believe bent on overthrowing the Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf.
The Persian Gulf states’ willingness to challenge and defy the Obama administration’s pro-Brotherhood policy is a no less epic development for the region than the drama of the swift, virtually bloodless Egyptian uprising.
Before returning to the Egyptian political arena, Ahmed Mohamed Shafik may let Egypt’s transitional period play out under the oversight of the military and the head of the Constitutional Court Adly Mansour.