Revolutions in the Middle East

[KanadaHye]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

I'm sure the people that matter understand they are being played for fools but what can they do, Israel controls the country and America pays for the army. A real revolution isn't just a crowd of people with no responsibility skipping some time from school. Their real goal is to further push the neo liberal agenda on the people.... which can only be done on the young generation.

[Federate]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Mubarak didn't resign today but handed his powers over to the newly appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman (an Israeli lapdog). He also promised reforms in 6 sections of the Egyptian constitution and promise to punish those responsible for violence. Crowd went ballistic that he stopped short of resigning.

Mubarak's resignation is not enough, all his cronies must go to. What's the point if Mubarak resigns only for Suleiman to take over? Hope the people understand that...

[ninetoyadome]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Mubarak's Billions
— By James Ridgeway| Mon Feb. 7, 2011 7:54 AM PST
The details of Mubarak’s fortune are a bit muddy, but according to various press reports, the family’s total wealth runs well into the tens of billions of dollars.

In Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar reports:

According to a mix of United States, Syrian and Algerian sources his personal fortune amounts to no less than US $40 billion – stolen from the public treasury in the form of “commissions”, on weapons sales, for instance. The Pharaoh controls loads of real estate, especially in the US; accounts in US, German, British and Swiss banks; and has "links" with corporations such as MacDonald’s, Vodafone, Hyundai and Hermes. Suzanne, the British-Irish Pharaoh’s wife, is worth at least $5 billion. And son Gamal – the one that may have fled to London, now stripped of his role as dynastic heir – also boasts a personal fortune of $17 billion. Or some $60 billion. Some speculate the fortune is around $70 billion.’

Should Mubarak skip the country, as Corey Pein points out in War Is Business, he might well do it in a business jet provided free of charge by the US taxpayers. “Pentagon contracts show that the US government has spent at least $111,160,328 to purchase and maintain Mubarak’s fleet of nine Gulfstream business jets. (For those keeping score, Gulfstream is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.)” War Is Busines provides copies of the actual contracts. Here is one of them:

Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., Savannah, Ga., is being awarded a $19,825,221 firm fixed price contract modification to provide for the Foreign Military Sales Program in support of FMS Case Egyptian. The Air Force provides follow-on maintenance support for the Egyptian Government’s Presidential fleet of Gulfstream aircraft. The program will provide depot maintenance support, parts and material repair, and supply, field team, and Aircraft on Ground or urgent situation support. At this time, $14,825,221 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by November 2005. Solicitation began October 2003 and Negotiations were completed October 2003. The Headquarters Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center, Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., is the contracting activity (FA8106-04-C-0001).

It’s tit for tat with Egypt. Pein again:

When the two military leaders met in May 2009 to discuss “a wide range of security issues,” Egyptian Defence Minister Hussein Tantawi presented US Defense Secretary Robert Gates with a set of gifts. They included a shotgun (with five bullets), a decorative rug and a gilded photo album.With a confidence that, in retrospect, seems dubious, Gates said “he looks forward to expanding the two countries’ military-to-military relationships in ways that promote regional stability.’Five months after that meeting, the Pentagon announced it would sell a new batch of two dozen F-16 fighter aircraft to Egypt—a $3.2 billion deal that is among the most recent of a long string of arms deliveries from America to its North African ally. These F-16s, according to the Pentagon announcement (pdf) would support “Egypt’s legitimate need for its own self-defense.”

In her blog, Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who exposed corruption and incompetence at the Bureau, writes:

This is where our government takes our dollars, gives it to dictator allies, and then asks them to turn around, give that money (minus the personal share for personal wealth) to our military industrial complex corporations. Then, we have those CEO’s with $$$$$$$ salaries, and $$$$$$$ to the lobbyists and $$$$$$ to our elected representatives, who then in turn, sanction giving more money, aid, tax payers’ dollars, to these dictators; and the cycle repeats, repeats, repeats…well, it’s been repeating nonstop for more than half a century.

James Ridgeway is a senior correspondent at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Get James Ridgeway's RSS feed.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/mubaraks-billions

any doubt that aliyev has more money?

[Armanen]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

I hadn't realized that Markar, brother of Monte, was such an ardent marxist.


More propaganda pieces posted by p***y.

[Mos]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Well, hayastan is really suffering because of the neo-liberal economic policies placed to favour oligarchs, and big businesses...a more left wing government would be good for us.

[Haykakan]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

The wonders of capitalism are boundless. Too bad the soviet union is no more.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

The Disintegration of the Armenian Family
By Markar Melkonian

hetq
[ 2011/01/31 | 15:00 ]

Ruling Regime Reigns over Socio-Economic Disaster

The party of power in Yerevan includes in its platform the statement
that "the basis of the Armenian society is a traditional family." The
platform introduces us to a short roster of other marvelous entities,
too, including "the Armenian type," an "Armenian essence," and
spiritual values, all punctuated by invocations of God.

It is probably a mistake to try to make sense of this sort of
"traditional family" talk. The function of this rhetoric, after all,
is not to convey meaning but to numb brains. Putting the best face on
things, though, Armenia's Republican Party deserves credit at least
for using the indefinite article-"the basis of A traditional family,"
instead of "THE traditional family."

But which traditional family? It is hard to take seriously the
suggestion that the "basis" of Armenia today is the extended
patriarchal family of rural Armenia before the 20th century. This
leads to the suspicion that Armenia's Republicans, perhaps unwittingly,
are extolling the nuclear family that thrived in the country's towns
and cities during the Soviet decades.

Although this nuclear version of a traditional family is modern,
it still evokes soft-focus pictures of the Armenian hearth (ojax),
that little refuge of sympathy and mutual support. Back in the Soviet
days, girls and boys were fed, cherished, and educated-and all of
this without the threat of hell or the promise of heaven.

But those were the bad old days, before Armenia joined Bosnia and
Kyrgyzstan in the exalted club of independent nations. Now that Free
Enterprise has returned to Armenia, bread is no longer an entitlement.

Families in Armenia face hard times

Families, traditional or otherwise, are not doing well in Armenia
these days. The self-advertised champions of "a traditional family"
preside over a country where even basic postnatal healthcare is beyond
the reach of many households; a country where single-parent households
have proliferated; where transnational pimping and human trafficking
have become growth industries, and where elderly pensioners, reduced
to wards of soup kitchens, spend their last years as charity cases,
stripped of dignity.

Laura Michael, a member of a charity that works with orphans, recently
made the obvious causal connection between post-Soviet poverty and the
disintegration of Armenian families: "Fifty percent of the population
in Armenia lives in poverty," she noted, "and often people cannot care
for their children due to financial reasons." ("Inside the Orphanages
of Armenia.," The Armenian Weekly online, Oct. 6, 2010.)

Over the past twenty years, successive administrations in Yerevan
have set in motion processes that have gutted public institutions
that used to benefit Armenia's most vulnerable populations.

Privatization of land, together with "pro-business" tax policies,
has depopulated the countryside, pushing the rural population off of
farms and emptying Armenia's villages and small towns. The resulting
dislocation and unemployment have divided tens of thousands of
families in this small country, as husbands, fathers, and sons have
sought jobs in Krasnodar, Moscow, and farther afield. In this way,
successive post-Soviet regimes have created thousands of abandoned
wives, mothers, and children.

Meanwhile, privatization and real estate speculation have pushed
housing costs in Yerevan far beyond what many families can afford.

Real estate tycoons and developers have pressured poor and
working-class residents to sell homes, sometimes at far below market
value. (Among other sources, see: Vahan Ishkanyan, "Futile Fight:
Angry Property Owners Use Barricades as Last Defense," ArmeniaNow,
September 12, 2005). On Buzand Street and elsewhere, police have
evicted longtime homeowners, who could do little more than watch
helplessly while bulldozes leveled their flats. When the homeowners
have sought legal redress, the courts have almost invariably ruled
against them.

Will there be an educated workforce in Armenia?

The same pro-business priorities together with scanty local budgets
have hit hard when it comes to funding for preschools and primary and
secondary schools. According to a recent UNICEF report, "close to 80
percent of pre-school age children do not attend pre-schools due to
poverty and/or absence of pre-school facilities."

(http://www.unicef.org/armenia/education.html) This is far lower than
preschool attendance during the last decades of Soviet Armenia.

Other recent studies have noted growing absenteeism and drop-out
rates among primary and secondary-school students. Children in some
of Armenia's poorest families spend their days working in the fields,
or begging, or selling knickknacks on the streets, or collecting
recyclables from garbage dumps.

Child labor laws have been weakened, of course. But this is largely
irrelevant today, since in any case labor laws are not enforced.

None of this bodes well for Armenia's economic future, since it has
endangered what economists twenty years ago considered to be the
country's main comparative advantage in the new global labor market,
namely a cheap but highly educated workforce.

UNICEF reports that in Armenia, "there is shortage of learning
and teaching materials at schools." When it comes to Free Market
indoctrination, however, it seems that schools receive the necessary
resources. Foreign sponsors bribe underpaid school teachers to adopt
"economics textbooks" that bury the realities of exploitation, class
rule, and imperialism under a thick layer of free market dogmas
and slogans, and that encourage children to blame their parents for
their poverty.

The Republican Party's self-described "pro-family" administration has
privatized social security, and now we hear that it proposes to amend
the Labor Code, to extend a regular work week from five days to six.

Who will defend the working class in Armenia?

They do this because they can get away with it. And they can get away
with it because there are no militant unions in Armenia, and because
leftwing parties, for one reason or another, do not fight back in
the relentless class struggle that the plutocrats are waging against
working-class families.

According to the sentimental cliche, the mother is the bulwark of
the family. But in Armenia today women are no longer safe on the
streets-and too often, they are even less safe in the hearth. The
domestic violence case of Greta Bagdasaryan and the beating death
of Zaruhi Petrosyan are notable because they are especially brutal
instances of a more widespread phenomenon.

According to a survey conducted in 2008 by Amnesty International,
women in roughly three out of ten families endured physical abuse,
and about two-thirds experienced mental duress. According to a more
recent study by the Sociometer center, 75 percent of the 1200 women
studied had endured violence at the hands of their husbands. The
study also found that in one out of four cases children witnessed the
violence. (By comparison, a World Health Organization study puts the
number of women physically abused by their partners or ex-partners
at 30 per cent in the UK, and 22 per cent in the US.) Other published
studies report similarly alarming figures.

No one is denying that domestic violence existed during the Soviet
decades. But there was at least a measure of accountability in the
Soviet days. In Free Independent Armenia, as in the Islamic Republic
of Afghanistan, the Cold War victors have re-launched misogyny on a
scale that had not existed for decades.

High rates of poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism probably play
the big role in Armenia that they have played in other places when
it comes to domestic violence. It does not improve things, however,
when pervasive free-market propaganda denigrates such values as
equality and justice.

Confronted with exploding violence against women, authorities have
failed to prevent, investigate and punish perpetrators. Even as the
violence has escalated, the range of legal recourse and institutional
remedies has narrowed. Armenia's Criminal Code does not even have a
specific law against domestic violence.

Reviewing the record of Armenia's self-described champions of
traditional family values, one wonders just what it would take to
distinguish oneself in their eyes as an enemy of the family. In Armenia
as elsewhere, demagogues who resort to family-value talk typically have
nothing good to offer the majority of their citizen-subjects. In the
context of privatization and the dismantlement of the social safety
net, the official phrase-mongering about family and hearth masks an
on-going assault on women, children, and families.

The least Armenia's workers can do is to stop voting for candidates
who keep them unemployed and their families poor and insecure. They
could let the gangsters stuff the ballot boxes themselves.

A longer-term solution, though, would require laying the groundwork
for an organized, militant working-class-one that would put a genuine
fear of God into the hearts of Armenia's rulers.

Markar Melkonian is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

And has there been a sudden run on apricot-coloured paint in Armenia, and have the shops suddenly run out of apricot coloured fabric, and big Armenian flags?

The tinder is there. All it needs is a spark.

EGYPTIAN PROTESTS NOT TO SET PRECEDENT FOR ARMENIA - SHARMAZANOV

Tert.am
31.01.11

The current unrest in Egypt cannot set a precedent for Armenian,
Edward Sharmazanov, spokesman of the Republican Party of Armenia
(RPA), told a news conference on Monday.

"There is certain dissatisfaction in Armenia, but there are no
preconditions for a social unrest. The Armenian authorities were
resolute enough in implementing the post-crisis program, as can be
seen by their efforts to combat corruption and conduct open work with
the media. Never before were our authorities so open. While certain
people need shocks, we need a strong Armenia," he said.

ARMENIA IS NOT HEDGED AGAINST SUCH A REVOLT LIKE THE EVENTS IN EGYPT, ARMENIAN SOCIOLOGIST THINKS

ArmInfo
2011-01-31 13:06:00

ArmInfo.The events taking place in several Arab countries today may
also happen in Armenia, chairman of the Armenian Union of Sociologists,
Gevorg Pogosyan, said at today's press-conference when replying
to ArmInfo correspondent's question about the disorders in Tunis
and Egypt.

He also added that the threat of the Egyptian scenario's repetition in
our country will be caused the worsening social and economic situation
in the country, the public protest against the government which cannot
improve the life of its citizens.

'Moreover, when the country cannot stabilize politically as well
as economically, self-liquidation is threatening it. The tendencies
available in Armenia do not inspire optimism. Here the situation may
be out of control any moment', - he said.

At the same time, he did not rule out participation of the
leading superpowers in destabilizing process and later in possible
"self-liquidation" of the country.

THE MARGINALIZATION OF ARMENIAN SOCIETY
Armen Arakelyan

hetq
[ 2011/01/31 | 15:15 ]

Will the dispossessed electorate be a factor for future change?

The public rallies organized by Tigran Karapetyan, the periodic
protests staged against the Armenian government, the president and
the mayor's office, verify that a new political impetus or force
is taking shape in Armenia - the marginalization of the masses;
i.e. the formation of an Armenian lumpenproletariat. (In German the
word literally means "rag proletariat").

This gradual marginalization process of society continues in Armenia.

What are the causes and where might it lead? First, this societal
marginalization is a product of Armenian government policy, which
at its core results in the deepening of the social divide. Some
might argue that it results from the government's inability to halt
the process.

The economic, social and judicial policies of the regime are
directed towards satisfying the interests and requirements of a very
specific elite segment of society and, as a rule, aims towards the
monopolization of all essential commercial and economic sectors.

As a result, small and medium sized businesses are disappearing. Thus,
the middle class is vanishing as well. Society is being divided into
rich and poor segments. The former, comprised of a limited segment
of monopoly oligarchs are becoming the only practical guarantee for
the retention of power by the authorities. The ranks of the poor are
being filled with ever increasing segments of society marginalized
from that government and its various power bases.

Given such proportionality, it is this latter sector that is taking
the full brunt of each deterioration in social life based on objective
conditions - inflation, low wages, etc. This actual anti-socialization
also becomes possible by setting disparities within the human rights
defense field. Informal divisors are placed between the privileged and
those remaining below who shoulder the full burden of responsibility.

This state of affairs that has arisen in Armenia pushes a wide variety
of social issues to the front and center - guaranteeing minimal
conditions of human life and defense of certain inalienable rights.

This current reality pushes all others to the backburner - all
national, political, ideological and cultural issues.

In the past, if one occasionally saw small groups of people protesting
in front of various government buildings that their rights had been
violate, now such sights are a daily occurrence.

Moreover, the threats voiced by these disgruntled individuals and
groups to take drastic action are growing.

It is clear that a resistance movement has started from these once
isolated and limited actions that still remain mostly unorganized. Any
type of consolidation remains restricted to individuals sharing the
same narrow set of problems, people from similar social "castes".

Thus, it is too premature to speak about any type of mass social
movement.

This is due to two realities. First, since this budding movement is
spontaneous it lacks any real political content and isn't being lead by
any political force. Second, the traditional Armenian mentality of -
"I don't get involved with others" - also prevents needed organizing
and mobilization. Thus we wind up with street vendors, incensed that
they can no longer ply their wares, protesting separately; those who
bring in goods from Turkey, angry with a doubling of freight rates,
protesting on their own; and disgruntled community leaders doing
their own thing.

Nobody supports the other. Nor do the protestors want, or understand
the need, to mobilize a common front for struggle.

Thus, within the ruling circles, the growing belief is that
there isn't really anything serious to worry about. Even if these
protests of separate social sectors expand, they will never lead to
a all-encompassing movement of social unrest. This also allows the
authorities to keep neglecting the underlying causes for the protests
and their cause and effect links.

To a certain degree, the government is correct in its approach. The
problem is that the political forces still remain indifferent to the
impulses arising from the society automatically consolidating via the
process of marginalization. Certain forces are simply not capable of
assuming leadership of the movement, given that they find themselves
in a insignificant position.

The problem facing the government and the ruling coalition forces is
not to lead this movement but to extinguish it, or at best, to keep
it manageable. The regime would like to avoid any potential headaches
if possible.

With this aim in mind, conveniently exploiting the "Tigran Karapetyan
phenomenon" is a true brainstorm. On the one hand, the blossoming
social protest movement is discredited and deprived of any content,
and on the other, those segments of society caught up in the phenomenon
are manipulated and depoliticized.

In Armenia today, only three forces have the potential to place the
movement on a positive political track: the ARF, the Heritage Party
and the HAK. The first two are clearly in a wait and see holding
position and have no overwhelming desire to get active. Then too,
they simply aren't able to.

HAK (Armenan National Congress) possesses all the requirements to
assume a leadership role for the burgeoning movement. But it displays a
principally incorrect approach regarding it. The HAK sees the movement
as merely an uncontrollable "lumpen" mass, and not as a movement with
which to politicize society.

In reality, however, HAK is waging a struggle against the same
underlying causes that are at the core of the marginalization process.

What has started is also a struggle for civil rights, draped in a
veil of super-socialized issues.

It is also clear that this spontaneous social movement, if placed on
a systematic, institutional basis, can be infused with real political
content because, no matter how tragic, that segment of society is
being marginalized that should perform the role of the middle class.

HAK, by artificially inserting a differentiation between these two
categories, is simply depriving itself of the opportunity/possibility
of becoming active and, in general, is alienating itself from the real
social demands of the people. This just might lead to the eventual
marginalization of HAK itself because the self-serving nature of its
actions will become evident.

Recently, we learnt that a session of the HAK's economic affairs
committee convened and that members discussed such matters as the
forcible cessation of street trade and recent governmemt steps leading
to the illegal increase of custom duties by the government and the
monopolization and oligarchic domination of the economy. It would
thus seem that the HAK is trying to crystallize its positions and
possible solution options.

This signifies that the possibility still exists for the HAK to assume
leadership of the movement.

[Lernakan]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

Critical Connections: Egypt, the US, and Israel

by Alison Weir, February 05, 2011

Minimally explored in all the coverage of the momentous Egyptian uprising taking place over the last 10 days are the Israeli connections.

A central and critical reality is that it is US tax money that has propped up Hosni Mubarak’s despotic regime over the past 30 years, and that this money has flowed, from the beginning, largely on behalf of Israel.

Israel is generally a significant factor in events in the Middle East, and to understand ongoing happenings it is important to understand the historic and current Israeli connections.

The violent creation, perpetuation, and expansion of a state based on ethnic expulsion of the majority inhabitants has been central to Middle East dynamics ever since Israel was created by European and American Zionists in 1948 as a self-identified "xxxish State."

Israeli leaders and outside observers realized from the very beginning that the only way to maintain such a violently imposed, ethnically based nation-state was through military dominance of the region. For Israel to achieve this military dominance required two things:

(1) The creation of a military more powerful than all the others in the region combined. Israel has achieved this through a uniquely massive influx of US tax dollars and technology, occasionally purloined but largely procured through the machinations of its lobby. (Among other things, Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons, a fact almost never mentioned by American media or the American government.)

(2) The prevention of any other nation in the region from becoming a threat. Israel has attained this goal through several strategies: divide and conquer techniques, direct invasions and attacks (or pushing the U.S. to carry out attacks), and the propping up of despots who would openly or tacitly agree (sometimes in return for similarly large influxes of American tax money) not to support the rights of those oppressed and ethnically cleansed by Israel.

For the past 30-plus years, Egypt has been among those despotic regimes supported by the U.S. and Israel in return for turning its back on Palestinians.

The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 has occasionally been mentioned in news reports on the current uprising. That treaty was an arrangement in which the Egyptian leader of the time, Anwar Sadat, stopped opposing Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing of close to a million indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians (at least 750,000 in 1947-49 and an additional 200,000 in 1967). This removed the most populous and politically significant country from the Arab front opposing Israel’s illegal actions and led the way for other nations to "normalize" relations with the abnormal situation in Palestine.

In return, Israel gave back to Egypt the Sinai, Egyptian land it had illegally annexed in its 1967 war of aggression. (Egypt had almost managed to re-conquer this land and more in 1973, but the most massive airlift in American history, engineered by Henry Kissinger under pressure from the Israeli lobby, was sent to Israel, preventing this outcome.)

Also in return, the United States agreed to give Egypt more US tax money than any other nation, with the exception of Israel. Since 1979, Egypt has received an annual average of close to $2 billion in economic and political aid from American taxpayers (most of whom have known nothing about this use of our money). The arrangement has allowed Mubarak to stay in power for decades despite periodic attempts by Egyptians to free themselves from his ruthless rule.

At the same time, it’s important to note that the U.S., as broker of the peace treaty, gave Israel even greater rewards: guaranteeing Israel’s oil supplies for the next fifteen years; assuring Israel of American support in the event of violations; committing to be "responsive" to Israel’s military and economic requirements; and promising a variety of major transfers of technology and aid, including $3 billion to relocate two Israeli air bases out of the Sinai, where, as journalist Donald Neff noted, they had no right to be in the first place.

In fact, the American financial arrangement with Israel, which had begun years before Egypt’s, has been far cozier than Egypt’s: Israel gets considerably more money from the US, even though its population is one-tenth of Egypt’s; there is little U.S. oversight of how it uses that money; and, unlike Egypt, which receives its allotment monthly, Israel receives its handout in a lump sum at the very beginning of the fiscal year (which means that Americans then pay interest for the rest of the year on money that the government has already given away, while Israel makes interest on it).

In the cases of both Israel and Egypt, the Israel lobby’s role in procuring this U.S. tax money has been central. While this fact is largely missing from US media reports and many liberal/left analyses, it is frequently referred to in Israeli and xxxish media. For example, a current xxxish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report states: "The question of whether to stake a claim in the protests against 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy is a key one for the pro-Israel lobby and pro-Israel lawmakers because of the role they have played in making Egypt one of the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. aid."

As conditions change in Egypt, U.S. lawmakers known for their allegiance to Israel are evaluating what to do about U.S aid. Many such Israel partisans have particularly powerful and relevant positions, such as Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the foreign operations subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee; Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Middle East subcommittee; Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Foreign Affairs committee and the author of last year’s sweeping Iran sanctions law; and Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev), member of the subcommittee on the Middle East of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. A person close to the Israel lobby notes: "No matter what happens, clearly one of the top criteria Congress is likely to use is Egypt’s approach to its peace treaty obligations with Israel."

Through the years a variety of Egyptian groups have opposed the Egyptian regime, some using violence (while the regime has used greater violence against them). This is virtually always reported without context and in extremely negative terms, without noting that it is routine for resistance movements to use violence; the American Revolutionary War was not known for its nonviolence. Yet, Israeli-centric U.S. media rarely discuss this.

In recent years, Mubarak has collaborated with Israel in closing off the Gaza Strip, largely imprisoning 1.5 million men, women, and children, resulting in a humanitarian disaster in which children suffer malnutrition, stunting, and trauma, and 300 Gazan patients have died through lack of essential medical supplies or being denied exit passes for medical care. Egyptian citizens, furious at their nation’s complicity in this cruelty, have been powerless to stop it.

Israel has long worked to create enmity between Egypt and the U.S. In the early 1950s the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, hatched a plan to firebomb areas in Egypt where Americans gathered — and to make these attacks appear to be the work of Muslim extremists. The plot was discovered and caused a scandal in Israel known as the "Lavon Affair," but few Americans have ever heard of it. Some analysts suspect that other such plots succeeded and that the little-known Israeli attack on the U.S. Navy ship USS Liberty may have been a similar false-flag operation. (Certainly, there is little doubt that the U.S. would have attacked Egypt if Liberty crewmembers had not succeeded, against all odds, in getting a distress signal out before Israel succeeded in sinking the ship with all men aboard.)

Another little-discussed result of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty was the creation of an international peacekeeping force in the Sinai, known as the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), charged with mediating between Egypt and Israel. It is telling that this force was not placed on Israeli land but instead occupies Egyptian territory.

Its current head is Ambassador David M. Satterfield, an American diplomat who served extensively in the Middle East, was Senior Advisor on Iraq for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and held a number of other high positions in the state department, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of State.

In 2005 Satterfield was named as having provided classified information to an official of the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. According to documents, Satterfield had discussed secret national security matters in at least two meetings with AIPAC official Steven J. Rosen, who was subsequently indicted by the U.S. Justice Department (later quashed over the objections of the FBI.)

In 2004 Satterfield presided at a State Department conference on the 1967 war. A Washington Report on Middle East Affairs report on this conference stated that Satterfield repeatedly referred to Palestinian terrorism while failing to mention Israel’s brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians. The article reports "Satterfield’s remarks dampened audience expectations for an even-handed U.S. approach to peacemaking."

Among those in the audience at the conference’s panel on the USS Liberty, though not on the panel itself were USS Liberty survivors, trying to tell their story. State Department moderator Marc Susser quickly cut them off, and his treatment of the survivors reportedly "bordered on abusive."

Now, David Satterfield is heading up international forces occupying Egyptian land charged with being a "neutral" mediator between Egypt and Israel.

It is unknown whether his conversations with AIPAC continue.

http://original.antiwar.com/alison-weir/2011/02/04/critical-connections-egypt-the-us-and-israel%C2%A0/

[londontsi]

Re: Revolutions in the Middle East

The bad part is it's ripe to install a system that runs on debt in which case, much is expected of you.

Sounds like a recipe for a revolution.

What another one?