EGYPT MILIRATY COUP ORCHESTRATED BY ISRAEL AND THE US – FUNDED BY AMERICAN AND GULF MONEY
by Syarif Hidayat*
The latest military coup d’etat in Egypt was orchestrated by Israel and the United States.
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. The God Almighty Allah has warned Muslims in Al Qur’an. “Never will the Jews nor the Christians be pleased with you (O Muhammad Peace be upon him ) till you follow their religion. Say: “Verily, the Guidance of Allâh (i.e. Islâmic Monotheism) that is the (only) Guidance. And if you (O Muhammad Peace be upon him ) were to follow their (Jews and Christians) desires after what you have received of Knowledge (i.e. the Qur’ân), then you would have against Allâh neither any Walî (protector or guardian) nor any helper.” (Al Qur’an, Surah Al Baqara, Verse 120)
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported: Marathon phone calls about the coup took place between Jerusalem and Washington. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon spoke with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror spoke with his White House counterpart, Susan Rice. The senior American official said the talks were aimed at coordinating U.S. and Israeli positions on the Egyptian crisis.
Political analyst Michael Burns said that the United States is trying to protect the interests of Israel regarding the recent chaos in Egypt. “In respect to Egypt, we are trying to protect the interests of Israel,” he told Press TV. He made the remarks after it was revealed that the man who was behind the recent military coup in Egypt was a student at the U.S. Army War College, Egyptian Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, who engineered the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi on Wednesday, attended the war college in Carlisle, Pa., in 2006.
Egyptian military coup was ordered by Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice, according to New York Times report. Scott Creighton in his article titled: “Egyptian Military Coup Ordered by Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice – New York Times”writes this ends the debate as to what this color revolution really was. They offered President Morsi the opportunity to stay on as a kind of figurehead puppet, but he had to give up control to a prime minister and cabinet hand picked by Washington. Morsi refused and Susan E. Rice gave the order for the military coup to begin.
Susan E. Rice had told deposed Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s team that the president would leave office an hour before his ouster by the military, a report says. An Arab foreign minister had called Morsi as an emissary of the United States to give him one final chance to make changes to his cabinet to end the standoff with the military, The New York Times reported. Senior advisors with Morsi said the minister, not named in the report, made the call several hours before the announcement of the president’s ouster by the military on Wednesday to ask for the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet. The new cabinet would have assumed all legislative powers and replaced Morsi’s appointed provincial governors.
Morsi’s top foreign policy adviser, Essam al-Haddad, who was with Morsi when the call came through, then left the room to call U.S. ambassador to Egypt Anne W. Patterson to notify Washington that Morsi had refused to comply, the U.S. daily said. Upon returning to the room, Haddad said he had called Susan Rice, Morsi’s aides said. “Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” read a text message sent by an aide to his associate, referring to “Mother America,” the Egyptians’ sarcastic name for the Western power that has for years supported the Egyptian military with billions of dollars in aid.
Gen. Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian defense minister and the country’s top military commander, announced on Wednesday that the army had removed Morsi from power. After the TV announcement, the military said Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, had “failed to meet the demands of the Egyptian people.” Morsi was the Muslim Brotherhood’s envoy in talks with the military, represented by General Sisi, following the overthrow of Egypt’s long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak in early 2011. Later the relationship between them developed, according to a senior Brotherhood official close to Morsi, to the level that the president “trusted him.” In a surprise move last summer, Morsi appointed General Sisi defense minister.
Over his short-lived tenure as president, Morsi was frequently accused by the opposition groups of seeking to monopolize power. In a meeting with Haddad in Washington last December, U.S. President Barack Obama had urged the Muslim Brotherhood to include the opposition in the government, according to the Times. Secretary of State John Kerry had even suggested naming former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei as prime minister to ease tensions with the opposition groups but Morsi had rejected the idea, the U.S. paper said.
Mossad and CIA Orchestrate Coup in Egypt
According to an article titled “Mossad Orchestrates Coup in Egypt – Proof” published in http://nodisinfo.com July 6, 2013, it was the Mossad and its proxy agents in the CIA which orchestrated the coup in Egypt, not a popular uprising backed by the military. Any military involvement in such a coup was mere an extension of the Mossad crime through it collaborators in the U.S. government-backed Egyptian military. In a Kermit Roosevelt-style fake protest act, the same kind that led to the toppling of the democratically elected government of Iran, 1956 (Mohammed Mossadeq), the legitimate government of Egypt was toppled by force and also through coercion and deceit.
Moreover, it was done strictly by Zionist Jews. Can no one see it? It is all a scam. Protests: who could possibly believe that 22 million people suddenly flooded the streets of Egypt out of nowhere, considering that at least half the population still supports Morsi. Where is the proof for such protests: where, where, where? Pictures? Live video cams: 22 million people wouldn’t be difficult to miss. Moreover, can the pictures be confirmed to be from this time? Live video cam is the most reliable source. Even so, what does that have to do with a military coup, essentially occurring of July? Numerology and Satanism, anyone? Disguised as sayanim moles and also not so well disguised, the Jews were on the ground fomenting the corruption.
Meanwhile the rich countries in the Gulf region especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) poured billions of US dollars into the coffers of Egypt’s army rulers in cash, grants, loans without interest and gifts of gas, a dizzying life-saving infusion into its tottering Egyptian economy and a review of dozens of US federal government documents shows Washington has quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of the country’s now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.
West and ‘Israel’ behind coup in Egypt
Former Secretary General of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah Subhi al-Tufayli told the Turkish news agency Anadolu his opinion on the events in Egypt and the participation of the units of “Hezbollah” in the war on the side of Bashar al-Assad. Speaking of the military coup in Egypt and the overthrow of Mohammed Mursi, al-Tufayli said that “Israel” and western countries were behind it. According to him, numerous resignations in the government of Egypt in the last year were designed to show the incompetence of Egyptian authorities, headed by Mursi and the fact that the state built under the auspices of Muslim Brotherhood had no future.
He noted that the pressure on the Muslim Brotherhood continues, and there is no mechanism that would protect them. Al-Tufayli said that before the coup certain forces created chaos in the economy, so they could accuse the government of failing to run the country. “In Egypt, where there had been problems with lights and heating, all these places got electricity and heating almost immediately after the coup. It can be concluded that, in Egypt, people deliberately had been set up against the government”, he said.
Al-Tufayli poke out sharply against the so-called “interim president” of Egypt Adly Mansour. According to him, Mansour needs to admit that the military coup and his appointment contradict the constitution, for which the people voted. Turning to the situation in Syria, the former leader of Hezbollah condemned the participation of Shiites in the war in that country. He believes that because of this, the clashes may have been pushed into Lebanon, and this may have led to the sectarian war.
Moreover, Al-Tufayli is convinced, the participation of Hezbollah in the Syrian war weakened Lebanese resistance to “Israel”. According to him, Hezbollah should leave Syria and return to Lebanon, and Iran should reconsider its Middle East policy for the benefit of Muslims. Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, one of the founders of the Hezbollah, led the movement in 1989-1991. In 1997, he proclaimed a civil disobedience campaign to protest against the deterioration of social and economic situation of Shiites in Lebanon. In response, the Hezbollah decided to expel al-Tufayli from this movement in 1998.
US funded anti-Morsi activists
Emad Mekay in his article titled “US funded anti-Morsi activists” published in www.aljazeera.com writes President Barack Obama recently stated the United States was not taking sides as Egypt’s crisis came to a head with the military overthrow of the democratically elected president. But a review of dozens of US federal government documents shows Washington has quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of the country’s now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.
Documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley show the US channeled funding through a State Department programme to promote democracy in the Middle East region. This programme vigorously supported activists and politicians who have fomented unrest in Egypt, after autocratic president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising in February 2011.
The State Department’s programme, dubbed by US officials as a “democracy assistance” initiative, is part of a wider Obama administration effort to try to stop the retreat of pro-Washington secularists, and to win back influence in Arab Spring countries that saw the rise of Islamists, who largely oppose US interests in the Middle East. Activists bankrolled by the programme include an exiled Egyptian police officer who plotted the violent overthrow of the Morsi government, an anti-Islamist politician who advocated closing mosques and dragging preachers out by force, as well as a coterie of opposition politicians who pushed for the ouster of the country’s first democratically elected leader, government documents show.
Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, interviews, and public records reveal Washington’s “democracy assistance” may have violated Egyptian law, which prohibits foreign political funding. It may also have broken US government regulations that ban the use of taxpayers’ money to fund foreign politicians, or finance subversive activities that target democratically elected governments.
‘Bureau for Democracy’
Washington’s democracy assistance programme for the Middle East is filtered through a pyramid of agencies within the State Department. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars is channeled through the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), The Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), USAID, as well as the Washington-based, quasi-governmental organisation the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
In turn, those groups re-route money to other organisations such as the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House, among others. Federal documents show these groups have sent funds to certain organisations in Egypt, mostly run by senior members of anti-Morsi political parties who double as NGO activists.
The Middle East Partnership Initiative – launched by the George W Bush administration in 2002 in a bid to influence politics in the Middle East in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks – has spent close to $900m on democracy projects across the region, a federal grants database shows. USAID manages about $1.4bn annually in the Middle East, with nearly $390m designated for democracy promotion, according to the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).
The US government doesn’t issue figures on democracy spending per country, but Stephen McInerney, POMED’s executive director, estimated that Washington spent some $65m in 2011 and $25m in 2012. He said he expects a similar amount paid out this year. A main conduit for channeling the State Department’s democracy funds to Egypt has been the National Endowment for Democracy. Federal documents show NED, which in 2011 was authorised an annual budget of $118m by Congress, funneled at least $120,000 over several years to an exiled Egyptian police officer who has for years incited violence in his native country.
This appears to be in direct contradiction to its Congressional mandate, which clearly states NED is to engage only in “peaceful” political change overseas.
Exiled policeman
Colonel Omar Afifi Soliman – who served in Egypt’s elite investigative police unit, notorious for human rights abuses – began receiving NED funds in 2008 for at least four years. During that time he and his followers targeted Mubarak’s government, and Soliman later followed the same tactics against the military rulers who briefly replaced him. Most recently Soliman set his sights on Morsi’s government.
Soliman, who has refugee status in the US, was sentenced in absentia last year for five years imprisonment by a Cairo court for his role in inciting violence in 2011 against the embassies of Israel and Saudi Arabia, two US allies. He also used social media to encourage violent attacks against Egyptian officials, according to court documents and a review of his social media posts. US Internal Revenue Service documents reveal thatNED paid tens of thousands of dollars to Soliman through an organisation he created called Hukuk Al-Nas (People’s Rights), based in Falls Church, Virginia. Federal forms show he is the only employee.
After he was awarded a 2008 human rights fellowship at NED and moved to the US, Soliman received a second $50,000 NED grant in 2009 for Hukuk Al-Nas. In 2010, he received $60,000 and another $10,000 in 2011. In an interview with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, Soliman reluctantly admitted he received US government funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, but complained it wasn’t enough. “It is like $2000 or $2,500 a month,” he said. “Do you think this is too much? Obama wants to give us peanuts. We will not accept that.”
NED has removed public access to its Egyptian grant recipients in 2011 and 2012 from its website. NED officials didn’t respond to repeated interview requests.
‘Pro bono advice’
NED’s website says Soliman spreads only nonviolent literature, and his group was set up to provide “immediate, pro bono legal advice through a telephone hotline, instant messaging, and other social networking tools”. However, in Egyptian media interviews, social media posts and YouTube videos, Soliman encouraged the violent overthrow of Egypt’s government, then led by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.
“Incapacitate them by smashing their knee bones first,” he instructed followers on Facebook in late June, as Morsi’s opponents prepared massive street rallies against the government. Egypt’s US-funded and trainedmilitary later used those demonstrations to justify its coup on July 3. “Make a road bump with a broken palm tree to stop the buses going into Cairo, and drench the road around it with gas and diesel. When the bus slows down for the bump, set it all ablaze so it will burn down with all the passengers inside … God bless,” Soliman’s post read.
In late May he instructed, “Behead those who control power, water and gas utilities.” Soliman removed several older social media posts after authorities in Egypt took notice of his subversive instructions, court documents show. More recent Facebook instructions to his 83,000 followers range from guidelines on spraying roads with a mix of auto oil and gas – “20 liters of oil to 4 liters of gas”- to how to thwart cars giving chase.
On a YouTube video, Soliman took credit for a failed attempt in December to storm the Egyptian presidential palace with handguns and Molotov cocktails to oust Morsi. “We know he gets support from some groups in the US, but we do not know he is getting support from the US government. This would be news to us,” said an Egyptian embassy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Funding other Morsi opponents
Other beneficiaries of US government funding are also opponents of the now-deposed president, some who had called for Morsi’s removal by force. The Salvation Front main opposition bloc, of which some members received US funding, has backed street protest campaigns that turned violent against the elected government, in contradiction of many of the State Department’s own guidelines.
A longtime grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy and other US democracy groups is a 34-year old Egyptian woman, Esraa Abdel-Fatah, who sprang to notoriety during the country’s pitched battle over the new constitution in December 2012. She exhorted activists to lay siege to mosques and drag from pulpits all Muslim preachers and religious figures who supported the country’s the proposed constitution, just before it went to a public referendum.
The act of besieging mosques has continued ever since, and several people have died in clashes defending them. Federal records show Abdel-Fatah’s NGO, the Egyptian Democratic Academy, received support from NED, MEPI and NDI, among other State Department-funded groups “assisting democracy”. Records show NED gave her organisation a one-year $75,000 grant in 2011.
Abdel-Fatah is politically active, crisscrossing Egypt to rally support for her Al-Dostor Party, which is led by former UN nuclear chief Mohamed El-Baradei, the most prominent figure in the Salvation Front. She lent full support to the military takeover, and urged the West not call it a “coup”. “June 30 will be the last day of Morsi’s term,” she told the press a few weeks before the coup took place.
US taxpayer money has also been sent to groups set up by some of Egypt’s richest people, raising questions about waste in the democracy programme. Michael Meunier is a frequent guest on TV channels that opposed Morsi. Head of the Al-Haya Party, Meunier – a dual US-Egyptian citizen – has quietly collected US funding through his NGO, Hand In Hand for Egypt Association.
Meunier’s organisation was founded by some of the most vehement opposition figures, including Egypt’s richest man and well-known Coptic Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, Tarek Heggy, an oil industry executive, Salah Diab, Halliburton’s partner in Egypt, and Usama Ghazali Harb, a politician with roots in the Mubarak regime and a frequent US embassy contact.
Meunier has denied receiving US assistance, but government documents show USAID in 2011 granted his Cairo-based organisation $873,355. Since 2009, it has taken in $1.3 million from the US agency. Meunier helped rally the country’s five million Christian Orthodox Coptic minority, who oppose Morsi’s Islamist agenda, to take to the streets against the president on June 30.
Reform and Development Party member Mohammed Essmat al-Sadat received US financial support through his Sadat Association for Social Development, a grantee of The Middle East Partnership Initiative. The federal grants records and database show in 2011 Sadat collected $84,445 from MEPI “to work with youth in the post-revolutionary Egypt”.
Sadat was a member of the coordination committee, the main organising body for the June 30 anti-Morsi protest. Since 2008, he has collected $265,176 in US funding. Sadat announced he will be running for office again in upcoming parliamentary elections. After soldiers and police killed more than 50 Morsi supporters on Monday, Sadat defended the use of force and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood, saying it used women and children as shields.
Some US-backed politicians have said Washington tacitly encouraged them to incite protests. “We were told by the Americans that if we see big street protests that sustain themselves for a week, they will reconsider all current US policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood regime,” said Saaddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American politician opposed Morsi.
Ibrahim’s Ibn Khaldoun Center in Cairo receives US funding, one of the largest recipients of democracy promotion money in fact. His comments followed statements by other Egyptian opposition politicians claiming they had been prodded by US officials to whip up public sentiment against Morsi before Washington could publicly weigh in.
Democracy programme defence
The practice of funding politicians and anti-government activists through NGOs was vehemently defended by the State Department and by a group of Washington-based Middle East experts close to the programme. “The line between politics and activism is very blurred in this country,” said David Linfield, spokesman for the US Embassy in Cairo.
Others said the United States cannot be held responsible for activities by groups it doesn’t control. “It’s a very hot and dynamic political scene,” said Michelle Dunne, an expert at the Atlantic Council think-tank. Her husband, Michael Dunne, was given a five-year jail sentence in absentia by a Cairo court for his role in political funding in Egypt. “Just because you give someone some money, you cannot take away their freedom or the position they want to take,” said Dunne.
Elliot Abrams, a former official in the administration of George W. Bush and a member of the Working Group on Egypt that includes Dunne, denied in an email message that the US has paid politicians in Egypt, or elsewhere in the Middle East. “The US does not provide funding for parties or ‘local politicians’ in Egypt or anywhere else,” said Abrams. “That is prohibited by law and the law is scrupulously obeyed by all US agencies, under careful Congressional oversight.”
But a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said American support for foreign political activists was in line with American principles. “The US government provides support to civil society, democracy and human rights activists around the world, in line with our long-held values, such as respecting the fundamental human rights of free speech, peaceful assembly, and human dignity,” the official wrote in an email. “US outreach in Egypt is consistent with these principles.” A Cairo court convicted 43 local and foreign NGO workers last month on charges of illegally using foreign funds to stir unrest in Egypt. The US and UN expressed concern over the move.
Out of line
Some Middle East observers suggested the US’ democracy push in Egypt may be more about buying influence than spreading human rights and good governance. “Funding of politicians is a problem,” said Robert Springborg, who evaluated democracy programmes for the State Department in Egypt, and is now a professor at the National Security Department of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California.
“If you run a programme for electoral observation, or for developing media capacity for political parties, I am not against that. But providing lots of money to politicians – I think that raises lots of questions,” Springborg said. Some Egyptians, meanwhile, said the US was out of line by sending cash through its democracy programme in the Middle East to organisations run by political operators.
“Instead of being sincere about backing democracy and reaching out to the Egyptian people, the US has chosen an unethical path,” said Esam Neizamy, an independent researcher into foreign funding in Egypt, and a member of the country’s Revolutionary Trustees, a group set up to protect the 2011 revolution. “The Americans think they can outsmart lots of people in the Middle East. They are being very hostile against the Egyptian people who have nothing but goodwill for them – so far,” Neizamy said.
Egyptian army’s financial coup: 12 billion petrodollars from Gulf fans
According to DEBKA Weekly (www.debka.com ), in a dazzling display of monetary muscle, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates poured $8 billion in a single day into the coffers of Egypt’s army rulers in cash, grants, loans without interest and gifts of gas, a dizzying life-saving infusion into its tottering economy. Forking out sums on this scale in a single day – or even month – is beyond the capacity of almost every world power – even the US and Russia – in this age of economic distress. The Arab oil colossuses managed to dwarf Iran’s pretensions to the standing of regional power.
Tuesday, July 9, just six days after the Egyptian army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, a UAE delegation of foreign and energy ministers and national security adviser landed in Cairo. They came carrying the gifts of $1 billion as a grant and $2 billion in long-term credit. In well-orchestrated moves, Saudi Arabia then stepped forward with a $5 billion package, of which a lump sum of $2 billion was drafted to Egypt’s state bank that day, followed by another $2 billion as a gift of Saudi gas, and a further $1 billion for propping up the sagging Egyptian currency. The delivery by two Arab governments to a third of financial assistance on this scale and on a single day is unheard of in the Middle East, or, indeed, anwhere else.
As they celebrate Ramadan, 84 million Egyptians can start looking forward to a square meal at the end of their month of fasting. This river of largesse was the outcome of a development first revealed by DEBKA file last week: The Egyptian military high command was not working alone when its operations headquarters put together the July 3 takeover of power from the Muslim Brotherhood; it was coordinated closely down to the last detail with the palaces of the Saudi and UAE rulers and the operations rooms of their intelligence services.
The last DEBKA Weekly issue 594 (July 5) carried details of the military-intelligence mechanism at work between the three governments.
The coming issue, out next Friday, July 12, offers further revelations of how this mechanism is designed to shore up Egypt’s post-coup regime and restore the strife-torn country, the most populous in the Arab world, to its traditional eminence. Cairo is assigned a lead role in a Sunni Muslim bloc stretching from the Gulf to Cairo (with room for quiet collaboration with Israel) to withstand the challenges posed by the alliance of Russia, Iran, Syria and the Lebanese Hizballah.
The petrodollar shower for Egypt did not end with the $8 billion from Saudi Arabia and the UAE: Kuwait has pledged another $5 billion – later amended to $4 billion – in a secret communication to Riyadh. It will be released after the sheikhdom’s parliamentary elections on July 27, and so raise total Gulf Arab bounty to Egypt to the staggering total of $12 billion. Friendly assistance on this scale tends to diminish the relevance of Washington’s dilemmas over the continuation of its $1.3 billion aid package to Egypt after a military coup, of which $700 million is due this year.
The suggestion that US aid may be used to hasten Egypt’s “swift return to a democratically elected civilian government” loses its force when Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both guaranteed to make up any shortfalls in US aid to Egypt. On June 26, Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Kadri Jamil boasted that Moscow, Beijing and Tehran were contributing half a billion dollars per month to Syria’s war chest. “It’s not so bad to have Russia, China and Iran on your side,” he gloated. Egypt can now boast to have far outstripped Syria in foreign support – $12 billion in a single month, compared with a mere $6 billion in a year.
Why the White House avoids using the word “coup” ?
This is why the White House has avoided using the word “coup,” because, as Reuters explained, “calling the military intervention a ‘coup’…would trigger legal obstacles to continuing aid payments.” The New York Times‘ Caucus blog adds that Egypt has been the second-largest recipient of American aid, behind Israel, since 1979, as a reward and incentive for its peace with the Jewish nation, and the military continues to support that treaty.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney repeatedly dodged any confirmation that Morsi’s overthrow was a coup, saying instead the situation in Egypt was “complex and difficult” and that the Obama administration has no immediate plans to halt aid to Egypt. I think it would not be in the best interest of the United States to immediately change our assistance programs to Egypt. We think — not just I, but we think that it would not be in the best interest of the United States to do that. We are reviewing our obligations under the law and we will be consulting with Congress about the way forward with regards to, specifically, the assistance package that we provide.
The State Department made similar statement, saying in a press briefing, “Our focus is on returning stability to the region.” Israel’s interests in the U.S. maintaining its hefty aid to the Egyptian military prompted “marathon phone calls” to U.S. officials this weekend, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported: Marathon phone calls about the coup took place between Jerusalem and Washington over the weekend.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon spoke with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror spoke with his White House counterpart, Susan Rice. The senior American official said the talks were aimed at coordinating U.S. and Israeli positions on the Egyptian crisis. During those calls, and in follow-up conversations afterward, the Israelis warned that cutting military aid to Egypt would likely impact negatively on Israel’s security, especially given the possibility of further security deterioration in Sinai.
They also warned that halting the aid could undermine Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt. Foreign policy analyst Jim Lobe noted similar comments from other pro-Israel voices, including the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal. Lobe wrote: Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s hard-line neo-conservative editorial board stressed Washington had too much at stake to disassociate itself in any way from the military, insisting that “cutting (military aid) off now would be a mistake. Unpopular as America is in Egypt, 1.3 billion dollars in annual military aid buys access with the generals. U.S. support for Cairo is written into the Camp David peace accords with Israel,” according to its lead editorial.
This ends the debate as to what this colorful Egyptian revolution really was. (T/E1/P03)
Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)
*Editor of MINA
Sources:
1. http://nodisinfo.com
