The Arab tyrannies have long tried to distract their people from their miserable lives by focusing anger on scapegoats. The fact that there is no employment in Egypt outside of the government has nothing at all to do with Copts, Israel, or the West but is caused by corrupt leaders is irrelevant to the ignorant mobs.
by Benny Avni
The Arab Spring is turning sour for Egypt’s Christian Coptic minority — whose future now seems even bleaker than it was under the deposed President Hosni Mubarak.
Rioting Saturday in the Imbaba neighborhood, northwest of downtown Cairo, killed 12 people and injured 250 and set two churches ablaze. The cause? A Muslim man alleged that his wife, a Copt who’d converted to Islam, had been kidnapped by her Christian brethren and held hostage inside a church.
The riots, which have yet to die down, were initiated by the bearded men of the harsh Salafist branch of Islam, which is intolerant not only of Christians and Jews but also of Shiites, Sufis and other “heretics” who have strayed from the religion’s supposed early roots. Copts and Egypt’s pro-democracy forces have also blamed the security forces for failing to protect them.
Some 10 percent of Egypt’s population, the Copts are one of the world’s oldest Christian communities and the Mideast’s largest minority. When allowed, they’ve reached the highest echelons of Egyptian society. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a foreign minister who became UN secretary-general, is but one example.
But for decades now, as Egypt’s economy deteriorated along with its status as leader of the Arab world, Copts have been targeted for attacks — with the Mubarak regime’s passive (and sometime active) approval.
In Mubarak’s later years, Copts complained that Salafists and other Islamists kidnapped Christian women, forcing them to marry Muslims and convert to Islam. As government-related job openings (Egypt’s only economic opportunity) became more scarce, security officials ignored and at times participated in violence against Copts or their religious symbols.
But that was old Egypt, right? Wrong. With the same military establishment and permanent bureaucracy that have held power for the last half-century still running the show, change is coming slowly. When Islamist demonstrators called for the head of the new Coptic governor of the southern Qena province, Emad Mikhail, new Prime Minister Essam Sheraf suspended the appointment last month.
Under Mubarak, sectarian strife was treated as a “security” matter, with the police suppressing all sides, says Cairo University Islamic studies scholar Ali Mabrook, a major advocate of religious tolerance. But with Mubarak gone, passions are erupting.
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This is an old Arab tradition: Unite the people by distracting them from issues like jobs, the rule of law, education and prosperity while igniting passions that are irrelevant to their daily lives. The new attacks on Copts fit that tactic perfectly: “Infidels” are as good as a piñata for venting frustrations as any.
Unlike several Arab countries — Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and even Iraq, to name a few — where sectarian strife frustrates any would-be democrat, Egypt is largely a homogenous, Sunni society. The plight of Copts therefore hasn’t dominated the headlines and is unlikely to change the way we view the Arab world’s journey toward democracy.
But this isn’t only about Copts. Egypt won’t be fully free of its pharaohs until it rids itself of a culture that seeks scapegoats in lieu of policy that benefits its people. Only when a minority ceases to be the target of riots, and only when its talented members are reintegrated into Egypt’s leadership, will we know that a true Arab Spring is around the corner.
Read the rest here: Egypt’s scapegoats
The ineptitude that Hillary Clinton has shown as Secretary of State in dealing with the Middle East has me wondering how much of an improvement over Obama she really would have been as POTUS. Her hedging over Syrian brutality and her cautious response to the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation leads me to think that she really is not as smart as her admirers always made her out to be.
by Michael Goodwin
Imagine this nightmare. In stead of sending a team of SEALs to ice Osama bin Laden, President Obama sent a team of negotiators to see if we could talk the terror lord into promises of peace. All he had to do was say the right words, and we’d say 9/11 and all the threats about destroying the Great Satan were forgiven, and gee, let’s be friends.
It’s a sickening scenario, yet it’s not far from what the world, including the United States, is asking Israel to do with Hamas. The Israelis are expected to break bread with the people who still threaten to wipe them off the face of the earth and regularly fire rockets into towns and cities.
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It’s far from clear the truce will hold, and the jockeying for power has begun. Yet pressure is already building on Israel to make a deal that will lead to a unified Palestinian state, despite the fact that Hamas has not met the American and European demand that it renounce violence and accept Israel’s right to exist.
Indeed, one top Hamas leader told al-Jazeera this week that Hamas would never recognize Israel and “the rule of Poles and Ethiopians in their land.” Another denounced the killing of bin Laden and called him “an Arab holy warrior” and martyr.
Those sentiments are hardly a surprise, but what is surprising is that the Obama administration doesn’t see them as red flags. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton swatted away concerns, saying, “We are going to be carefully assessing what this actually means, because there are a number of different potential meanings to it, both on paper and in practice.” She said the United States has not changed its demands on Hamas, but would make a decision when “we actually see what unfolds.”
That’s the wrong answer. As Elliott Abrams writes on his blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, “The United States needs to be far clearer: we cannot and will not support any government where Hamas has a real influence and the security forces stop fighting terror.”
A deputy national security adviser for Mideast affairs under President George W. Bush, Abrams adds that “we must certainly not fund such a government.”
That’s got to be the American bottom line, but by taking such a wait-and-see attitude, the White House is doing something far worse than merely kicking the can down the road. It is effectively giving a green light to letting Hamas join, and maybe run, the Palestinian government without giving up its charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel. Coming as Israelis celebrate their 63rd anniversary of independence, it’s a mighty strange gift.
Alarmed by the White House approach, 27 Democratic senators wrote to Obama, reminding him that the US cannot legally provide aid to any government that includes Hamas, which is a listed terror group. It also cited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning that Fatah can have “peace with Israel or peace with Hamas” but “there is no possibility for peace with both.”
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Read the rest here: Beware, Bam, of unholy alliance
Tags: Benny Avni, Michael Goodwin
