Pew poll: Egyptians want to scrap Camp David, prefer sharia law

A new Pew Research poll of Egypt shows some worrying trends.

No dividend emerges for the United States from the political changes that have occurred in Egypt. Favorable ratings of the U.S. remain as low as they have been in recent years, and many Egyptians say they want a less close relationship with America. Israel fares even more poorly. By a 54%-to-36% margin, Egyptians want the peace treaty with that country annulled.

The military is now almost universally seen (88%) as having a good influence on the way things are going in Egypt. Fully 90% rate military chief Mohamed Tantawi favorably.

Egyptians are welcoming some forms of change more than others. While half say it is very important that religious parties be allowed to be part of the government, only 27% give a similar priority to assuring that the military falls under civilian control. Relatively few (39%) give high priority to women having the same rights as men. Women themselves are more likely to say it is very important that they are assured equal rights than are men (48% vs. 30%). Overall, just 36% think it is very important that Coptic Christians and other religious minorities are able to freely practice their religions.

Egyptians hold diverse views about religion. About six-in-ten (62%) think laws should strictly follow the teachings of the Quran. However, only 31% of Egyptian Muslims say they sympathize with Islamic fundamentalists, while nearly the same number (30%) say they sympathize with those who disagree with the fundamentalists, and 26% have mixed views on this question. Those who disagree with fundamentalists are almost evenly divided on whether the treaty with Israel should be annulled, while others favor ending the pact by a goodly margin.

If more than half of those who favor Shari'a law are not sympathetic to "fundamentalists," this means that the Arab definition of "fundamentalist" is much different than the Western definition. After all, wanting to have the nation ruled by religious law is, by definition, a fundamentalist position.

This means that Western journalists and pundits who try to paint the Muslim Brotherhood as outside the mainstream of Egypt are missing the real story.

Only 20% of Egyptians hold a favorable opinion of the United States, which is nearly identical to the 17% who rated it favorably in 2010. Better educated and younger Egyptians have a slightly more positive attitude toward the U.S. than do other Egyptians.

Looking to the future, few Egyptians (15%) want closer ties with the U.S., while 43% would prefer a more distant relationship, and 40% would like the relationship between the two countries to remain about as close as it has been in recent years.

So in what sense is Egypt considered an "ally" of the US again?

The worst way to form a government, except for all the others (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

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Earlier this week, Avigdor Lieberman decided, for some reason, that he would not join PM Netanyahu’s coalition (yes, he gave ‘reasons’, but nobody takes them seriously). Coalition negotiations with Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, the last to get on board, continued until a few hours before the deadline for Netanyahu to present his putative coalition of 61 Knesset members to President Rivlin.

As I make the final update to my post on Thursday morning, the excitement is over. Bennett demanded and got the Justice Ministry portfolio for Ayelet Shaked. There will be a Likud government with 61 mandates, the narrowest possible margin, a government that can be knocked over by the defection of a single member.

There were other possibilities. Netanyahu and Bennett might not have come to agreement, or some other member of the coalition suddenly might have decided to make a new demand despite having signed an agreement. Netanyahu might have chosen to invite Labor’s Herzog into a unity government; given the proper inducements, he would have agreed despite his protestations.

If Netanyahu hadn’t succeeded at the last moment, the President might have given the job of forming the coalition to some other Knesset member, like Herzog, who would probably have had even more trouble than Netanyahu. He might have tried to force a unity government. There is even the possibility that no member of the Knesset could form a coalition, in which case there would have to be new elections.

This is tremendously frustrating. There are big problems — internal and external — that require attention, and the PM and various party leaders who are ministers have spent almost two months negotiating with each other, having meetings (open and secret), hatching plots (Lieberman), etc. This is after the excruciating election campaign that went on from December to March.

I admire PM Netanyahu for being able to carry on at least the most important affairs of state during this protracted period, but this system is dysfunctional. And a 61-member coalition means that it isn’t over — Netanyahu will have to try to broaden the coalition after its inauguration unless he wants even more instability.

The parliamentary system is a good one, because it makes the government highly responsive to the will of the electorate, as expressed by their representatives in the Knesset. An ineffective government can be removed at any time. If only the US had such a system, Obama would be long gone! But the coalition process is problematic.

One suggestion is to simply get rid of the process by appointing as Prime Minister the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats. But this could have unintended consequences, if there are more than two parties in the race. Suppose there were three parties, two on the Right and one on the Left. If the right-wing parties received 39 seats each, and the single left-wing party got 52, the latter would win by a large margin — but the clear preference of the electorate for a right-wing government would be thwarted.

Another possibility would be to elect the Knesset and then have the MKs choose a Prime Minister from among themselves, by majority vote. One problem with this is that it removes the direct connection between the voter and the PM that is important if the people are to have confidence in the PM. Worse, it would produce backroom wheeling-and-dealing similar to what goes on in coalition negotiations, except that there wouldn’t be explicit coalition agreements.

What about direct election of a Prime Minister? Israel tried American-style separate elections for the Knesset and the Prime Minister in 1996 and 1999. This proved unsatisfactory because the elected PM didn’t necessarily have the base needed in the Knesset to form a stable coalition. Other suggestions that detach the PM from the Knesset could bring about the kind of paralysis that has characterized the relationship between the US President and the Congress.

Yet another idea would be to raise the minimum percentage of votes needed to enter the Knesset from the present 3.5% (5 Knesset seats) to a much larger value and then require that each party designate another party that would get its votes if it did not reach the threshold. This would make it more likely that one of the larger parties would get a majority, and simplify coalition negotiations if not. But it would also reduce the representation of minority views in the Knesset, in effect disenfranchising their voters (it could also produce an outcome with two large Jewish parties, each without a majority, and one smaller Arab party holding the balance of power).

Despite the frustration, this isn’t a simple problem, especially since the political propensity is to find ways to exploit unplanned loopholes in any system. Possibly, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous comment on democracy, the coalition system is the worst way to form a government — except for all the others.

Arab towns surrounded by Jewish communities have 0% unemployment

Mas-ha, Qarawat Bani Hassan and Biddya are three Arab towns that, according to the conventional wisdom, should be suffering more than most due to the suffocating presence of Jewish settlements surrounding them.

Here is a detail of B'Tselem's map showing the towns as islands of Arab brown among a sea of Jewish blue areas.

Yet today there is an Arabic article in Safa that says that the towns have a zero percent unemployment rate.

The article characterizes the issue as how the towns manage to thrive even though the evil Israelis built their evil apartheid wall (the dotted lines are for barriers that have not been built.)

The towns were commercial centers before the second intifada, and it appears that they used to get lots of Jewish customers to department stores lining their main street during the peaceful Oslo period when blowing up Jews only happened several times a year.

But when the suicide bombings became bad, they lost customers so the town leaders decided to re-orient their economy around manufacturing. Now they are filled with factories making glass, furniture and other goods.

This has caused their land prices to increase tenfold, from 10,000 Jordanian dinars per dunam to 100,000 dinars.

The new manufacturing sites are attracting Arabs from all over the West Bank, and factory owners cannot keep up with the demand for skilled workers. They claim that their wages are comparable to those of Arab workers in Jewish settlements, between 4000-7000 shekels a month.

Here's the kicker.

The business leaders of Qarawat Bani Hassan complain that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing to help them. On the contrary, they say that they are taxed heavily by the PA  and that they get literally nothing in return.

In fact, they say that the PA looks at them suspiciously. One business owner says that the Ministry of Finance considers successful businessmen to be thieves, sometimes accuse him of tax evasion, and at other times of money laundering.

The only people who seem threatened by the towns' success are the kleptocrats of the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps the NGOs who have little power over using these towns as propaganda against Israel (although they try.)

The story of Mas-ha, Qarawat Bani Hassan and Biddya shows that it isn't settlements that are ruining the economy under PA rule. It is PA rule itself, where jobs are used as political favors and corruption is the norm, where innovation is punished and laziness rewarded.

It also shows that the entire PA strategy isn't for helping their people but instead to do everything they can to demonize and diminish Israel on the world stage.

The people don't matter. "Winning" their zero sum game with Israel is the obsession of the PA, and the people who are abandoned are forced to do what they can in spite of their corrupt leaders.

Great article: "There's Something About Winning"

From the Jewish Journal, by David Suissa:

I’ll never forget sitting with a group of intellectuals several years ago, at the height of the messy war in Iraq, and discussing why President Bush and America had fallen so low in the esteem of the world. One great mind after another offered sophisticated analyses. My head was spinning.

Finally, someone piped up: “Everything would be different if Bush were winning the war.”

At which point a distinguished professor from Israel said: “This is brilliant! Bush’s real problem is that he’s not winning!” I sat there, slightly stunned, thinking: How can something so complicated lend itself to such an easy insight?

I reflected on that insight the other night when President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden after a nearly 10-year pursuit. Here was a president who had suffered relentless criticism for his handling of foreign affairs. And now, as Jeffrey Goldberg wrote on his blog: “Our President, in the blink of an eye, has gone from a hyper-criticized, seemingly-swamped possibly-one-term leader to an American hero, a commander-in-chief who calmly oversaw the killing of the greatest mass murderer in American history.”

And why did he become a hero? Not because he made one of his inspiring speeches or announced a brilliant new policy.

He became a hero because he got a win. It’s as simple — and as complicated — as that.

We love to teach our kids that life is not about winning and losing but “how you play the game.” That may be true when you’re dealing with people of good faith. But when you’re dealing with people who are out for blood, it’s a good idea to know how to win.

Naturally, Jews and Israel have always been juicy targets for people out for blood. So, how should one deal with such aggression?

I found a wonderful answer last week in a shoe store, of all places, on trendy St. Denis Street in downtown Montreal. The French Canadian owner of the store, who has been there for 25 years, decided last year to carry a woman’s shoe line from Israel called Beautifeel. Well, wouldn’t you know it, within a few months, a vicious boycott campaign was under way against the store, led by a popular local politician, Amir Khadir.

To give you an idea of the tone of their campaign, one of the boycotters’ leaflets had an oversize image of a woman’s shoe stomping on a pile of buried naked bodies — reminiscent of those horror shots of emaciated bodies you see in Holocaust documentaries. Written on the shoe was “Beautifeel. Made in Apartheid Israel.” On top was the headline, in French, “Boycottons la boutique Le Marcheur” (“Let’s boycott the boutique Le Marcheur”).

Week after week, the boycotters recruited large and noisy crowds to hand out the leaflets and implore people not to enter Le Marcheur. Their mission was to pressure the owner, Yves Archambault, to stop carrying the Israeli shoe line so that the neighborhood would be “apartheid free.” But Archambault refused, out of principle. It didn’t seem right to him that he should be told how to run his business. His business suffered, but he held firm.

The story hardly ends there. The Jewish community in Montreal got wind of the boycott and went nuts. A “buycott” campaign was launched, and Jews from all over the city came to buy shoes at Le Marcheur. A woman bought a hundred pairs. Archambault became a local hero.

Meanwhile, creative minds went to work producing counter leaflets mocking the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement as “Boycott Derangement Syndrome,” explaining the discrimination and hypocrisy inherent in the movement. These leaflets gave people the Israeli side of the story. Archambault did his own research and found out that the Israeli shoe company (besides making great shoes!) hired women, minorities and Palestinians and treated their employees very well. The Quebec General Assembly drafted a unanimous resolution condemning the boycott and supporting the store.

And what happened to the initiator of the boycott, Amir Khadir? He went low-key and stopped coming to the demonstrations. Apparently, he concluded that the backlash might not be good for his political future.

I tell you this story not to remind you of the insidious global movement to demonize the Jewish state. That’s old hat by now. I’m telling you this story because it’s a tribute to the noble virtues of fighting back and winning.

Too often, we recoil at the idea of fighting. It leaves a bad taste in our mouth. We dread the thought of “lowering ourselves to the level of mudslinging.” We prefer notions like “engagement” and “bridge building.”

But the nasty boycotters of St. Denis Street who used Nazi imagery to malign an Israeli shoe company were not looking for engagement or bridge building. They were looking for blood — and a victory.

Faced with such aggression, how else to respond but to fight back?

Yes, in such cases, life is a zero sum game. One side wins, and the other side loses. The Jewish community of Montreal, with the support of a brave French Canadian shoe merchant, fought back ferociously and smartly against what it perceived as a grave injustice to the State of Israel. And, guess what — they won.

It’s not as dramatic as taking down bin Laden, but we’ll take it.

(h/t Max)

Seventh Fatah Congress planned for August

Arab media are reporting that Mahmoud Abbas plans to schedule the seventh Fatah Congress sometime this summer.

The sixth Fatah Congress was held in August, 2009. It was marred by public disagreements and insults, as factions that represented Mahmoud Dahlan, Mahmoud Abbas and the Al Aqsa Brigades all jostled for political gain. Abbas and the old Arafat loyalists did everything they could to marginalize the "new guard" who organized the first intifada in 1989.

When the Central Committee decided not to issue a written report but only to present it orally, chaos broke out and Mahmoud Abbas instructed his bodyguards to eject members of the Congress.

In the end, a new Fatah Platform was issued. In it, Fatah made very clear that it still supported terrorism despite the lies its members tell the media in English. Here is what I wrote about it last year:

The main strategic goals are "Liberating the homeland, ending its settler occupation and attaining the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people." Note that these are separate goals - the "homeland" is all of British Mandate Palestine while the "occupation" is the areas Israel gained in 1967 and the "inalienable rights" include the "right to return."

The platform makes it very clear that Fatah still subscribes to "armed resistance" as a "right":" "The Palestinian people’s right to practice armed resistance against the military occupation of their land remains a constant right confirmed by international law and international legality."

Unintentionally proving how tenuous Palestinian peoplehood is, the platform tries to shore it up by saying"The Palestinians are a genuine people with a clear identity and clear affiliation to their homeland. They maintained their attachment to this identity and to their homeland through their national struggle for almost a century."

Two of their tactics include:

Boycotting Israeli products at home and abroad through popular movement, particularly those goods for which there is local substitute. Performing new forms of civil disobedience against the occupation and launching an international campaign to boycott Israel, its products, and its institutions benefiting from the experience of South Africa against Apartheid....

Restoring our direct and strong relations with the Israeli peace camp, and revitalizing our joint action for a just peace, without mingling it with normalization with Israel, which is rejected while occupation continues.

It also calls to strengthen the culture of terror:

Continued commitment to the culture of struggle, and the permanent readiness to engage in resisting the occupation, and sacrifice for the homeland. Continuous education through regular organizational meetings and training courses. The issuing of Fatah circulars, to continue mobilizing the cadres of the movement and masses with the heritage of the Palestinian armed struggle. Celebrating our battles, and commemorating the history of our struggle and the permanent readiness to sacrifice.

Every single thing that is incompatible with true peace  is enshrined in this platform. These are not negotiable positions, according to this document.

I am certain that neither John Kerry nor President Obama, nor Thomas Friedman nor any supposed mainstream media "expert"  ever read this.

In fact, practically no one in the West has read this platform, although Mahmoud Abbas has been acting entirely consistently with it. I translated some of it when it was released, but this official English translation seems to have been released over a year later. I found it at the Palestinian Press Office of Denmark.

This is essential reading in order to understand the strategy of the PLO and Mahmoud Abbas.

  Fatah Political Platform by Eldad Tzioni

Hamas and Salafist groups continue to attack each other

Since the explosion that rocked Hamas' security HQ earlier this week, there have been a number of other explosions in Gaza, although no one has been killed.

El Badil reports on a number of explosions and other incidents in the last couple of days. A young man was injured when an object exploded. Hamas found and dismantled two bombs in cars on Monday night. Another explosion occurred near a school on Monday.

Last night, there was a large explosion near the Al Nour mosque in central Gaza.

It is widely believed that Salafist groups in Gaza are responsible for this. They threatened Hamas last Saturday. Hamas responded by cracking down on the group and even reportedly destroyed a mosque, something that the Western media didn't think was as newsworthy as someone drawing cartoons.

Shimon Peres not going to Clinton Foundation meeting in Marrakesh. Where's Bill?

From the World Bulletin (Turkey):

Morocco has backtracked an earlier invitation extended to the former Israeli president Shimon Peres to pop in the Kingdom to attend the Clinton Global Initiative's First Middle East and Africa Conference set to kick off on May 5 in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh.

Morocco rescinded the invitation it had dispatched earlier to the notorious former Israeli PM Shimon Peres after his projected stopover stirred up a hornet's nest among the Kingdom’s pro-Palestine activists and organizations.

Earlier, on Friday, a series of protest rallies staged in observance of the International May Day also voiced firm rebuff of Peres’s stopover.

Additionally, according to new360, Hamas government agencies in Gaza had written to Moroccan officials asking that the infamous Israeli politician be blocked from entering Morocco.

The Moroccan government has not responded to any of the calls to arrest or deport Peres. It was noted on Sunday that his invitation had been rescinded and he would not be attending the conference.

ANSAMed, however, reports that Peres is the one who decided not to go:

RABAT, MAY 4 - Former Israeli president Shimon Peres will not be going to Marrakesh despite an invitation from the Clinton Foundation to speak at a conference on the Middle East and Africa. The decision was made after polemics following the announcement that he was to have taken part tomorrow.

Since the nation of Morocco isn't who invited Peres to begin with, it seems that the Turkish version of the story is not correct.

Peres is not Avigdor Lieberman. He is passionately dedicated to peace, whether you agree with him or not. Yet no one in the Arab world is coming to his defense. On the contrary - the only voices one can find in Arabic media were those calling for him to be dis-invited at the very least, and arrested and jailed should he step foot in Morocco.

Interestingly, even though the Clinton Foundation issues press releases every day, it has not mentioned this story. No regrets, no gentle scolding that it is antithetical to peace - nothing. One would think that if the Clinton Foundation is as dedicated to peace as possible, it would have done everything possible to allow Peres to attend.

Could it be because the Clinton Foundation has accepted some $40 million from Arab countries since it started? Arab countries give far more to the Clinton Foundation than to other NGOs doing similar work.

There will be no peace as long as there is no pressure on Arab governments to act in a peaceful way. If they truly wanted to see a peaceful two state solution they would welcome Shimon Peres anywhere he wanted to go.

And a strong condemnation by Bill Clinton on how Shimon Peres is treated by the Arab world would do more for peace than any number of conferences.

Evil, Talmudic Jews desecrating Al Aqsa again

Palestine Times reports that Jews "desecrated" the Al Aqsa Mosque yet again, by...standing there.

They are "roaming in the courtyards" of Al Aqsa, attempting to establish "Talmudic rituals" in the area. These "Zionist extremists" are also doing "provocative tours."

As you can see, the photo shows how horrible they are acting.

Biden: Iran "paved its path" to a bomb

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Washington Institute last night, where he strongly defended the White House's negotiating posture with Iran.

The tone of the speech was markedly different from previous communications from the administration. In the past, even when signing the Iran Sanctions Act, the White House has said things like "Iran can prove that its intentions are peaceful."

In this speech, Biden sais about as explicitly as can be that Iran's intentions are to build a nuclear weapon.

Iran, Biden argued, “has already paved its path” to a bomb and could build up to eight nuclear warheads in two to three months.

There is a big difference between the Cold War-style "trust but verify" model of negotiations and one where one side assumes, ab initio, that the other side is deceptive and is actively seeking to do the opposite of what the agreement is meant to accomplish.

If we are saying that we don't trust Iran at all, then any agreement that doesn't include comprehensive inspections anywhere in Iran that a secret facility may be built is useless. And Iran has a track record of building secret nuclear facilities. 

Iran's president has bragged that he broke previous nuclear agreements. Yet the current framework agreement still has gigantic loopholes on weaponization and verification.

Worse, the White House knew that Iran was that close to a nuclear weapon for a long time, but insisted publicly that it was over a year away. That piece of information changes everything as to how negotiations should be conducted.

But from what we can see, the US kept the "trust but verify" mentality when negotiating with a party that is known to lie and hide its nuclear weapons program.

Biden may have made a good speech, but he showed that we have been deceived by Washington as much as Washington has been deceived by Iran.

Wiesenthal Center complains about incitement to Jew-hatred on Goal.com Arabic site

A month ago, I reported that Goal.com's Arabic site included anti-Israel rhetoric.

Now the Simon Wiesenthal Center has noticed:

In a letter to the UEFA (Union of European Football Association) President, Michel Platini, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, drew attention to " the constant incitement  and offence against the State of Israel on the Arabic site of Goal.com, a web site that prides itself in having a global constituency of over 64 million fans". 

The letter listed: 

- "a classic example (see photo and caption, upper case for emphasis, reads in translation 'Saturday 28 March 2015, Sammy Ofer Stadium, Haifa, THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES Wales decided to enter the 2016 UEFA Cup Finals, for the first time ever, after defeating the ZIONIST ENTITY TEAM of the City of Haifa in the OCCUPIED TERRITORIES with three straight goals). This was the first ZIONIST loss in the play-offs...'" 

Samuels noted that: " 'Zionist entity' is deemed as denying the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the very right to sovereignty of the Jewish people".
See photo and Arabic caption:https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2FCswRYn5xA_rTJUaBmjHRrr8MNFvaZeltP8hNaVYvJgFUZC_rKaKyg4I8LlG3-lJ6yEG7-uZi1dyyLpQWkMXj0gu3UXleggC9-R8anNxaPRC6q0ysfYj8XjuS5EeA-gyrhTrtvm__RR5/s1600/goal1.png- "Another article celebrated how the 'OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES ZIONIST TEAMS, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Tel Aviv and Hapoel Beersheba' were unable to play in the summer of 2014 due to 'Palestinian Hamas shelling'.” 

Samuels added "calling Haifa, Tel Aviv and Beersheba OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, in effect deletes all of Israel from the map".

- "Another recounts how Bosnian striker, Edin Dzeko, will not participate in the UEFA Euro 2016 qualifier against 'THE ZIONIST ENEMY' in 'THE ARAB CITY OF JERUSALEM'."

The Centre argued that "this language violates Goal.com's on-line Terms of Message and Content Use which forbids any expression that is:

- 5.7.2 is threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent
- 5.7.3 [that] promotes violence
- 5.7.4 [that] promotes discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age
- 5.7.10 [that] will be likely to harass, upset, embarrass or alarm any other person".

The letter pointed to "an example of how far such words can reach, occurring this Friday, 1 May, when Raja Casablanca F.C. President, Mohamed Boudrika protested violence on the pitch by the Algerian Wikaf Stef team, to epithets from their Club President, Hassan Hammar, calling the Moroccan team “Jews Jews!".
See:http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2015/05/157477/raja-president-terrorized-algeria-algerian-police/

Samuels claimed that "multiple appeals to Goal.com London headquarters have remained unanswered," continuing,  "a similar complaint to pan-European sports network, EUROSPORT, resulted in immediate action.

It will be interesting to see if Goal.com responds to this.