by Jonathan Spyer*

A number of events in recent weeks cast light on the current intersecting lines of conflict in the Middle East. They reflect a region in flux, in which new bonds are being formed, and old ones torn asunder.

But amid the confusion, a new topography is emerging.

This was the month in which a long-existent split in the Sunni Arab world turned into a gaping fissure. On March 5th, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates announced that they were withdrawing their ambassadors from the Emirate of Qatar.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Who is more deserving of punishment by the United States? Millions of Egyptians, for ousting the Muslim Brotherhood? Or the Muslim Brotherhood, for habitually terrorizing and murdering Christians, among many other crimes?

According to the unmistakably clear actions of the Obama administration, it is the millions of anti-Brotherhood Egyptians who deserve punishment.

Last Sunday, the Church of the Virgin Mary in Waraq near Cairo was attacked during a wedding ceremony, leaving four dead and many wounded. According to Dr. Hisham Abdul Hamid of forensics, two of those who were murdered were Christian children—two girls; two Marys: 12-year-old Mary Nabil Fahmy, who took five shots in the chest, and 8-year-old Mary Ashraf Masih (meaning “Christ”), who took a bullet in the back which burst from the front.

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By Sara Y. Aharon

In 2003, a team of 16 American soldiers in Baghdad stumbled upon a lost treasure trove of thousands of documents belonging to Iraq’s Jewish community.

These rare materials, thought to have been stored originally in synagogues and private Jewish homes, were sitting in a moldy, flooded basement of the muhkabarat, Saddam Hussein’s feared secret police.

The collection, now referred to as the “Iraqi Jewish archive,” contains “2,700 Jewish books and tens of thousands of documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English, dating from 1540 to the 1970s,” including a 1568 Bible and several Torah scrolls, according to the National Archives in Washington.

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by Gary Gerofsky

The Obama administration lies, feigns horror, ignores history (especially recent history), and purposely chooses to make the wrong conclusions. Obama panders to Islamists, nationally and internationally. Mistakes are piling up on other previous mistakes, quickly forgotten, and then repeated with reckless abandon. The theatre of the absurd is taking place before our eyes with implications that have far reaching impact on America for the worse. The Libya and Tunisia debacles have led to Egypt which led to Benghazi which has led to Syria. The common thread is a doctrine that the U.S. president is following to empower Islamists who promise America “democracy” and non-violence. But “Islamist democracy” and “Islamist non-violence” are oxymorons. Obama buys into these contradictions as if they were real possibilities. Following the dictates of Syrian “rebels” and having them direct American policy is like taking advice at face value from those who sent our airliners into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Selective indignation and political correctness have amounted to a complete political and military debacle in the U.S. which also involves and endangers other stakeholders. Every attempt is being made to isolate one act of chemical warfare after a series of chemical attacks in a country (and region) where they have experienced the same for many decades under the Assad family dictatorship — without much objection from the world community or the U.N. Questions need to be asked. There are too many contradictions, inconsistencies, befuddled thinking and lies to enumerate, but here are a few:

Contradictions and inconsistencies:

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

The supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the head of the Islamist snake, Muhammad Badie—who had slipped security forces by traveling in and out of the Brotherhood torture camps (known as “peaceful sits ins” by the mainstream media”)—has finally been arrested in Egypt and is awaiting trial. Not only was he the leader of the Brotherhood, but, according to Brotherhood members themselves, he was giving orders to his underling, Muhammad Morsi, the now ousted Egyptian president.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Evidence that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was directly involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where Americans including U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens were killed, continues to mount.

First, on June 26, 2013, I produced and partially translated what purported to be an internal Libyan governmental memo which was leaked and picked up by many Arabic websites. According to this document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including now ousted President Morsi, played a direct role in the Benghazi consulate attack. “Based on confessions derived from some of those arrested at the scene,” asserted the report, six people, “all of them Egyptians” from the jihad group Ansar al-Sharia (Supporters of Islamic Law), were arrested. During interrogations, these Egyptian jihadi cell members:

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by Cynthia Farahat*

Ahmed Moussa, a prominent Egyptian television personality on the Tahrir TV channel as well as a former officer in Egyptian State Security Intelligence (SSI), went public on July 30 with a remarkable piece of information.

Moussa said, addressing U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson (in absentia) on his show:

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by Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative,” “Israel Hayom”

While the Middle East combusts, threatening vital US interests, the US attempts to clip the wings of Israel — the only reliable, predictable, stable, effective, democratic and unabashedly pro-US firefighter in the region.

Western policy-makers and public opinion molders welcomed the 2011 riots on the Arab Street as an Arab Spring, a people’s revolution and a transition toward democracy. However, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria have demonstrated that the Arab Street is experiencing an Arab Tsunami and a transition towards intensified chaos, totally unrelated to the Palestinian issue, which has been a regional sideshow. In fact, Alexei Pushkov, Chairman of the International Committee in Russia’s Duma, stated on July 4, 2013: “the ongoing events in Egypt confirm that the so-called Arab Spring has led not to democratic renewal but to chaos… We can see this in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria, and in Iraq… The events in Egypt show that there can’t be a quick and gentle transition from an authoritarian regime to political democracy. There can’t be such a transition in the Arab Middle East countries…”

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by Raymond Stock*

On their current trip to Cairo, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), two of President Barack Obama’s most persistent critics on everything in foreign policy from Syria to Benghazi, have found common cause with him at last.

All three fear that the anti-American (and generally anti-human) Muslim Brotherhood (MB), whom they mistakenly see as “moderate,” will disappear from the halls of power in Egypt, our most important Arab ally. They also evidently worry that the MB’s leading figures, such as now-deposed (and arrested) President Mohamed Morsi—who had awarded himself powers greater than any previous ruler in Egypt’s history—will not be free to plot a return to power in an ancient nation that he had nearly destroyed in only one year.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

With the ousting of Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, al-Qaeda has been vindicated and the terror-jihad exonerated, in the opinion of many Islamists, that is.

According to the Associated Press, in a new video, al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri “said the military coup that ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi provides proof that Islamic rule cannot be established through democracy and urged the Islamist leader’s followers to abandon the ballot box in favor of armed resistance [i.e., jihad].”

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by David P. Goldman*

Earlier today, Egypt’s military government arrested former prime minister Mohammed Mursi on charges of conspiring with the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate. That is as good as it gets in this part of the world. Hamas has murdered 457 Israelis and wounded more than 3,000 since 2000, according to the Israeli government. It is an implacable enemy of the United States as well as the State of Israel. Since taking power, the Egyptian military has shut down illegal tunnel traffic with Gaza, Hamas’ stronghold, and strangled its economy.

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by Daniel Pipes*

In the aftermath of the coup d’état in Egypt, a consensus has emerged, to cite an anonymous Obama administration official, that “Trying to break the neck of the [Muslim] Brotherhood is not going to be good for Egypt or for the region.”

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Why do millions of Egyptians, including politicians and activists, consider Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “stooge”—as she is so commonly referred to by many in Egypt, from the media down to the street?

In America, some are aware of matters, such as that “Patterson in particular resisted opportunities to criticize the Morsi government as it implemented increasingly authoritarian policies. In a memorable May interview with the Egyptian English-language news sit[e] Ahram Online, she repeatedly dodged pointed questions about Morsi’s leadership. ‘The fact is they ran in a legitimate election and won,’ she said…. Republicans from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce have pounced on statements like these, increasingly seeing Patterson as the key implementer for a policy that at least offers tacit support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

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by Daniel Pipes*

The overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt delights and worries me.

Delight is easy to explain. What appears to have been the largest political demonstration in history uprooted the arrogant Islamists of Egypt who ruled with near-total disregard for anything other than consolidating their own power. Islamism, the drive to apply a medieval Islamic law and the only vibrant radical utopian movement in the world today, experienced an unprecedented repudiation. Egyptians showed an inspiring spirit.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Accordingly, among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.

While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18 edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The Pope politely informed her that his spiritual authority over the Copts does not extend to political matters.

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