They should not be afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Living with it won’t be easy but it should not be seen as inevitably our enemy. We need not demonize it nor endorse it.

"The question is, do we think Obama is reliable or not," said an Israeli official, who declined to be named.

"Right now it doesn't look so. That is a question resonating across the region not just in Israel."

Writing in Haaretz, Ari Shavit said Obama had betrayed "a moderate Egyptian president who remained loyal to the United States, promoted stability and encouraged moderation."

To win popular Arab opinion, Obama was risking America's status as a superpower and reliable ally.

"Throughout Asia, Africa and South America, leaders are now looking at what is going on between Washington and Cairo. Everyone grasps the message: "America's word is worthless ... America has lost it." - Israel shocked by Obama's "betrayal" of Mubarak, Reuters

Abunimah traveled in some of the same political circles as Obama in the 1990s. Abunimah previously described meeting with Obama at a fundraiser at the home of Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, reportedly a former PLO activist. Khalidi was also a close associate of Obama.

"[Obama] came with his wife. That's where I had a chance to really talk to him," Abunimah recalled. "It was an intimate setting. He convinced me he was very aware of the issues [and] critical of U.S. bias toward Israel and lack of sensitivity to Arabs. ... He was very supportive of U.S. pressure on Israel."

According to quotes obtained by Gulf News, Abunimah recalled a 2004 meeting in a Chicago neighborhood while Obama was running for his Senate seat. Abunimah quoted Obama telling him "warmly" he was sorry that "I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race."

"I'm hoping when things calm down, I can be more up front," Abunimah reportedly quoted the senator as saying.

Abunimah said Obama urged him to "keep up the good work" at the Chicago Tribune, where Abunimah contributed guest columns that were highly critical of Israel.
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Last week, a senior Egyptian diplomat stated the Egyptian government suspects elements of the current uprising there, particularly political aspects, are being coordinated with the U.S. State Department and Obama administration.

The senior Egyptian diplomat told WND the Mubarak regime suspects the U.S. has been aiding protest planning by Mohamed ElBaradei, who is seen as one of the main opposition leaders in Cairo.

ElBaradei, former International Atomic Energy Agency chief, has reinvented himself as a campaigner for "reform" in Egypt. He is a candidate for this year's scheduled presidential elections.
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Last weekend, the London Telegraph reported the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 2008 helped a young dissident attend a U.S.-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

The Telegraph would not identify the dissident, but said he was involved in helping to stir the current protests. The report claimed the dissident told the U.S. Embassy in Cairo that an alliance of opposition groups had a plan to topple Mubarak's government.

The disclosures, contained in U.S. diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police.

Feb. 2, President Barack Obama delivered an ultimatum to Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman and the army and security chiefs: Mubarak must be removed in the coming hours or else US aid to Egypt will be cut off, debkafile's Washington sources exclusively report. Pressure on the Egyptian armed forces to oust the president forthwith was further applied by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who called Vice President Omar Suleiman, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates who called Egyptian defense minister Mohamed Tantawi, and US armed forces chief Adm. Mike Mullen in a telephone call to the Egyptian chief of staff Gen. Sami Enan.,

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and UK Prime Minister David Cameron were recruited earlier to lean hard on Egyptian army chiefs to bring Mubarak's presidency to an end in the coming hours.

“The blunt reality is our alliances in the Arab world are with a thin strata of the ruling elite,” Rosen said. “We face mass movements in virtually every Muslim country that are profoundly hostile to the West and very uninterested in peace with Israel and many other things we’re interested in. When you start talking about democratization, you’re really unleashing these forces.” - BEN SMITH & JOSH GERSTEIN |via Politico

It becomes hard to defend repression and say, ‘Go crack some heads.’ It’s hard to say ‘We want an undemocratic autocrat’ or ‘We don’t stand for freedom.’ The ‘freedom agenda’ is a compelling idea,” Rosen said. “It’s hard to defend Mubarak’s police.”

Bolton said his views on the wisdom of overturning pro-Western governments like Egypt are driven in large part by a 1979 Commentary article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” The essay, criticizing the Carter administration’s approach to unrest in Iran and Nicaragua, helped Kirkpatrick win the job of U.N. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan.

“We went from two authoritarian governments that were pro-American to two governments that were even more authoritarian and anti-American,” Bolton observed. “Good intentions only get you so far. In a complicated, highly uncertain situation where, in this case Egypt, the U.S. has huge strategic interests, we’re rolling the dice on the Jimmy Carter theory of democracy.”

And in Jerusalem Wednesday, the criticism of American optimism that Egypt - Muslim Brotherhood and all - could find its way to secular, open democracy was even more heated.

The Israeli scholar Barry Rubin summed up the local view of Washington’s high-mindedness: “I have an idea for the prophets of Muslim Brotherhood moderation: Please experiment with the lives of people closer to your own homes.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/48747.html#ixzz1DULREmt3

In a statement the Muslim Brotherhood vehemently opposed both the attack (by al Qaeda in Iraq on a Christian church in Iraq) and threat (by the same group aimed at Coptic Christians in the region) calling on all Muslims to unite and protect the holy places of all the monotheistic religions, stressing it was a religious duty. It emphasized that Islam was a religion which promoted only peace and tolerance. The MB described the attack as criminal and heinous.

The [New Year's Day Coptic church bombing in Alexandria] prompted opposition groups to collaborate and form a national committee to promote civil rights. Leaders from the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Wafd Party, Al-Ghad, Al-Tagammu, Al-Gabha Party, Al-Wasat Party and the Kefaya Movement for Change met at Al-Wafd's headquarters on Saturday to declare a united stand against the attack.

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The Muslim Brotherhood were among the first to denounce the attacks and renew claims that Islam explicitly forbids acts of terrorism and affirm their denouncement of the actions of whomever is responsible.

President Obama has been clear on Egypt that the transition must begin now, and now means now,” a White House spokesperson was quoted as saying after Mubarak’s supporters engaged anti-government protesters in bloody street battles on Wednesday.

Although the “prop-up-Mubarak” position has recently solidified on talk radio and Fox News, during the early days of the Egyptian crisis, the only clear principle that emerged from the right was that Obama was wrong. The terrible complexity of the situation, the conundrums and impossible trade-offs, were never acknowledged.

Has the Obama Administration been totally consistent from day to day? No. Is it driven more by developing facts on the ground than driving those facts? Yes. And good luck to anyone who thinks that he can do better in this diplomatic and moral morass.

Key Findings:

This is not an Islamic uprising. The Muslim Brotherhood is �gapproved�h by just 15%, and its leaders get barely 1% in a presidential straw vote. Asked to pick national priorities, just 12% choose shariah over national power, democracy, or economic development. Asked to explain the uprising, economic conditions, corruption, and unemployment (30�]40% each) far outpace �gregime not Islamic enough�h (7%).

Surprisingly, asked two different ways about the peace treaty with Israel, more support it (37%) than oppose it (22%). Only 18% approve of either Hamas or Iran. And a mere 5% say the uprising occurred because the regime is �gtoo pro�]Israel.�h

El Baradei has very little popular support in a presidential straw vote (4%), far outpaced by Amr Musa (29%). But Mubarak and Omar Suleiman each get 18%.

A narrow plurality (36% vs. 29%) say Egypt should have good relations with the U.S. And just 8% say the uprising is against a �gtoo pro�]American regime.�h Still, something over half disapprove of our handling of this crisis and say they don�ft trust the U.S. at all.

In 1991-92, a federal election was held in Algeria. The results of the first round of elections showed that the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) would win by a landslide. It was their intent to establish an Islamic State. The army took over the government of the country, annulled the election and created a military dictatorship.

The GIA announced that it intended to start a war of genocide to ethnically cleanse the country of all Jews, Christians, and Polytheists.

The new victims are largely ordinary citizens killed in their own homes.Often an entire village is wiped out. Nobody is spared, not even pregnant women, children or infants. They are raped, hacked to death, burned alive, mutilated, and shot.

By year's end, most commonly accepted casualty estimates were that 60,000 people had been killed during 5 years of turmoil."(2)

"In the past three months [1997-JUN to AUG] at least 1,500 civilians have been killed, may in horrific ways: hacked to death, burned alive, disemboweled, [sic] their throats slit." (3)

IRANIAN protesters took to the streets of capital Tehran for a major rally overnight in support of Arab revolts, while fresh anti-government protests were reported in Yemen and Bahrain.

By midday local time, more than 4000 people gathered in central Tehran's Azadi Square, with many more streaming in, The Wall Street Journal reported.

a deeply syncretic creed that in every era adopted elements of the region’s dominant faith – Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy, Sunni and later Shi’a Islam, Crusader Catholicism – while maintaining its own suspicious insularity...

Far worse is their doctrinal affinity with Christianity, and with pre-Islamic pagan rites like the Persian New Year, Nowruz.

Alawites “believe in reincarnation, regard the Pillars of Islam as purely symbolic, do not fast during Ramadan or make pilgrimage to Mecca, have no mosques or indeed any public worship, celebrate Christmas, Easter and Epiphany, and traditionally wear crosses like Christians,” according to University of Haifa linguist John Myhill.

The idea of God’s reincarnation in human form is central to Alawite belief, Myhill said, explaining that Alawites believe in “seven cycles,” or reincarnations of God in both revealed and hidden forms.

For example, Adam (God’s revealed form) returned to Earth in the hidden guise of Abel, Moses returned as Joshua Ben-Nun, Jesus as Peter and Muhammad as Ali. Like Christians, Alawites also worship a “holy trinity” – in their case, Ali, Muhammad and Salman the Persian, a companion of Muhammad who helped lay siege to Medina during the Islamic Conquest.

IN THE Ottoman era, Alawites were persecuted as infidels, forced to pay heavy taxes and mostly worked as indentured servants or tenant farmers for Sunni landowners.

The advent of French rule after World War I ushered in a golden age for the once down trodden sect, which was granted short-lived autonomy as the “Alawite State” on Syria’s coast in the 1920s and ’30s. Colonial authorities hoping to stem Sunni nationalism propped up the Alawites and other Syrian minorities, giving them preferential treatment in the army and laying the groundwork for today’s Alawite-dominated military.
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The one significant challenge to Assad the father’s rule – a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the central city of Hama – was brutally quashed, with security forces killing an estimated 20,000-30,000 people.

Islamists’ Victory in Tunisia a Win for Democracy: Noah Feldman - Bloomberg

Numerous Iranian leaders have expressed their willingness to sacrifice millions of Iranian citizens to the cause. One of Ahmadinejad’s predecessors Akbar Rafsanjani, considered the leading candidate to replace ailing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, is on record as declaring it “not irrational to contemplate a nuclear exchange with Israel” on the grounds that even one nuclear bomb would devastate Israel. A 2006 fatwa issued by clerics in the Shiite holy city of Qom provides religious sanction for nuclear war. Already in 1980, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian revolution, stressed that the mullahs do not worship Iran but only Al-lah, and that the destruction of Iran would not be too great a price to pay for the triumph of Islam over the infidels. - Jonathan Rosenblum, Cross Currents

"Most leaders in the Green movement made clear they did not desire financial or other support from the United States," a State Department senior official said. "As an organic movement, it was concerned that taking outside support would discredit it in the eyes of the Iranian people. We respect that and do not provide financial assistance to any political movement, party or faction in Iran."

In November 2009, leaders of the Green party, which had staged a revolt on the streets of Tehran in June of that year, sent a long memo through channels to the Obama administration that some analysts said was a clear call for help.

"So now, at this pivotal point in time, it is up to the countries of the free world to make up their mind," states the opposition memo dated Nov. 30, 2009. "Will they continue on the track of wishful thinking and push every decision to the future until it is too late, or will they reward the brave people of Iran and simultaneously advance the Western interests and world peace."

The eight-page memo describes the current regime under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "brutal, apocalyptic theocratic dictatorship."

The memo warns that Iran "with its apocalyptic constitution will never give up the atomic bomb, nor will it give up its terror network, because it needs these instruments to maintain its power and enhance its own economic and financial wealth." - The Washington Examiner

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, U.S. sources familiar with the matter said.

Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

This and other developments signal a shift toward growing, albeit still circumscribed, support for Assad's armed opponents - a shift that intensified following last month's failure of the U.N. Security Council to agree on tougher sanctions against the Damascus government.

The White House is for now apparently stopping short of giving the rebels lethal weapons, even as some U.S. allies do just that.

Then look at these four signs, held by different people, all clearly written by the same person and misspelled the same way. It is highly doubtful that the participants have any idea what the signs they’re holding mean. Certainly no one in this crowd knows enough English to be aware of it.

The hand-lettered signs are supposed to look individual, they are clearly not.