"That the tape was not shown to Congress reflects a desire by Israel's political and diplomatic echelon not to escalate tension with Cairo by becoming directly involved in lobbying against Egypt in Congress."
While diplomats dither over protocol, the weapons keep going over the border. And Egypt is certainly counting on that pattern to continue so that it can avoid being held accountable. "Why the US hasn't seen smuggling tapes," by Herb Keinon and Yaakov Katz for the Jerusalem Post:
Despite efforts by the country's top security echelon to share with Congress videotapes of Egypt assisting Hamas in arms smuggling, the footage has been shown only to some administration officials and never made it to Congress, to avoid infuriating the Egyptians, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
The videotapes included footage of Egyptian border policemen allegedly assisting a group of close to 80 Hamas terrorists crossing illegally into Gaza through a hole they had cut in the border fence.
Defense officials said there was also evidence that the Egyptians were assisting Hamas with smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip under the Philadelphi Corridor.
The decision to send the tapes to the Israeli Embassy in Washington was made by Israel's top defense echelon to influence the appropriations process in Congress ahead of a decision to withhold part of the foreign aid granted to Egypt.
That the tape was not shown to Congress reflects a desire by Israel's political and diplomatic echelon not to escalate tension with Cairo by becoming directly involved in lobbying against Egypt in Congress.
For months there has been a debate inside the government over how directly Israel should get involved in the issue inside Washington.
The perception that won the day this time was that over-involvement would be seen by Cairo as an infringement of certain diplomatic "rules" between the two countries and could lead to a major crisis.
The Bush administration is also opposed to pushing too far on the issue at the present time.
The defense establishment believes that showing the tapes can be an effective way of pressuring Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak into clamping down on Hamas's smuggling activities.
"If key congressmen and senators see this, then it will provide a clear picture of the situation and ensure that the money is withheld," a senior official said. "When this happens, Mubarak will feel that he has no choice but to stop the smuggling."
Congress on Wednesday sent a foreign aid bill to US President George W. Bush that for the first time conditions some Egyptian military aid on its efforts to crack down on smuggling into Gaza and improving its human rights record.
According to the legislation, $100 million of the $1.3 billion in Egyptian military aid has been set aside until the secretary of state certifies that Egypt has met these obligations, though the secretary can waive the requirements if she feels holding back the $100m. would harm American national security interests.
An earlier version of the bill would have held back $200m. and not have given the secretary of state a waiver, but it was watered down throughout the process.
Still, critics of Egypt's activities feel that the move sends a strong message that Congress is watching the country and is willing to take some moves that might anger what the administration feels is a key US ally.
Also, according to Washington sources, part of the rationale of continuing with the military aid - begun as part of the Camp David Accords - is that some of it will be used to combat smuggling.
"That the tape was not shown to Congress reflects a desire by Israel's political and diplomatic echelon not to escalate tension with Cairo by becoming directly involved in lobbying against Egypt in Congress."
....however, it is ok...the dhimmicrats in Congress do not want evidence of anything that gives credence to the theory that Islam is Involved in terror....
More than ever I believe that those cops in Pakistan who let that punk "escape" were as crooked as their "prisoner" after reading this. They're pretty much all in cahoots-forget this baloney about who's radical or moderate. As long as infidels die somewhere in the world that's all that matters.
It's indicative of several problems. The growing anti-semitism in this country, along with dhimmi-ism, and the sell out of Israel by Olmert.
The fact that Mubaraq (and/or his son) has partial control over his armed forces, is no excuse for his abrogation of responsibility for their actions. It doesn't concern Israel whether Egyptian assistance to and arming of "Palestinians" in Gaza was ordered by top brass or initiated by Muslim Brotherhood inflitrators into Egyptian ranks. The end result is the same --- continuation by the Egyptians of the decades-long brazen violation of the Camp David accords.
Maybe it's time that Israel's pathetic "leaders" get a clue and realize that insisting on viewing a hudna as a genuine peace treaty will not make it into a peace treaty.
What gives the Israeli government, or the U.S. government for that matter, the right to intentionally obfuscate and hide reality from its citizens, thereby putting those citizens at greater risk? In a democratic republic, they have no such paternalistic authority, in fact the opposite is true. Unless it relates to methods and sources of intelligence gathering, or to war planning, they have an obligation to tell us citizens the truth, or at the very least, to allow others to tell the truth without fear of being arrested for "Islamophobic hate crimes".
The worst part is that it is almost taken for granted nowadays. The government hides or changes the data to suit its needs, and the media doesn't even question it anymore. So again, what gives them the right? They have the evidence on video tape, and so they hide the video tape. What gives them the right?
I think this is pretty gutless non-action from Israel. What do they have to lose? If Egypt gets upset, then Israel will have a real plus.
"The decision to send the tapes to the Israeli Embassy in Washington was made by Israel's top defense echelon to influence the appropriations process in Congress ahead of a decision to withhold part of the foreign aid granted to Egypt."
-- from the article above
There should be no American aid to Egypt, but the Americans are afraid to end it -- they are afraid to end what, in the way it is perceived by both the Infidel donors and the Muslim recipients, as given as a duty, and accepted as a right. All foreign aid from Infidels to Muslims takes on that character, whether it is given to Egypt, or Pakistan, or the "Palestinians" or to any others. Egypt is not a "friend" and not an "ally" no matter how often this may be asserted, or parrotted by journalists incapable of thinking for themselves. It is a state that pocketed every concession made by Israel, including being given the entire Sinia with its airfileds, and oilfields, and all that infrastructure -- see Sharm el Sheikh -- that the Israelis had built, and proceed to violate every solemn promise it had made to encourage a new and friendly attitude toward Israel, with the ways spelled out in detail in the Camp David Accords.
Egypt votes consistently against American interests at the U.N. Egypt tries, successfully so far, to block any real action in the Sudan, because the Egyptian government does not want the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur rescued, and wants to delay any such rescue until the Arabs have emptied Darfur of many of its black African residents and moved in those who are convinced that they are Arabs. Egypt is the main diplomatic protector of the govenment of the Sudan. Egypt wishes to have the Sudan thoroughly islamized, and then to have Islam move on further south, especially to increase its numbers in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which must be forced into a condition of submission, and give up any plans to divert part of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation purposes.
Egypt is run by a stratokleptocrat ("stratokleptocracy" is a term I invented to describe "rule by military thieves" or "thieving-generals rule"), Mubarak, who is eager to have his oily son succeed him, and will brook no criticism or mockery of this plan. But as the famous song has it, "vainement Pharaon" makes his plans. The Mubarak Family-and-Friends corruption, much of it the result of American foreign aid that is siphoned off, is driving Egyptians straight into the hands of the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, and it is they who will likely inherit Egypt after Mubarak. And of course those who are already paying for the Mubarak regime are the Copts, whose situation is always perilous.
Congress should not cut foreign aid to Egypt slightly. It should end it alogether. Egypt is part of the Camp of Islam. It has received more than $60 billion. It is now, it always will be, our enemy. For Islam declares that Believers and Infidels are in a state of permanent war, if not always of open warfare. The viciousness of the Egyptian press, radio, and television, the shear craziness of it, can be picked up, a bit, by looking at what MEMRI (at www.Memri.org) finds and translates. But the full experiencing of Egyptian meretriciousness and malevolence is hardly conveyed even by those videotapes and transcripts.
End the Jizyah. That should be the Congressional cry. If a few people in Congress start to see that, as a few journalists have started to echo the theme here, put up steadily over the past few years, about Infidel foreign aid to Muslims always amounting not to foreign aid (as with Non-Muslim countries) but rather to a kind of Jizyah, a great step forward will have been achieved.
Who, in Congress, will be the first?
A previous article from April, 2006:
Fitzgerald: Just do it: end the jizyah
Let Saudi Arabia, now making one billion dollars every day or two, and Kuwait, and the U.A.E., step in to aid Hamas if they so desire. They can afford it. Member countries of the E.U. have all sorts of new expenses -- guarding churches, synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples, airports, busses to airports, interurban busses, train stations, trains, government buildings, national monuments, parks, sports events. They have to monitor, at great cost, what goes on in mosques -- or try to. They have to monitor their coasts, to make sure that those who are descendants of the Arab Muslims who used to raid up and down the coasts of Western Europe, kidnapping women as sex slaves and men as regular slaves, and looting whatever they could, and who now come not to raid and depart but to stay and raid from within in every way they can -- do not land illegally from North Africa.
And then there is the cost of oil itself -- now $68 a barrel. The amounts pouring into OPEC, with 10 of its 11 members either Muslim or, as in the case of Nigeria, essentially Muslim-controlled, are astronomical.
Western countries have been paying the very worst sort of Jizyah to the tip of the Jihadist spear, the "Palestinian" shock troops of the Lesser Jihad. That Jihad, directed at the Infidel state of Israel, was for a while the only local manifestation of this general impulse that received any attention. The other local Jihads -- those conducted against Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, or against Christians in Indonesia -- received little attention. Nor did the Western world think of these in other than local terms, and never ever related them to a shared ideology, the belief-system of Islam.
And there was something else. Until the last one-third of a century, Arabs and Muslims lacked the wherewithal, the ability, to conduct worldwide Jihad to spread Islam.
Three things changed that. The most important was the most obvious: the quadrupuling of oil prices and the continued ability of OPEC, until recently, to manipulate prices both up and down so as to maximize total revenues of the major producers, and especially to charge oligopolistic rents. This was made easier by the capture by the Saudis of the American government's foreign policy and energy establishment, that continued to insist, and even to believe, that our "staunch ally" Saudi Arabia would exercise a "moderating" influence on prices, so that there was no urgency -- not political, not geopolitical, not environmental -- to discuss energy policy and the need to reduce the use of oil and gas.
The second thing that happened, and at the same time, was the negligent, even criminally negligent, behavior of Western governments in first allowing in large numbers of Arab and Muslim males, and then in allowing them to bring what were optimistically called their "families" -- which often meant a very large number of wives and quasi-wives and children. In Germany it started with Turks who were thought would come, work, and return home -- the Gastarbeiter. It did not happen; they stayed. They were ultimately permitted to bring their families, and more than their families, and today there are more than 3 million Muslims in Germany. In England, it was Pakistanis who came to work, but then their families were allowed in (and what soft-hearted Western government could resist the idea of allowing the "family" to come, unaware of what that concept meant in Muslim terms, and unwilling to study, very closely, what the belief-system of Islam clearly -- not ambiguously, but clearly – teaches). In France, single men came from North Africa. The French thought that their behavior, regarded as sociopathic but in fact merely that of Muslims on the loose in a society of Infidel victims, would be less menacing if they were allowed to "bring their wives." Giscard d'Estaing fell for this. The policy began of allowing that "wife" (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4 wives) and "children" to come to France also. Who in the French immigration services was going to look closely -- especially since those services were necessarily staffed by those who could speak Arabic, and therefore, just as necessarily, the very people entrusted with monitoring and checking were often Arab Muslims themselves -- not exactly a prescription for a wary, rigorously monitored program, is it?
Now there are millions of Muslims all over Europe. The demographic trends are clear. While in Italy and France the Infidel indigenes are not even replacing themselves, the Muslims are more than doing so. And many of them have managed to take full advantage of everything the welfare states of Western Europe, built and paid for by Infidel taxpayers, provide. In France, where Muslims have rioted, they receive free education, free health care, free or low-cost housing. Any American can see the benefits that are received by these Muslim immigrants, and the fact that they do not exactly appear to be trying very hard either to make a living or to express any gratitude for the chance to live in such an advanced and civilized society. They are indifferent, or hostile, to much of that civilization. Why should they care what is in the Louvre, or what the symphony orchestras have to offer, or what goes on at the Institut Pasteur, or what non-Muslim histories and literatures are preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale?
The third development is the existence of new technologies, created by Infidels but enthusiastically exploited by Muslims to disseminate the full message of Islam and of those who embody or promote it. Khomeini finally returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979 (the Shah had left the country on January 19), after years of exile in France. But before that he had been making audiocassettes in Neauphle-le-chateau, and those audiocassettes were important in whipping up enthusiasm for his return and rule. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups have found videocassettes of their deeds quite effective. They depict suicide bombers preparing for their mission and uttering their usual Islamic mumbo-jumbo, taped bombings with martial Muslim theme music playing, as American convoys are attacked, and then the hysterical dragging of American corpses, or the decapitations of Berg and Bigley and other Westerners. These grotesque recruitment videos apparently work, which tells us all we need to know about the mental makeup of all too many Muslims. And then there are the propagandists of Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar, and other satellite channels. And of course, the Internet. None of these was created by the Muslims, but all of it can be and is exploited by Muslims eager to promote Jihad -- that is, the spread of Islam, the removal of all perceived barriers to Islam, and to its dominance, everywhere in the world.
It is of course tempting to believe that "if only" we give and give and give, or "if only" we throw Israel (or Kashmir, or the Christians of Iraq or Indonesia or the Sudan) to the wolves, things will die down. It won't happen. The psychology of the jihad is the reverse: it is only when firm and informed opposition appears, that suddenly Muslims will take a different tone -- "at your feet, or at your throat." The smiling, affable, sudden desire to make friends is not an end, but a means. See, for example, Professor Ahmed Afzaal's comments about his own, un-detailed, changes of mind and heart (what changes?) to Robert Spencer -- apparently stemming only from Afzaal’s desperation either to hide or to somehow give a different gloss on his incredible writings and his history of support for and involvement with Tanzeem-e-Islami.
The Europeans cannot afford the Jizyah. Let Arab Musliims, let Hamas, go to the Saudis and the others. That transfer will not be Jizyah, with all that the continued payment of such tribute implies both for the craven donor and the demanding donee.
End the Jizyah. Nothing will so clear the air, or feel so good, for Infidels, than if their governments stop funding Hamas, the "Palestinians," and all the Arab and Muslim governments and groups they have been led to believe that they have some kind of duty to support -- a duty, that is, to pay the Jizyah.
Call it what it is. Tom Tancredo -- start calling it the Jizyah, on the floor of Congress. Get others, in both parties. to do so. Philippe de Villiers -- do the same in France. Fini -- the same in Italy. Ex-Muslims -- sign a joint letter and demand that the non-Muslims of this world stop paying the Jizyah.
Just do it.
[Posted by Hugh at April 8, 2006]
That the tape was not shown to Congress reflects a desire by Israel's political and diplomatic echelon not to escalate tension with Cairo by becoming directly involved in lobbying against Egypt in Congress.
I understand completely, that might make them want to destroy Israel. Hey, wait a second....
Do we want Israel to survive ..then continue the aid to Egypt , Jordon etc, ....else some "Brotherhood" types may assume control ... and the terrorist smuggling will become a tidal wave. The Congress and Senate have intelligence committees , so the the video's will have been seen by those who count.
Diplomacy will be the death of us all.