Monday, April 11, 2016
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and Armageddon
Saudi Arabia has signed a $20 billion deal to finance Egypt's petroleum needs for five years and a $1.5 billion deal to develop its Sinai. The agreements were signed during a Cairo visit by Saudi Arabia's King Salman, a rare foreign trip for the 80-year-old monarch. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers have pumped billions of dollars into Egypt's stagnant economy since the army toppled President Mohamed Morsi of the Moslem Brotherhood in 2013 after mass protests against his rule. Gulf Arab countries aid Egypt because they see the Moslem Brotherhood as a threat and want to help Egypt revive an economy that collapsed under Morsi and the Brotherhood in 2011. The Saudi-Egyptian Business Council said Saudi businessmen also will invest $4 billion in projects, including the Suez Canal, energy and agriculture. The Saudi deal to develop the Sinai will help Cairo fight an islamist terrorist insurgency that feeds on discontent and poverty among the Sinai population. ~~~~~ Despite aiding Egypt since 2013, the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia worry about President al-Sisi's inability to halt corruption and economic inefficiency. They also want a bigger role for Egypt -- the region's largest country and a sunni intellectual center -- regionally. King Salman's visit to formalize the deal personally with al-Sisi indicates how important Egypt and Saudi Arabia are to each other in security matters. It also shows that Saudi Arabia still supports al-Sisi. ~~~~~ The surprise of the King's five-day visit was Egypt's announcement that it will transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Egyptians are furious, especially since Egypt's state-owned newspaper reported that Israel was informed in advance about the treaty, as part of the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace deal. Egyptians were upset their government told Israel but not them. The government said in a statement it has signed maritime demarcation accords with Saudi Arabia that put the islands of Tiran and Sanafir in Saudi waters, a six-year process. Saudi and Egyptian officials say the islands belong to the Kingdom and were under Egypt's control because Saudi Arabia's founder, Abdulaziz Al Saud, asked Egypt in 1950 to protect them. But the accord needs ratification by Egypt's parliament, and a well-known lawyer, Khaled Ali, filed a complaint with the administrative court, arguing that according to a 1906 maritime treaty the islands are Egyptian and the move is a transfer of sovereignty. Ali also alleges the accord violates article 151 of Egypt's constitution that requires all treaties related to sovereignty to be approved by referendum. The court will hear the case on May 17. ~~~~~ With Iraq, Syria and Yemen in civil wars, and Saudi Arabia occupied with its own power struggle with Iran, Riyadh reportedly feels it must stop Egypt from failing and will continue aid despite tighter budgets because of falling oil prices. But, the Saudi approach to Lebanon, cutting off $4 billion in aid, and the Gulf states halting aid to Lebanon, are the result of the growing role there of Iran's ally Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia is convinced that shiite Hezbollah, backed by Iran, now pulls the strings in Beirut. But the Saudi response, cutting aid, seems self-defeating to many Lebanese because it will weaken the army, a counter-balance to Hezbollah, leaving Hezbollah even stronger. An unnamed European diplomat said : "By default we're abandoning Lebanon to Iran." It makes Iran more dominant than ever in unstable Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is angered that "a militia that is classified as a terrorist group is now hijacking measures in government," Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said in March. Saudi Arabia believes Hezbollah carries Iranian power and influence beyond Lebanon -- fighting for President al-Assad in Syria and with Houthis in Yemen. ~~~~~ Dear readers, it is clear that Saudi Arabia is drawing the line that divides the Middle East into sunni/shiite, Saudi Arabia/Iran. The Middle East armageddon has not started but the world should do more than wring its hands because if it starts, it will become world war III.
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Arab Muslims born and raised in the United States are just as American as I am, but Arab Muslims born and raised in Belgium will never be Belgian. They may or may not be citizens of the state of Belgium, but they won’t have a Belgian identity. A Belgian identity scarcely even exists. Most Belgians identify first and foremost as Dutch-speaking Flemish or French-speaking Walloons.
ReplyDeleteThere are five times as many Muslims in the United States as there are in Belgium, but the United States is not a hotbed of homegrown Islamic extremism. We’ve suffered some acts of terrorism since 9/11—the mass shooting in San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon bombing and the massacre at Fort Hood. If American Muslims and European Muslims were equally predisposed to jihadism, we’d experience roughly five times as many attacks. But we haven’t – but why? We can only imagine the violent convulsions that will wrack the European continent if something on the scale of 9/11 ever happens on that side of the ocean. And it’s more likely to happen over there in the short and medium term than it is over here. Europe is already under much greater attack than the United States, and it has a far larger problem with Islamic radicalization.
Americans won’t likely ever forget how the supposedly “sophisticated” European opinion-makers said America’s chickens were coming home to roost when Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, and how we—for one brain-dead reason or another—had it coming. I wonder what Europeans think of that attitude now.
Europe appears to be falling apart and its leaders seemingly have no solution because they have spent all the political capital they had on the welcoming of the terrorist with NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Now their “look the other way attitude folder of ideas is empty.”
Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?
ReplyDeleteTo quote Winston Churchill: “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.
Stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications.
Islamic terrorism is where it is today because our leaders have failed to acknowledge it for what it is, rather than what they want it to be. Most of the world’s leaders have absolutely no training in Islam, terrorism, or for that matter the Middle East at all. But they want to make decisions based on their beliefs , not on the facts.