ISRAPUNDIT
By Victor Sharpe, AMERICAN THINKER
Not content with creating havoc in the U.S. economy, setting Americans against each other, and forcing through a health reform act which has nothing to do with health but everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and an immense increase in governmental interference, our president has now opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. It may well usher in a catastrophe not seen since World War 2.
From his notorious Cairo speech to the present, President Obama speaks, and disaster follows. Some commentators believe that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are so utterly naïve as to make themselves unable to understand what will happen in Egypt as a result of their undermining of the Mubarak regime.
The question is justifiably asked: Do they truly believe that the next regime that comes to power will have the interests of the U.S. and the West at heart?
My fear is that Obama is not naïve at all, but he instead knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West and Israel, however much innocent blood will flow as a result.Inevitably, sooner or later, the Muslim Brotherhood will take power, usher in a barbaric Islamist power in Egypt that will control the Suez Canal, and show no mercy to its own people or its perceived foes.
So now we see what the present incumbent in the White House has wrought, and so can our few remaining allies. They must now wonder what confidence they can ever have in any future alliance with the United States.
We should be aware of what endemic Islamic violence has wrought in the past. For example, assassinations of Arab leaders are not an infrequent occurrence. After the 1948 Arab-Israel War, the King of Jordan, Abdullah, was murdered by followers of the Muslim fanatic, the Mufti of Jerusalem.
The Egyptian prime minister, Nokrashi Pasha, was also struck down. The forces behind the killings were elements of both Arab socialist movements and the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, in the streets of Cairo, we have an unholy alliance of the current radical left with the same Muslim Brotherhood.
The Suez Canal is a major lifeline for the economies of Europe and the United States. It has been the source of political disruption in the past, as it may well be in the near future. And the Muslim Brotherhood may soon control it. As always, the past is our guidepost to the future.In 1952, Gamal Abdul Nasser seized control of the Egyptian state and forged an alliance with the Soviet Union, which provided enormous arms shipments to Egypt.
Feeling greatly empowered, Nasser broke both the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Israel and international law by blocking the Suez Canal to Israeli ships and other vessels bringing cargoes to and from the Jewish state. At the same time, Nasser blockaded the narrow Straits of Tiran at the foot of the Sinai peninsula, thus preventing Israeli maritime trade with the Far East and Africa.
Nasser eventually nationalized the Suez Canal on July 27, 1956. This illegal act threatened the oil supplies to Britain and France from the Middle East. The economic stranglehold on Israel became intolerable, and Arab terrorism against the Jewish state led to many Israeli civilian deaths. (Incidentally, Arab terrorism began long before the so-called Israeli “occupation,” which Arab and pro-Arab propagandists now use as the excuse for present Arab aggression against Israel.)
In October 1956, war by Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt broke out. Israeli forces, in what became known as the One Hundred Hours War, defeated the Egyptians in Sinai and Gaza and broke the naval blockade. Britain and France invaded the Canal Zone to end Nasser’s blockade of the Suez Canal.
Under U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Britain and France were eventually forced out of Egypt. This was, as future events showed, a dreadful blunder on the part of the Eisenhower administration. It was the beginning of Britain’s decline as a world power. It also led to Nasser remaining in power.
The Egyptian dictator’s political and pan-Arab ambitions again climaxed in 1967. Nasser again blockaded the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping and reinstituted the naval blockade at the mouth of the Tiran Straits.
This in turn led, in 1967, to the hasty withdrawal of the U.N. buffer force that had been in place to prevent further Egyptian aggression against Israel. U.N. Secretary General U. Thant folded under Arab pressure and arbitrarily withdrew the buffer force. Egyptian armed forces then entered the Sinai, heading for the Israeli border.
The Arab and Muslim world called then, just as now, for Israel’s extermination, and huge mobs in Arab capitals uttered lurid threats for Israel’s defeat and the slaughter of her people. The world prepared for Israel’s destruction, but everyone was astonished when in June 1967, Israel — forced to fight a defensive war of survival — destroyed the combined Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies and air forces within six days.
The Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran were again open for the free passage of Israeli ships. Nasser fell from power and was replaced by Anwar Sadat. However, in 1973, the Syrian and Egyptian armies attacked Israel on the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar, Yom Kippur, which gave its name to the war.
Israel was hard put to survive initially, but she gradually beat back the Arab threat. Sadat eventually decided that war was not an option for the time being and chose to make peace with Israel.
Israel vacated the entire Sinai desert (95% of the territories Israel conquered) and gave up the oil-producing facilities it had developed at Abu Rodeis — all in return for a signed peace agreement with Egypt. Jordan eventually followed Egypt’s decision, but both Arab nations maintained a frigid peace with the Jewish state.
Anwar Sadat was subsequently assassinated by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. His successor was Hosni Mubarak, who, for the last thirty years, has kept control over the seething Egyptian masses and the volatile Arab street. Now his thirty-year rule has been fatally undermined by U.S. President, Barack Hussein Obama, in a betrayal that is as astonishing as it is deplorable.
It is clear to any child that a new Egyptian regime will, if not immediately, be hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is now calling for Egypt to prepare itself again for war with Israel and for the blockading of the Suez Canal to American, Western, and Israeli shipping. Obama is no fool; he engineered this.
So, thanks to President Obama, we are back to square one with an Islamic Egyptian regime poised to send Egypt’s massively armed army back into Sinai and towards the Israeli border with the aim of exterminating the Jewish state. So much for “land for peace.”
But what economic turmoil would a new Egyptian Islamic closure of the Canal mean to the West?
It is estimated that slightly more than two million barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products flow both north and south through the Suez Canal every day.
In 2009, for example, almost 35,000 ships transited the Suez Canal, and 10 percent were petroleum tankers. Oil shipments from the Persian Gulf travel through the Canal primarily to European ports, but also to the United States.
Additionally, the Sumed Oil pipeline provides an alternative to the Suez Canal, transporting as much as 3 million barrels of crude oil from Saudi Arabia and several Gulf states. It amounts to up to seven percent of Europe’s oil needs. Since the violence erupted in Egypt, European oil prices have risen far more than they have in the United States.
If the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928, takes over Egypt, it is more than likely that both the Canal and the pipeline would be shut again, causing oil tankers to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, adding six thousand miles to the journey to Europe alone. Not what an economically strapped Europe wants.
At the same time, the Brotherhood, now governing over 80 million Egyptians and possessing a huge military, would join with a radicalized Yemen in blockading the Bab al Mandeb straits at the foot of the Red Sea.
Add to the noxious mix the Islamic Republic of Iran, and we may well see the closure of the Gulf of Oman, with additional disruptions of oil shipments to the West. The economic reality for America will be catastrophic.
Under Obama’s watch, the true democratic revolution against the mullahs in Iran was snuffed out because the American president refused to support the demonstrators in the streets of Tehran. In contrast, the same Obama ordered Hosni Mubarak to leave office and let the rioters in Cairo have “free” elections.
Following Condoleezza Rice’s naïve call for “free” and democratic elections in Gaza, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas) used the democratic process to come to power and immediately trashed all semblance of democracy by instituting oppressive sharia law and raining thousands of missiles upon Israeli towns and villages.
The grotesque policies of Obama have caused Lebanon to fall under Islamic occupation, with the Iranian puppet, Hezb’allah, now controlling the Lebanese government. Jordan’s kinglet, Abdullah, sits on a powder keg whereby his throne is under increasing pressure from violent members of the same Muslim Brotherhood.
So there you have it. Islam increasingly holds Europe, America, and what is left of the free world in its clutches…and the left cheers it on.
Let me close with the words of Michael D. Evans, New York Times bestselling author of Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos:
- It’s no coincidence that Al Baradei showed up in Cairo only two days after the uprising began and was immediately named a negotiator by the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, he had been waiting in the wings for quite a while.
He’s on the board of an organization headed by George Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski called International Crisis Group. Brzezinski is the same man who supervised the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
Another board member of the ICC is one Javier Solana. Solana is one of the most powerful figures in the European Union. Because of Solana’s Marxist sympathies, and his support for the regime of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Solana was on the USA’s subversive list.
Former U.S. National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, who once smuggled incriminating documents out of the Clinton White House by hiding them in his clothing, is another Board Member, as is General Wesley Clark, once fired from his NATO command.
Mohamed El Baradei also sits on the ICC’s Board and thus, seeing the hand of George Soros along with the other players who for so long have plotted against the West and Israel, the Islamists are joined together.”
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One & Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
