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An Egyptian Abrams tank in Tahrir Square.

News item:

On Friday, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of a possible sale of 125 M1A1 Abrams tank to Egypt – the first large arms deal since Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power in February – including associated weapons, equipment, parts, training and logistical support at an estimated cost of just over $1.3 billion.

If approved, the deal would increase the number of Abrams tanks in Egypt from around 1,000 to 1,130.

What?

Egypt is headed for a huge economic/food crisis. David P. Goldman (‘Spengler’) writes,

The numbers thrown out by the IMF are stupefying. “In the current baseline scenario,” wrote the IMF on May 27, “the external financing needs of the region’s oil importers is projected to exceed $160 billion during 2011-13.” That’s almost three years’ worth of Egypt’s total annual imports as of 2010. As of 2010, the combined current account deficit (that is, external financing needs) of Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia was about $15 billion a year.

What the IMF says, in effect, is that the oil-poor Arab economies – especially Egypt – are not only broke, but dysfunctional, incapable of earning more than a small fraction of their import bill. The disappearance of tourism is an important part of the problem, but shortages of fuel and other essentials have had cascading effects throughout these economies.

So, how will they pay for these tanks? Well, I suppose we US taxpayers will, through the military ‘aid’ that we’ve provided to Egypt ever since we supplanted the Soviets as their patron. I presume our government thinks that it’s more important to ‘aid’ the Egyptian military complex than to feed the people. And then there’s our own debt crisis.

A more important question is “what do they need these tanks for?” Egypt’s armored brigades are already far superior to those of Iran. There is only one possible use for them, and that is to fight Israel.

Nobody knows at this point who will be in charge in Egypt in the next few months. Demonstrators presently camped in Tahrir Square include not only “pro-democracy” elements, but also Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups. Can we trust them? Does it sound ridiculous to even ask that question?

There is perhaps no place on earth as dangerous today as Egypt, a huge country where political instability, economic crisis and a massive military establishment are coming together.

Should the US be making it even more dangerous?

Technorati Tags: Egypt, Abrams tanks, famine, Islamism

JERUSALEM (AP) — Some 120 foreign activists were being held in Israeli jails Saturday, awaiting possible deportation, after arriving at Tel Aviv’s airport over the weekend as part of a solidarity mission with the Palestinians, a government official said.

Others who managed to get through Israeli border controls traveled to the West Bank where some joined a demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier. Associated Press Television footage showed some foreign activists, along with Palestinians, cutting through the barrier’s barbed wire fence with clippers. Another protester started a small brush fire.

The Israeli military said about 150 protesters gathered near the barrier just north of Jerusalem. Some threw rocks at soldiers who fired tear gas to disperse them, the army said…

When several of the ‘activists’ unfurled Palestinian flags at the airport yesterday, they had to be rescued by police from normal Israeli passengers, who beat them and told them to go to Syria to demonstrate.

Need it even be said: what other nation in the world would allow foreigners to come in to their country and commit acts of vandalism while agitating for its destruction?

***

Another news item:

The United States’ elimination of Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama Bin-Laden has paved the way for Israel to renew plans to eliminate Hizbulla terrorist leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, according to European diplomatic reports cited by Lebanese newspaper Al-Dayar.

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the start of the Second Lebanon War, the newspaper said the plans were approved but shelved under American and European pressure as deviating from the ceasefire agreement that ended the war.

So a) the US can kill the guy who orchestrated an attack on it but Israel can’t, and b) after Hizballah has been allowed to receive tens of thousands of rockets and every other manner of arms, to retake control of southern Lebanon and rebuild fortifications in direct contravention of UNSC resolution 1701 with nary a peep, the Americans and Europeans are suddenly concerned about a possible Israeli violation of it.

Keep in mind that the rearming of Hizballah has made another war a virtual certainty, regardless of what happens to Nasrallah.

***

Finally, the spoiled brats of the Middle East (see my piece from Friday) are outraged that the US Congress thinks that we shouldn’t pay to keep enemies afloat:

The Palestinian Authority has protested this week’s decision by the United States Congress to cut off funds to the PA if it unilaterally declares itself a sovereign state and seeks United Nations recognition in September. A statement by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction said the decision would push the region into violence. — IsraelNN

This is a perfect example of the Palestinian Arabs’ collective personality disorder: everything is someone else’s fault. If the region erupts in violence — that is, if the Arabs start another intifada — then it will be because the US has pushed them into it by not giving into their demands.

One might think that this sounds like plain old blackmail, but it’s worse than that. They really believe that they are owed a living and a state (at Israel’s expense), and that if we don’t give it to them, we are responsible for their misbehavior.

The really, really bad thing about this is that some elements of the US administration — including the President — seem to agree with them.

Technorati Tags: Israel

Here’s something to think about over the weekend:

The Palestinian Authority is facing a budget crisis. It has reached its borrowing limit and has a 585 million dollar deficit. So naturally its leaders are asking the West for another handout…

But do “Palestinian People” really need billions more in aid? The World Bank report for 2011 found that only 16 percent of the West Bank under PA control was living below the poverty line.

How serious is a 16 percent poverty rate? It’s better than the poverty rate in Washington D.C. which hit 18.9 percent. That means that politicians in Washington D.C. are diverting money that could have been used to help needy Americans a few miles from their offices, to help the comparatively better off terrorist populations in the West Bank…

Last month the PA passed a law putting all imprisoned terrorists, even members of Hamas, on its payroll. Now the Palestinian Authority is having payroll problems and expects foreign donors to bail it out– so it can continue paying money to convicted murderers. — Daniel Greenfield, “The Palestinian Muslim Money Hole“

Read the article to find out what else your money is buying for the Palestinian Arabs.

Now, everyone knows that Greece, whose poverty rate is 20%, has suffered a massive economic crisis, and the harsh terms of its bailout are likely to push that number even higher. But after all, these are the Greeks, a real people in a real country, with a real, albeit struggling, economy.

Palestine, Greenfield suggests, has become a failed state before it’s been declared.

So the question is, why is it so important that these particular Arabs, who have given the world so much — airline hijacking, suicide bombings with rat-poison laced shrapnel, the Qassam rocket — should have a state of their own?

Indeed, why is it seen as an enormous problem that they presently do not have a state, since they turned down several past opportunities?

Who are they, anyway? They are mostly the descendents of Arabs from Syria and Egypt who moved to Palestine during the latter part of the 19th century and the Mandate period, mostly to take advantage of better economic conditions there — thanks to the Zionists — than in their homelands.

In the years since 1948, and particularly since 1967, they have created a mythology of a ‘Palestinian’ civilization that extends back hundreds, indeed thousands, of years. But that’s what it is, a myth. ‘History’ invented from whole cloth.

They have developed themselves into a people only in opposition to another people — the Jews who ironically made it possible for them to be ‘Palestinian’ in the first place. And it seems that much of their culture — their literature, poetry, music, their politics and their heroes — are all based on their opposition to the Jews. They are the ‘anti-Jews’ in every way. Do I need to add that they aspire to destroy the Jews’ state? Do I need to add that they try to kill Jews every chance they get?

So why is this ‘people’ important enough that its political entity should be maintained by the taxes collected from people who are less well off, in Washington DC, Greece and California (poverty rate: 15.3%)? Why is it important enough that European and American heads of state have called for statehood for them as soon as possible?

Why are ‘activists’ from all over the world converging on Israel this week, by air and sea, on behalf of them?

Indeed, when there are other peoples around the world whose situation is objectively far worse — in Southern Sudan, in Syria, etc. — why is so much attention, money and effort focused on the “Palestinians?”

Only a paranoid Jew would say that it’s precisely because they are the anti-Jews.

Technorati Tags: Palestinians, Israel

Once there was the Old Jew: the ghetto Jew that didn’t know how to fight or farm, pale, cut off from the land, too weak to protect himself against the antisemites, who depended on non-Jewish rulers and often waited for help to come from the heavens until it was too late.

Then we got the New Jew, tough, the one that ‘made the desert bloom’, a fearsome fighter who gave up Yiddish for tzabarit, and traded the Old Jew’s traditional Judaism for a religion of hard work and (often excessive) self-confidence. The New Jew told the non-Jewish rulers to go hell and created the state of Israel. The New Jew wasn’t as easy to push around as the Old Jew, but his ideology didn’t have the staying power that the Old Jew’s religion had, which gave rise to…

The Newer Jew: these are the Jews for whom the highest ideal is universal justice, the maximum amount of freedom and self-determination for everyone, and end to limitations, to borders, to oppression for all humankind. These are the Peter Beinarts and the Richard Jacobses. Although they may profess a form of Judaism, its ethics hold no special place for the Jewish people or the land of Israel. Unfortunately, the Newer Jew — who usually has only a tenuous grasp of history and often a specious post-modern left-wing ideology — sometimes has trouble telling the difference between friends and enemies.

This is where you get absurdities like “Rabbis for Human Rights” and others who today are actually helping Hamas by trying to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, an act which serves no humanitarian purpose but only facilitates Hamas obtaining weapons to use against Israel!

But the pendulum never stops swinging, and there is a reaction to the Newer Jew as well: groups like hashomer hachadash and im tirtzu, who seem to combine the respect for Judaism and the Land of Israel of the Old Jew with the toughness of the New Jew. Do we call them the Newest Jew?

Im tirtzu recently sailed their own little ‘flotilla’ among the boats of the pro-Hamas activists waiting to leave for Gaza from Piraeus, Greece. Their message was that the real victimes of oppression were not the genocidal antisemites of Hamas, but rather the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and the Syrian dissidents who are being murdered on a daily basis by Bashar al-Assad:

Technorati Tags: Israel, Judaism, im tirtzu