Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak suffered a heart attack in the course of an inquisition “investigating graft and abuse allegations.” Also on the public prosecutor’s docket: “violence against protesters.” (Link)
Expect Egyptian freedom fighters, many of whom are of the once-thwarted Muslim Brotherhood, to grow more restive as it becomes clear that “freedom” will not make manna fall from the heavens—especially since most Egyptians are not, as far as I know, demanding a liberalization of their economy.
The Egyptian court judging Mubarak will oblige the masses. It’ll masquerade as a court of law, but I suspect that this tribunal will more closely resemble the French Revolutionary Tribunal, meting justice by popular demand.
UPDATE: A “Day of Cleansing” is what the rebels are, ominously, calling the next stage of the Egyptian revolution.
During “the early days of the movement … Egyptians showered the Army with flowers and saw them as defenders of the people after tanks rolled into the streets to restore order after violent clashes with police.” It was not as though “hundreds to thousands of people have [not] been detained by the Army and tried in military courts without access to civilian lawyers. Yet until recently, such criticism of the Army had not been widespread.”
The people, it would seem, have changed their fickle minds.
The blood will flow, and still something will be amiss.
Why do you think that, bar the likes of the tea party, is it never real liberty that the majority wants?
Here’s why: Radicals, libertarians among them, believe that because all people seek safety and sustenance for themselves, they’ll allow those they dislike to peacefully pursue the same. These radicals are oblivious to reality. People are not naturally good. They want what is not theirs. Free up the Egyptian economy. Some will rise, others will fall.
A cry will then go out for a third party (the new government) to take from those who rose and give to those who fell.
“We are not part of the picture” [in Libya], Ehud Barack told Greta van Susteren, who recounted to him the familiar war-for-Israel-and-oil accusations circulating in some Arab quarters vis-a-vis the offensive in Libya. This, even as the US commits itself to furthering the whims of the seething Arab Street—whoever it comprises, wherever it is, and whatever it wants. American warriors, in arms and in armchairs, seem to believe that repeating the word “rebel” enough times will transform the shady ragtag factions we are fighting for as a princess’s kiss transforms a toad.
Ehud Barack, Israel’s Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister (bio information), has politely applauded NATO and the US for rescuing the Libyans, but he also expresses a conscious thought about the feel-good operation, the kind of thought that will never be floated stateside:
“It’s up to the Arab people to struggle for their rights; to change regime or impose corrections and new procedures in their internal political life.”
If indeed we’re subsidizing “freedom” for [the Libyans] and are fighting their battles—then we’ve also increased their impotence and diminished their initiative. Subsidize individuals because you believe they are helpless—and you’ll get more learned helplessness.
Besides, what are these people? Wards of the American state? Whatever happened to fighting your own revolutions?
Their detractors—and yes, this butchered Jewish family, the youngest of whom was three months old, has detractors—claim that they were settlers, occupiers of Palestinian land. They deserved to be slaughtered by Palestinians as they slept, their gruesome deaths (images below) “celebrated with carnivals by Hamas which handed-out sweets to passers-by.” (HERE)
The “settler” exculpation—used indirectly by Obama to condemn the victims, not the perps—still does not explain away the existential meaning of stabbing “an eleven-year-old in his heart and slitting a four-year-old boy’s throat.” (HERE) Remember: the Arab citizens of Israel proper prefer to live surrounded by a Jewish majority than migrate to the Palestinian Authority. Shouldn’t they be “encouraged” to pack up and relocate to the PA? Evidently not. For one, their civilized, peace-loving Jewish neighbors have accepted them and granted them full citizenship rights: “They vote. They elect leaders to the Knesset. They serve on the Israeli Bench. They publish Arabic-language newspapers. They preach anti-Semitic hate sermons in their mosques. There is almost no limit to the freedom bestowed on Arabs of any faith within Israel.” (HERE) Why are they not considered occupiers of land not theirs?
Watch the scene of the crime. (Read a write-up.) I’ll continue this tack below.
“In The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and indefatigable civil libertarian, elucidates the moral components of the vortex of terror and counterterror, action and reaction into which the Palestinians have plunged Israel. He observes that the number of innocent Israelis killed intentionally by Palestinians is considerably higher than the number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed accidentally by the Israel Defense Force.”
“The vast majority of Palestinians killed by Israelis are directly involved in terrorist activity. Those not directly involved were killed accidentally in the course of legitimate military actions against terrorists. ‘Israel’s moral responsibility for these accidental, although often foreseeable, casualties of war,’ he avers, ‘is in no way comparable to the responsibility of Palestinian terrorists who have deliberately targeted every single Israeli civilian victim.'”
“This distinction, one would presume, is a no-brainer: ‘Every reasonable school of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence and common sense distinguishes between deliberately targeting civilians and inadvertently killing civilians while targeting terrorists who hide among them.’ Nevertheless, anti-Zionist bigots, who understand the difference between accidental death and willful murder in ‘other contexts,’ embrace moral relativism when it comes to the Jewish state.”
Professor Dershowitz makes one other particularly chilling observation:
Israel has nothing to gain and everything to lose from inflicting civilian casualties. The opposite is true for the Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian casualties play in their favor, and Israeli casualties play in their favor.”
[SNIP]
I have vehemently opposed Israel’s anti-terrorism reprisals as disproportionate in their use of force. Still, everything said above obtains.
UPDATE II (March 16): Justice is Not Vengeance. The right thing to do is catch the perpetrators, try them, and kill them. Beck is missing the meaning of the grieving father’s words; refracting them through his Christian beliefs. Said Ruth Fogel’s father, Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai:
“I have worked in education many years, and as an educator, I try to strengthen and teach people faith. I understand that I cannot be satisfied with words and that I also must implement the same principles on which I have educated others. This is a test of my faith, and therefore I agreed to be interviewed.
I believe in the country, in our strength and in the strength of the army, and I ask how did this strength not save our children?
… We will take upon ourselves the difficult task and pave for them the path so that life will be victorious.
Their mother and father will pray for them from the Heavens, their grandfathers and grandmothers will give them a lot of love, and the People of Israel will hug them and encourage them to grow and continue in the path of their parents.viewing them through the prism.”
[SNIP]
The above is profound, simple and beautiful, but it is hardly a statement of loony Christian forgiveness. To forgive evil in Jewish thinking is evil. Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai simply expresses his love for his surviving grandchildren and his determination to help them. There is nothing as unhealthy here as forgiveness. That’s a Christian hobby horse. There can be no justice without proportional punishment. Jews get that.
UPDATE III (March 20): TINY TAMAR SPEAKS. This gifted little orphan articulates ideas and has a depth of understanding absent among her peers in the West/US. For those who understand Hebrew:
“Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood,” I wrote here. For the sake of accuracy, let’s remember that Mubarak was not an equal opportunity oppressor; he went after members of the Muslim Brotherhood, mainly.
The BBC concedes as much in an upbeat expose on the Brotherhood’s Egyptian acolytes. “For decades, keeping the Brotherhood and other Islamists from power was the main justification for the authoritarian rule of President Hosni Mubarak.” (Here.)
Here are some of the musings of gentle Doha, a Muslim Brotherhood steel magnolia:
“The first thing to do is to sever all ties with Israel because it is the cause of our ruin. And Mubarak was their agent.” …
“Egypt follows French law, and we do not want that, because when someone steals for example, he spends a month in jail and then he’s released to do the same again. But under Sharia law he gets his hand cut off and that’s better.” …
“Sharia doesn’t allow women to participate in government because women are emotional. Women should be responsible for their houses and their jobs, but not government,” she said.
The BBC correspondent says that “some of [Doha’s] views reflect the official Muslim Brotherhood line.”
The BBC would never entertain the notion that where the radicalism of dear Doha doesn’t jibe with that of her “moderate” Brothers—it’s because the latter practice Takiya: lying to advance and protect the faith.
