The attacks in northern Sinai by Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (Friends of Jerusalem) may go on for a while. Their terror warfare, though resulting on January 29 in massacring 30 army personnel and civilians, may go on for a while. But with each passing day, Egypt's huge military establishment learns from experience. Its response to the friends of ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming more sophisticated.
The pointed advocacy for surrender to global terror is in fact causing massive retaliation, especially through a widening the territorial buffer. Hamas is bottled up in Gaza, and its calls for a Rafah Crossing bonanza are no more than exhalations of desperation. You cannot hurt Egypt and, at the same time, issue deceiving proclamations of a Gazan-Egyptian brotherhood.
That crossing might one day be a bridge between Egypt and an independent State of Palestine. For now, Hamas is no more than an Islamist rebellion against a putative State of Palestine. Perhaps one day it shall submit to commonality with Egypt in recognition of a State of Israel. You cannot deny, as Hamas Charter does, "the right of any Jew to an inch of Palestine," and call yourself a credible member of the international community. Hamas should learn the basics.
Now to Egypt's editorialists -its adversaries from within.
- A genius by the name of Dr. Mahmoud Khalil mocks his country's renewal of the emergency law in northern Sinai for another 3 months. That professor at the Faculty of Public Information of the prestigious Cairo University is stupidly sarcastic without cause. He claims, through his empty suit, that "the military attacks (by Ansar) proves the inability of the present authorities to deal with the situation in Sinai."
- In his column (WATANTAN) of January 31, in Al-Watan newspaper, he sounds nearly gleeful. From his comfort zone in Cairo, he opines more blatant imbecilities. "Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis which carried the operation at Karm Al-Qawadees (northern Sinai) has augmented its lethal power many folds, while the opposing security forces have a diminishing prowess."
- Professor Khalil: Do yourself and Egypt a favor: learn the art of evidence!! Have you counted? Or does your measure rest on the mere ability to remotely explode a car laden with explosives, or sacrifice an ignorant suicide bomber? Have you ever learnt anything from the ample lessons of terror warfare? Apparently none!!
Turning now to Fahmy Howedy, an Islamist writer in Al-Shorooq of January 31. He, apparently without any previous experience in military intelligence, boldly states: "What happened in Al-Arish, clearly points to significant failure in the gathering of military intelligence." Sir!! On what basis have you formed that judgement? On the basis of its mere happening?
Have you ever been in Sinai? I don't mean the pleasure spots of Sharm El-Sheikh, Taba and Hurgada. I mean through the dunes and crevices of a vast province where trees have surrendered their existence to parched rocky hideaways. I was there. Several times. So was my son collecting Sinai plants to discover their medicinal values -a report by a then 16-year old, now deposited with Cornell University.
If you, Mr. Howedy, wants to be an expert in desert warfare (which I personally gained as a UN officer in Algeria during its brutal war of independence) go to the scene. Get some sands in your boots. Get a few lessons on Bedouin life, on tribal disconnects, on the sacrifices of our desert troops, on psychological warfare. Only then could you come back to us. Proclaiming that "the measure of competence is the ability to sabotage an operation before its happening." And you call this editorial wisdom?
Then in the language of a defeatist, Mr. Howedy, the Islamist guru of Al-Shoraaq, goes on saying: "Have the measures taken in Sinai diminished the threat of terrorism or enhanced it? The operations undertaken by Ansar are performed with a high level of professionalism while the counter operations are rudimentary and are attributed by the government to the Muslim Brotherhood."
Mr. Howedy: Is that what your pearls of wisdom are all about? Well, if you call raids by Apache helicopters, and the unremitting pursuit of terrorism in Asian Egypt rudimentary, this forces me to call you a simpleton!! The term is defined as "foolish; gullible; a half-witted person." The terror operations chain of custody couldn't be clearer -from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis to ISIS. If you, Mr. Editorialist, cannot make that linkage, it is not surprising that the Brotherhood cells in Egypt and abroad draw comfort from your editorials. So does Qatar, Turkey, Al-Jazeera TV, and the sheet called Al-Quds Al-Arabi, especially that of February 2.
Now to our editorialists as cartoonists. Helmy Al-Tooni glorifies in the creation of a cartoon in the newspaper Al-Tahrir of February 1. The cartoon by that Nasserite artist depicts Egypt as a bride in her wedding gown; flowers held tightly by her right arm; tears streaming her lovely youthful face; pyramids in the background. An arrow has struck her heart. With blood streaming, she bemoans the Egyptian leadership's presumed failure to protect, Bride Egypt, says: "Whoever married me must be able to protect me!!"
In support of this fallacy, another grossly misleading argument is advanced. Another editorialist by the name of Assem Hanafi makes a fanciful claim: "The Muslim Brotherhood is armed with a domestically-manufactured bombs which they are at liberty to explode at any time, and at any place."
With this deluge of non-thinking editorializing by well-known writers within Egypt is it any wonder that that defeatism has infected foreign correspondents? David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, who is pre-disposed to constant attacks against the elected President of Egypt, El-Sisi, pushes the envelope even further. On January 30, he, together with Merna Thomas, proclaims to the world a habitual epitaph for Egypt's ability to confront terrorism.
In a lead paragraph, they both assert a misleading fantasy. The Sinai terror operations are made to be unlike what is happening all over the world. Those operations, they preach, are "prompting fears that the Egyptian government's campaign of home demolitions, curfews and sweeping arrests has failed to choke off a budding insurgency there!!" Then they quote from their already predisposed habitual sources.
From Khalil Al-Anani of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies -a so-called expert in extremism, they produce a quotation. Al-Anani says: "The insurgency is getting stronger and stronger, and the government's strategy is a failure." And from Tamara Cofman Wittes, Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, another defeatist is quoted. She opines that: "It is clear that this extremely coercive approach is not working."
I wonder what Ms. Wittes, a former deputy assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs is comparing the defensive/offensive Egyptian measures to. With the existence in the U.S. of 50,000 private security firms? With the uncontrolled gun possession in the U.S. of 300 million had guns, a gun per person in America? With the unremitting U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and through the U.S. Africa military command?
Where has objective measuring of the advance in global counter-terrorism gone? Apparently nowhere. Except for a false focus on Egypt which is fighting on two broad fronts: Terrorism and the economy.
The icing on the cake should now be reserved to David Hearst.
In the World Post he surpasses all the above-cited doom-sayers. He, as if through a bull-horn, shouts: "Egypt is more unstable than ever, with full-scale military operations in the Sinai and mass protests around the country that never seem to die down." Last time I checked, I found unfortunately that the "mass protests in that never seen to die down," are in his own backyard: In Furgeson, Missouri. Incredible.
Shouldn't the likes of Kirkpatrick, Al-Anani, Wittes and Hearst spend sometime learning that their doomsday chants about the New Egypt are akin to mere sound echo at the Grand Canyon? The ABC of wisdom in today's international strategic studies is to shun combat predictions and to keep the U.S. safe from the unintended consequences of intrusiveness in the internal affairs of other States.
This is especially poignant when it comes to the New Egypt. Post-Islamist Egypt has charted a course toward "The Strong State." No room for an Islamization by the defunct Muslim Brotherhood. Give it a rest, folks: Morsi. This is in spite of an unfortunate reception accorded recently by the U.S. State Department to his acolytes, calling themselves the "Egyptian Revolutionary Council."
Those in D.C. who accorded that group a false sense of recognition should wake up to the realities of a possible Cairo - D.C. rapprochment. On this point, let us cite the New York Times.
Written by David Brooks, a conservative with Republican party leanings, he, under the title of "Being Who We Are," says:
"The Middle East is not a chessboard we have the power to manipulate. It is a generational drama in which we can only play our role. It is a drama over ideas, a contest between forces of jihadism and the forces of pluralism. We can't know how this drama will play out, and we can't direct it. We can only promote pluralism -steadily, consistently, simply."
Well said Mr. Brooks. From the Islamic reign of terror in Egypt, under the Morsi regime, a great lesson has been learnt. The Muslim Brotherhood, a determined adversary of pluralism, was given a historic chance which they miserably squandered. ISIS, their related organization, declared through The Friends of Beit Al-Maqdis, Sinai as an ISIS Emirate. How brain dead can you get!!
Once more, we see the devilish features of ISIS and its new franchises clearly in the mirror of assassinating the Jordanian pilot and the two Japanese hostages. These features inspire this invocation addressed to all those who predict failure of the efforts of Egypt in Sinai and other related combat activities against ISIS waged at present by the international coalition.
Our invocation is: May those who predict failure in the elimination of Jihadism everywhere have their heads examined, their voices stilled, their ink running dry, and their predictions proving as false as their pitiful understanding of this global war of values!!
In this information warfare, the primitiveness of Egyptian editors is staggering.
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