The manoeuvres at the top of the regime have transparently been choreographed in Washington. Mubarak’s declaration on Tuesday night followed hard on the heels of a visit from the Obama administration’s envoy, Frank Wisner, a paid lobbyist of the Egyptian government, who was reported to have “urged” the Egyptian president not to stand again.
Frank G. Wisner Jr. is not known to the U.S. public either as a diplomat or as a master spy, but as an unscrupulous financier. He was part of the Enron power elite involved in the fraudulent bankrupcy of the corporation that ruined countless small investors and, later, as Vice Chairman of American International Group whose share prices plummeted by 95% during the 2008 financial crisis before its bailout with taxpayers’ money.
From the Guardian:
11.31pm GMT: Frank Wisner, the US special envoy sent by Obama to talk to Egypt’s government, is on his way back to the US, empty-handed it would appear. AP reports:
The White House had attempted to nudge Mubarak to the exits, dispatching former US Ambassador Frank Wisner as a special envoy to deliver the message to him. But by Wednesday, Wisner was on his way back to the United States.
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the delicacy of the matter, suggested Wisner had been seeking specific pledges from Mubarak beyond just a promise not to stand for re-election. The official would not elaborate, but the administration has made no secret of the fact that it wants the state of emergency lifted and would prefer to see Mubarak’s son, Gamal, not try to succeed his father. Mubarak mentioned neither in his address Tuesday night.
Wisner is a veteran of “economic espionage” and is believed to have used his diplomatic cover to advance US governmental and corporate economic interests while he served as a diplomat to Asia. A member of Wisner’s staff told InterPress Services in 1997 that “if anybody asked the CIA to help promote US business in India, it was probably Frank”.
I understand if they expect a domestic audience to swoon for this sort of rhetoric, but do they actually expect that there is anyone in the Middle East, anywhere, who will take seriously the righteous objections of Hilary Clinton — the American Secretary of State and close Mubarak family friend — to the rise of an oppressive military dictatorship in the Middle East? Is anyone there really going to believe that it’s that government’s lack of respect for human rights — rather than its refusal to serve American interests and heed its various dictates — that is motivating the hostility and threats?
Egypt protests – live updates What lay behind Obama’s friendship with Mubarak? Erdogan is Brilliant Egypt: much too early to celebrate Google, Facebook, Twitter sound off on Egypt
RT @ArabRevolution: @VodafoneEgypt actively supporting Mubarak regime. SMS sent to Egyptians http://yfrog.com/gzhf7fvj BOYCOTT @VodafoneUK #
RT @jeremyscahill URGENT Cairo #journalists reporters GET OUT of your HOTEL ROOMS NOW http://bit.ly/gFRvZg #Jan25 RT NOW @chrislhayes #
@PJCrowley The perpetrators of today’s violence in #Egypt must be held accountable, and the government should tell its supporters to eschew violence. #
. @PJCrowley Take careful note ‘Pro-Mubarak supporters are recognizably police, says Peter Beaumont. ‘ http://tinyurl.com/4a8urur #
. @PJCrowley Some of the attackers caught. Their IDs showed them to be policemen dressed in civilians clothes.’ http://tinyurl.com/4nuvurn #
. @PJCrowley RT @alaa: Further proof there is police among the thugs, they’re now shooting tear gas #Jan25 # Protestor consoles Egyptian army officer
The leaked minutes of a meeting in 2008 between Palestinian, U.S. and Israeli officials show a senior Palestinian proposing that Israel annex all but one of its major Jerusalem settlements as part of a broad deal to end their decades-old conflict.
Ah, to be a ‘democracy’- apartheid Israel can flaunt international law and steal land, sponsor Palestinian ‘leaders’ without a mandate of the people from whom Israel steals, who then give away even more land behind Palestinians’ backs. How could Israel then be accused of stealing?
The Palestinian Papers blow the cover off the iniquitous deals which Abbas and his cohorts have done on the sly with their Israeli bosses. What chance for the end of the gross indignity of Israeli apartheid when the perpetrators of this discrimination are covertly and not so covertly assisted by those who shill as ‘Palestinian leaders’?
“Even during the days of negotiations, our own experience taught us that the pursuit of human fraternity and equality — irrespective of race or religion — should stand at the centre of our peaceful endeavours. The choice is not between freedom and justice, on the one hand, and their opposite, on the other. Peace and prosperity; tranquility and security are only possible if these are enjoyed by all without discrimination.”
One remembers also the second point in the preamble of the United Nations Charter:
“to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”
‘… it is sickening to see the Israeli consensus demanding that when Arabs think of their future, they should imagine a hobnailed boot crushing their faces forever, in order to protect Israelis from their own fears. This concept demonstrates, again, how much Israelis view Arabs as savages who can neither govern themselves, nor develop. They always need a strongman to keep them down. This concept tells us much more about Israelis than about their neighbours.’
Israel’s friend, Mubarak is a nice chappie, really …
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rejected calls from protesters to resign and said he would name a new government to promote democracy as protesters clashed with police into the night, setting buildings on fire and swarming armored cars.
Kevin Rudd is milquetoast, omitting condemnation of Mubarak’s outrageous oppression and police violence against peaceful protestors and journalists.
Well the political situation is highly fluid, as a number of my colleagues from elsewhere around the world have said. We have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East. We have equally strongly argued that this transformation should occur peacefully and without violence. That remains our view in terms of recent developments in Egypt as well.
“We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters, and we call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain the security forces,”
Mubarak is in power in Cairo with the west’s blessing, approval, support, sponsorship, funding and arms. Democrat and Republican presidents, Labour and Conservative prime ministers, have all cosied up to Egypt’s “secular” tyrant, a self-proclaimed but ineffective bulwark against “Islamic extremism”, since he assumed the presidency in 1981.
‘There was an old despot called Hosni
whose mind was suspicious and lazy,
for when poems are writ,
he quivers his lip,
and looks for the poet not meaning.’
‘There was an old fool called Mubarak
who hated all literary dialect
while his back was turned,
Hosni’s ears would burn,
as poets would cleverly paint him black’
On “Australia Day” many Australians project yobboish nationalism and drape themselves in the flag US-style, while the self-appointed elite sneer at the ‘bogans’ and ‘bevans’. Yet elitism is another form of the purulent racism with which Australia is infested, a miasm from the colonial aristocracy with roots in British class structure along with a more recent infection from the US ‘Me, me, me’ consumerist culture which values money, power and capitalist competition over community and cooperation.
At my place, we think of Australia Day as Invasion Day, the anniversary of the day our indigenous people saw white sails on the horizon, bringing Little England and its vapid social class structure, filthy diseases and other introduced species and destructive agricultural methods. This is my poem/song about the colonialists’ invasion of Australia.
Blow the Winds
Five years gone since my mate left home
he purchased his ticket to slavery
consigned him to another land
to wait for me in purgatory.
His pretty girl cried silken tears
sent to the gallows with cotton in her ears
they said she lied by the Rule of Law
born and bred a gypsy woman.
I’ll be going now, and I’ll see you soon
Sailing beneath the rising moon,
I’ll look for you in Melbourne town,
and there’s never been a heart so torn.
I stole an heiress in a field one morn
My heart’s in tatters and my hopes are gone,
In 1825, cold and wet and barely alive
I miss my woman and the babes she’s borne,
Fated to hang by a weeping judge,
Now sailing on the winds of scorn.
Blow the winds and fill the sails
take us to hell in New South Wales
The hulks are full in England
with many more like me
Bound to be Australians
with ironclad guarantees.
Me life’s not me own, I’m a Government man,
don’t remember when me term began,
the squatter’s chains rattle in me bones
to please the whims of the English throne.
Thrown into the white man’s cell
for laughin’ late and givin’ ‘em hell,
grabbed by the coppers, ripped from the land
no white fella can understand.
In 1985 another Murri suicides,
and there’s plenty more in Australia
of scoundrels such as me
Australia would be better off
if we’d hung on English trees.
Al Jazeera’s ground-breaking scoop provides definitive confirmation of perfidy on the part of unrepresentative Palestinian ‘negotiators’ and of the falsity of the Israeli position. The Palestine Papers reveal that Israel shunned way more than generous settlement offers through which Palestinian leaders betrayed their people.
The Palestinian Authority proposed an unprecedented land swap to the Israeli government, offering to annex virtually all of the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.
Not only did the Israeli government offer no concessions in return, but – as The Palestine Papers now reveal – it responded with an even more aggressive land swap: Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert wanted to annex more than 10% of the West Bank (including the major settlements in Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel and elsewhere), in exchange for sparsely-populated farmland along the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
The Israeli offer is documented in a Palestinian rendition of what’s colloquially called “the napkin map,” a rendering of which is revealed for the first time in The Palestine Papers.
Olmert met in mid-2008 with Mahmoud Abbas and showed him a map of the proposed swaps. Abbas was not allowed to keep a copy of the map, and so the 73-year-old Palestinian president had to sketch a copy by hand on a napkin.
The PA, in other words, never even really negotiated the issue; their representatives gave away almost everything to the Israelis, without pressuring them for concessions or compromise. Erekat seemed to realise this – perhaps belatedly – in a January 2010 meeting with [US president Barack] Obama’s adviser David Hale.
Erekat: Israelis want the two-state solution but they don’t trust. They want it more than you think, sometimes more than Palestinians. What is in that paper gives them the biggest Yerushalaim in Jewish history, symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarised state… what more can I give?
…
There is, in other words, seemingly no mutually acceptable policy for Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and other major West Bank settlements within a two-state solution – a fact the Bush administration was willing to acknowledge in July 2008.
Rice: I don’t think that any Israeli leader is going to cede Ma’ale Adumim.
Qurei: Or any Palestinian leader.
Rice: Then you won’t have a state!
Rice may prove to be correct: Two and a half years later, the parties are no closer to a solution on settlements, and the Israeli government may be gearing up to issue a “massive” new round of housing permits for illegal settlers in the West Bank.
Along with Al Jazeera, the Guardian also intends publishing the documents which it says show
* The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
* How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
* The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
* The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
* How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel’s 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City – the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
Desperately, the beleaguered Palestinian negotiators have attempted to ameliorate their irretrievable, exposed position:
Last night Erekat said the minutes of the meetings were “a bunch of lies and half truths”. Qureia told AP that “many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the … Palestinian leadership”.
However Palestinian former negotiator, Diana Buttu, called on Erekat to resign following the revelations. “Saeb must step down and if he doesn’t it will only serve to show just how out of touch and unrepresentative the negotiators are,” she said.
The current Likud platform, recommended reading, evidences the fact that Israel under Nutanyahoo has no intention of ceding a Palestinian state despite any of his stern blither – and indeed why relinquish a inch when talk of peace talks can delay resolution indefinitely, creating a facade that ‘something’ is being done, while Israel continues to steal more Palestinian land and oppress Palestinians, with the unmitigated support of its supine neocoloniser, the US. Israel’s leaders’ whines about “peace and security” echoed by its US consorts are always a cover for ziofascist expansionism and ethnic cleansing.
Even the lack of a US veto of the forthcoming UN Security Council Resolution to censure settlement growth is unlikely to restrain the avaricious Israelis, for what punishment has been visited on them by western governments for their contravention of the previous 28 UNSC resolutions of which they are in breach?
Ali Abunimah, who is analysing the Palestine Papers for Al Jazeera and will be commenting on them further this week spells out the bottom line in Electronic Intifada:
“The cover has finally been blown on a ‘peace process’ where there has been no transparency, honesty or accountability to the Palestinian people by those who claimed to negotiate in their name. What saddened me most as I reviewed hundreds of documents was to see how Palestinian negotiators — with no mandate from the Palestinian people — viewed the basic rights and interests of the Palestinian people not as objectives to be secured, but as obstacles to be fudged or mere bargaining chips to be frittered away to secure a ‘deal’ that could save the skins of the Palestinian Authority at almost any price.”
…
“What we can discern immediately from these documents is that the US-brokered negotiations, especially under the Obama administration, can never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights and that the two-state solution is basically dead. In the long term, we will have to ask how the peace process charade, revealed in these papers, was allowed to continue for so long as Israel continued its relentless colonization of Palestinian land and the Palestinian Authority that was supposed to be a step on the road to freedom become a sophisticated tool of continued Israeli occupation.”
Many PLO supporters in Palestine must be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders. Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily.
The two-state solution is now dead and buried by Israel and the PLO. Impossible for anyone (even the BBC) to pretend that there can be an independent Palestinian state. A long crapulent depression is bound to envelop occupied Palestine, but whether Israel likes it or not there will one day be a single state in the region, probably by the end of this century. That is the only possible solution, apart from genocide.
Tariq is unrealistic here, I think – by demographic pressures alone, one state would come about much sooner than the end of this century.
Thus, once again, the battle comes down to a principled struggle for equal rights for all – the end of Israeli apartheid and jewish ethnonationalist hegemony in historic Palestine. Given the Palestine Papers’ affirmation of Israel’s bad faith in ‘peace’ negotiations and complicity of the US with Israel’s intransigence, the rationale for boycotts, divestments and sanctions of Israel is affirmed once again.
Ah, to be a ‘democracy’- apartheid Israel can flaunt international law and steal land, sponsor Palestinian ‘leaders’ without a mandate of the people from whom Israel steals, who then give away even more land behind Palestinians’ backs. How could Israel then be accused of stealing?