Egypt’s political landscape is dotted with people and issues that, from a reasonable distance, are  incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, when you share a neighborhood with some of those people, you can’t always afford the luxury of trying to comprehend “root causes” and socio-demographic dynamics. The dangers are existential, not intellectual and so you need to first take defensive measures and then try to understand. People who fail to understand this tend – usually – to be those who live far from the threats, or think they do.

The Dubai-based Al Arabiya news site carries a report from Egypt today. It focuses on a televised sermon delivered Friday by Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a “holy man“ and lawyer who is “the country’s most charismatic Salafist politician” and a front-running candidate in Egypt’s 2012 presidential election. He was reckoned to have a serious chance up until his electoral run was forcibly ended by the disclosure, denied by the candidate but subsequently confirmed by the Egyptian authorities, that his mother was a citizen of the United States. It appears he is still laboring to overcome that disgrace.

He favours lowering the legal age of marriage to puberty (for girls, of course); chopping off the hands of thieves, naturally; ending the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty; supports the veiling of women and their segregation from men in the workplace (according to the L.A. Times). He calls Iran a successful model of keeping your independence from the United States. And about the 9/11 massacres, he said

I am one of those who believe these events were fabricated from the outset as part of the global groundwork for the distortion of Islam’s image. I mean, this is part of a comprehensive global plan that includes a media aspect. [Interview on a 2004 Saudi TV program]

There’s an eye-popping selection of other public pronouncements of this person here.

On Friday, according to Al Arabiya, the ultra conservative Abu Ismail preached that

The only way to build a strong Egypt is to have tens of thousands fight and be “martyred” under the name of God, a prominent Salafist politician told worshipers during a televised sermon on Friday. “So what if a hundred or a thousand, or even ten thousands are martyred to build a long-prevailing nation,” Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a former presidential candidate, said. “There is no other plan but to be martyred.”

A lunatic, right? Yes, and/or a cynical manipulator. But that’s not necessarily the impression you would get from the mainstream Western media coverage he has enjoyed during this past year.

A handful of examples from just one source: the L.A. Times:

* Abu Ismail’s is “a robust voice in the fractious political Islam” of post Mubarak Egypt;
* He embodies “a new Egypt searching for a religiously resonant yet pragmatic brand of politics that can fix the nation’s deep economic and social problems“;
* “He’s a favorite on talk shows and internet videos, a charismatic speaker who can charm a university crowd as easily as he can raise cheers from mill workers in the provinces”;
* “He skims the edge of fundamentalism — he once suggested that he and Osama bin Laden shared the same ends, if not the means, to create an Islamic state — but connects with Egyptians’ everyday worries.

The Economist has said he is “committed to replicating the seventh-century ways of the Prophet Mohammed [and]could be the country’s next pharaoh.” More recently, it has also called him a man with “folksy charm putting the dour Mr. Morsi in the shade.” He’s a politician whose followers are “rowdy enthusiasts.”

There is no suggestion that Abu Ismail himself has any intention of embracing martyrdom. It’s a near certainty that his inspiration will bring less discerning Egyptians (aka rowdy enthusiasts) to that end. Martyrdom-minded religious fanatics have a bad reputation in this part of the world, so this “folksy” sermon is less than good news.

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The Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya launched the Daniel Pearl International Journalism Institute on Wednesday, named for The Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan 11 years ago.

His murderers posted a video of Pearl, before they beheaded him, in which he stated, “I am Jewish.”

Pearl’s father, Prof. Judea Pearl, said he hoped the institute would be a “towering contribution to Danny’s legacy, his life, his mission and his dreams.”

Prof. Pearl this week lit one of the torches in the annual ceremony at the end of Remembrance Day for Fallen Soldiers and the beginning of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

IDF soldiers stopped a large-scale terrorist plot in the works with the arrest of a known Hevron terrorist who Arab media claimed who was critically injured even though he was disabled and has been confined to a wheelchair.

Amjad al-Najjar, the director of the Palestinian Prisoners Society office in Hevron, “denounced the arrest raid targeting a man who is already unable  to walk without assistance,” the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported.

The terrorist, Motaz Faraj Ibedo, was reported as being unable to walk on his own since he was shot in 2011 in the abdomen, and supposedly was “permanently disabled” after a bullet allegedly ruptured internal organs.

Just to make the case even more thrilling, Ibedo claimed he was shot while in custody and cannot walk because of paralyzed left leg.

But even Maan reported  without any contradiction, that an IDF spokeswoman said he “threw objects including a gas can at soldiers” and tried to snatch a soldier’s rifle.

For someone who can’t walk, he is pretty athletic.

The Jewish Press asked the IDF exactly what happened and got a slightly different version.

First of all, Ibedo was arrested for being involved in terrorist activity – again – but nothing small-time.

He “was involved in  something very serious, not marginal, but I can’t share any more information with you because the case still is under investigation,” and IDF spokesman told the Jewish Press.

There is some other information that Maan did not report. For example, he was arrested in a hideout, not in his home.

And the “handicapped” man “threw at the soldiers everything he could get his hands on,” such as hammers, said a military spokeswoman. “I won’t say he does not have a disability, but he can walk,” a spokesman added.

For a man who supposedly cannot walk on his own, he must have had an angel helping him because he walked down the stairs from the second floor, where soldiers nabbed him, and then tried to grab a soldier’s rifle.

The soldier then shot him in the hand. The “critical” injury amounted to his losing a finger, according to the IDF. Actually, it was a critical injury for the terrorist, whose ability to kill a soldier or Israeli civilian with a rifle is now severely limited.

The spokesman noted that even if he were in a wheelchair, “That does not give him a free pass.”

For years, foreign media have gobbled up Arab media reports that Israel’s counterterrorist actions have killed the handicapped, the elderly, pregnant women and mentally ill people.

Several “pregnant women” were discovered in ambulances during the Oslo War, otherwise known as the Second Intifada. On closer inspection, the “pregnant women” often turned out to be terrorists with weapons and suicide belts on their way to “delivery.”

Most ordinary Americans are sympathetic to Israel. This is actually surprising, when you consider what the media pushes at them, day after day. For example, this morning my local Fresno Bee newspaper contained part of an article from the NY Times headlined “Palestinians Erupt in anger at Israel,” which began like this:

JERUSALEM — Days before Secretary of State John Kerry’s return to the region, anger and defiance continued to flare across the West Bank on Thursday as Palestinians buried two teenagers killed by Israeli soldiers during protests triggered by the death of a prisoner with cancer while in Israeli custody. …

Clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths hurling stones and firebombs erupted there and in other West Bank locations for the third straight day, as Palestinian leaders accused Israel of escalating tensions in order to thwart Washington’s efforts.

“It seems that Israel wants to spark chaos in the Palestinian territories,” President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority told leaders of his Fatah faction at a meeting in Ramallah. “Israel on every occasion is using lethal force against peaceful young protesters, and peaceful demonstrations are being suppressed with the power of weapons. This is not acceptable at all.”

Although firebombs are mentioned, the Times article does not mention that the two “youths” (aged 17 and 18) who were killed were shot while throwing them at soldiers until the 17th paragraph. The excerpt in the Fresno Bee only included the first 8, so local readers did not get the benefit of even this:

The Israeli military said that the youths were hurling firebombs at an army post late Wednesday, and that soldiers responded with live fire; it is investigating the episode.

Here is another account of the incident, from Arutz Sheva, a right-wing Israeli source:

IDF soldiers opened fire on Wednesday night at two terrorists who approached an IDF position near the community of Einav in northern Samaria.

As the two terrorists approached the soldiers, they hurled a firebomb at them. The soldiers returned fire, killing one terrorist and wounding the other.

Personally, I prefer the second version. But even the first is better than the description of the “peaceful young protesters” presented by Mahmoud Abbas, which is all that Fresno Bee readers saw.

Now, a few words about the death of the prisoner, Maysara Abu Hamdiya, in Israeli custody. The Arabs claim that he died because Israel withheld medical care, and even provided a photograph of the poor man handcuffed to a hospital bed. Of course the photograph actually was taken last year of an insurgent in a Syrian hospital, but as you know, truth is all relative anyway.

Abu Hamidya had throat cancer. A prison service spokesperson said that

[He] had been treated since his diagnosis in February and that prison authorities applied to a parole board for his early release after he was found to be terminally ill. He died before the process could be completed…

Did he get good enough medical care? Who knows, but Arabs die in Palestinian Authority custody all the time and there are no riots or media coverage.

So why was Maysara Abu Hamidiya imprisoned in the first place?

In 2002, this retired general in the P.A. “security” forces was arrested for dispatching a suicide bomber to the Café Caffit in the Emek Refaim neighborhood of  Jerusalem. The bomber was incompetent and walked in with disconnected wires dangling from his bomb. A waiter saw him and pushed him outside; his bomb did not go off. In 2004 there was another unsuccessful attempt at the same location.

Abu Hamidiya worked for both Fatah and Hamas, and was heavily involved in providing weapons, financing of terrorism and bombmaking, in addition to his role in the failed attack.

Originally published at Rubin Reports.

Therefore, my Harry, Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out, May waste the memory of the former days.” –William Shakespeare, “King Henry IV, Part Two.”

THERE’S NO doubt about the growing crisis in Egypt, a country that is crashing economically and whose highest government official running the religious establishment just called for genocide against Jews.

Here are four dispatches from a 24-hour period:

The Associated Press reports:

A ferocious fight between members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents near the group’s Cairo headquarters…could mark a dangerous turning point… raising worries that the confrontation between Islamists, who dominate power in the country, and their opponents is moving out of anyone’s control.

The Christian Science Monitor speaks of “Bread riots or bankruptcy: Egypt faces stark economic choices.”

Then there’s the International Herald Tribune’s, “Fall in Egyptian Pound Weighs Heavily on the Ill,” which speaks of “a shortage of an estimated 400 different drugs, some of which are considered lifesaving….”

The Atlantic, formerly one of the most reliably apologetic publications on the Brotherhood regime, speaks of vigilante groups lynching alleged criminals.

And that doesn’t even include massive power cuts; the food poisoning of around 500 students at al-Azhar University due to negligence; the institution of blasphemy cases for alleged insults toward Islam (by an actress) and to the country’s president (by a television comedian). Even the April 6 Youth Movement, which functioned as an ally and something of a front for the Brotherhood during the early days of revolution, has turned against it.

The Brotherhood-controlled state institutions have threatened to lift the licenses of two television stations (here and here) that have been critical. In the turbulent northern Sinai, armed militant groups openly paraded with weapons.

So even with an almost $5 billion IMF loan supposedly on the way—none of which will ever be paid back, meaning taking away from Western economies to prop up an Islamist anti-American regime—the prospects aren’t good.

It also won’t change the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood which is not, like Communism during the Soviet Union in its last days, a movement that doesn’t take its ideas seriously. This is a vigorous movement that feels the future belongs to itself and which will soon be governing four places (Egypt, Gaza Strip, Syria, and Tunisia).

The official Muslim Brotherhood site just tweeted the claim, earlier made by President Morsi, that Jews control the American media. Of course, that same media has been incredibly friendly to the Brotherhood and apologetic for its behavior.

Egypt’s powerful minister of religious affairs, the person who gets to decide who gets hired as preachers in mosques, as religious instructors in schools, who approves those textbooks and controls vast funds, spoke as follows recently:

We hope the words of the Prophet Muhammad will be fulfilled: “Judgment Day will not come before” the Muslims wipe out the Jews and added that Israel will cease to exist.

The fact that such statements don’t even register in the Western media input shows how conditioned such countries have become from ignoring such things, though anti-Jewish statements from Morsi got a bit of coverage–in the context of being regrettable but not anything meaningful–when that became unavoidable.

Consider, then the simple facts: A country of 85 million people, heavily armed (with U.S. help) is burning with anarchy and violence, teetering on the edge of an economic abyss, and threatening genocide against a neighbor with less than one-tenth of that population.

Might this be a matter of concern? Well, the crisis is being covered but there doesn’t seem to be much worry about this in Washington. And even the media coverage lacks two vital elements.

First of all, none of the many articles pointing to the disaster in Egypt have pointed out that this was all totally predictable and yet no one in the establishment—the “herd-news,” to coin a phrase—predicted it. There is no reflection on how mistaken enthusiasm for an Egyptian revolution helped transform a mildly repressive pro-Western regime that managed Egypt’s economy as well as possible into an Islamist-dominated half-dictatorship, half-anarchy disaster.

The Associated Press, one of the largest news agencies in the world, will no longer use the term “illegal immigrant” to describe those who migrate to a country in violation of their immigration laws, their Executive Vice President announced on Tuesday.

Their style guide will no longer permit the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person.  It will now only use of the word “illegal” to describe an action, such as “living in or migrating to a country illegally.”

It is believed that most of the 1400 U.S. newspapers which use A.P. will likely follow their decision on the use of such a loaded term and will, for instance, stop referring to the millions of unauthorized Latino migrants to the U.S. as “illegal”.

ABC reported the following:

…most of America’s top college newspapers and major TV networks, including ABC, NBC and CNN, have vowed to stop using the term. Nearly half of Latino voters polled last year in a Fox News Latino survey said that they find the term “illegal immigrant” offensive. A coalition of linguists also came together last year to pressure media companies to drop “illegal immigrant,” calling it “neither neutral nor accurate.”

Whilst many Americans are applauding the decision by A.P. as a victory for accuracy and diversity, we can only wonder whether serious news organizations – and the Guardian – will similarly drop the loaded and value-laden term “illegal settler” to characterize Jews who, consistent with the parameters of the Mandate for Palestine, live beyond the 1949 armistice lines (in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem).

A quick search of the Guardian’s site shows a few references to such ‘illegal’ Israelis.Guardian film critic Philip French wrote the following in his Oct. 21, 2012 review of the documentary ’5 Broken Cameras’:

Behind this pair, but no less endangered, is Emad, recording some of the fiercest footage of assaults and atrocities on the West Bank that I’ve ever seen, as well as the arson wreaked on Palestinian olive groves by illegal Jewish settlers.

A July 24, 2012 story by Phoebe Greenwood on Palestinians facing eviction from ‘unauthorized’ homes in the southern Hebron hills included this variation of the charge:

Hila Gurani, the state’s attorney, wrote that the second intifada and the second Lebanon war exposed gaps in IDF preparation that requires more extensive training in firing zones, which the illegal Hebron residents are preventing

And, a report by Nicholas Watt about the call by some within the U.K. Labor Party to label products which are produced in Judea and Samaria included this passage:

Labour is opposed to boycotting Israeli goods but [Yvette] Cooper believes consumers should be informed whether products are produced by illegal settlers.

Moreover, a Google search using the words “illegal Israeli settlers” turns up 727,000 hits, and included references to the proscribed Jew in many “mainstream” publications. (Obviously, another variation of these specific words, in a different order, would likely produce further examples).

The greater implications of the A.P.’s decision are even more fascinating. If, for instance, we use A.P.’s logic as a guide, and only use the term “illegal” to describe an action, shouldn’t the Guardian and other sites stop referring to Jewish communities and homes in places like Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim and eastern Jerusalem as “illegal”?  If so, we might one day look back at the ubiquitous use of such subjective terminology (there were more than 5,000 references to “illegal settlements” at the Guardian’s site) as an embarrassing chapter in their paper’s history.

Whatever the Guardian editorial position on the desirability of a future Palestinian state which may include most of Judea and Samaria, we can hope that they’ll catch up with the times, heed their liberal calling and stop labeling – in one manner or another – hundreds of thousands of Jews residing within the boundaries of their historic homeland as “illegal.”

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Syria’s civil war recently entered its third calendar year. With worse still to come, in recent days it has been estimated that the number of people killed in Syria since the uprising began now stands at more than 90,000. Any death is a tragedy for someone and the people close to him; and a million deaths are not a statistic but a million individual tragedies. How can this fact glide by us with so little comment?

When it comes to Syria, there are probably a few practical reasons. One, undoubtedly, is that people get bored with long news stories. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown — in which American, British and other Western troops have after all featured prominently – public and media attention was fairly short-lived. After an initial burst of fascination, once the new norm was established, peoples’ attention wandered elsewhere. Syria has now dragged on too long to hold peoples’ ever-smaller attention spans.

There is also the fact that in Syria – as in other recent wars – journalists have found themselves becoming targets. While many journalists are willing to take the same risks as the population at large, few are willing to stay in situations where they might be the actual object of death-squads or the attentions of RPG’s. In Syria, most journalists have found it hard to get in, or once there, are unwilling to stay, so the amount of footage coming out is necessarily limited. With an absence of plentiful footage, if the story cannot be visualized, there is now rarely a story. Evidently we need pictures.

But there is another, more important, reason why this story has got so little attention. There are often underlying, as well as immediate, reasons why something does not make news. There are some situations in which a tragedy helps a political cause and others in which it hinders it. For some people, casualties are not tragedies or statistics, but simply a well-spring for political point-scoring. To compare the cases of Israel and Syria is to see this at its most stark.

Take, for instance, the highest figures for all the wars in which Israel has been involved throughout its history. The upper estimates suggest that the War of Independence in 1948 cost around 20,000 casualties in total – that is 20,000 on all sides. The upper casualty estimates of the wars of 1968 and 1973 are similar: another 20,000 and 15,000 respectively. The smaller wars in Lebanon and Gaza in the years since add several thousand more to this sad total. But something is striking here.

All the wars involving Israel, throughout its history, have caused at least 30,000 fewer deaths than have been caused in Syria in the last couple of years alone. Say that you added together all the wars involving Israel, and they had all happened either consecutively or in one go. Would we have seen the same amount of coverage that we have seen in Syria? Would there have been more or fewer protests around the world involving people of all religions, races and backgrounds, than there have been outside of Syria in recent months? Would the nations of the world, the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council, have been quieter or noisier than they have been when it has come to the matter of Israel’s neighbor, Syria, over recent months?

The answer to all these questions is that the air and ground incursions in Gaza in recent years have on each occasion led to deaths — tragic though they may be — that are a fraction of the number in Syria since the uprising there began. Yet the world, and the world’s press, and the world’s protest movements, and the world’s governments and the world’s supra-national organizations have on each and every occasion mobilized in a way which seemed at the time, and in retrospect, to demonstrate an obsession which is probably at best unhealthy, and at worst the expression of straightforward bigotry. All those people who claim that small incursions into Gaza have not been small incursions, but in fact a “holocaust,” where are they now? If the death of a hundred people is a “holocaust,” what is the death of 90,000?

Additionally, a Nov. 15 Telegraph Live Blog post on the Gaza war included this passage:

Jihad Misharawi, who is employed by BBC Arabic, lost his 11-month-old baby Omar. His brother was also seriously injured when his house was struck in the Israeli operation and his sister-in-law was killed.

Corrections: None.

Daily Mail. On Nov. 15, the Daily Mail published a sensationalist piece by David Williams, titled ‘What did my son do to die like this?’Anguish of BBC journalist as he cradles the body of his baby son who died in Israeli rocket attack on Gaza‘, which included multiple photos of Misharawi with his baby and the following passages:

“Tiny Omar…died after an Israeli airstrike on Hamas militants in Gaza.

Masharawi had arrived at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital after Omar suffered severe burns in an airstrike that sent shrapnel tearing into his home killing a woman and leaving his brother and uncle critically injured.

Corrections: None.

Spectator. David Blackburn published a piece titled ‘Israel’s public relations problem‘ which included the image of Misharawi with his baby, as well as the following passage:

The front page of today’s Washington Post shows a picture of the BBC’s Jihad Masharawi holding his dead 11-month-old son, an innocent victim of Israeli action against Hamas’ paramilitary targets following months of indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians in southern Israel*

Corrections: The piece has now been updated, per the asterisk, and includes the following at the bottom:

*Since this article was published, a United Nations investigation has found that the incident described by the Washington Post was caused by the shortfall of a rocket fired by Palestinian militants at targets in Israel.

The Sun. On Nov. 15 The Sun published ‘The Innocents: Beeb journalist’s son dead, another hurt..babies hit as Gaza war looms,’ by Nick Parker, which included a photo of Misharawi and his baby, and this passage:

Omar was one of at least 15 Palestinians killed in air strikes as Israel retaliated over the Hamas missiles.

Corrections: None.