Progressives and Facts - Incompatability?

Just in case facts mean more to you than they do to Jimmy Carter, and therefore, you are not a progressive, you might wish to click on this clever piece of factual propaganda entitled: "Why Are You Protesting Against Israel."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmerYYdJDv0&feature=player_embedded
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More on O'Reilly's interview with our self-absorbed president. (See 1 below.)
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I am bemused by the fact that when every day Americans march in peaceful protests against the Obama Administration's policies and challenge their constitutionality in our court system they are branded racists, traitors and mal-contents and Sarah Palin and those other 'witches' are attacked as nut cases.

When Egyptians protest Mubarak's policies, destroy their nation's cultural exhibits, riot in the streets terrorizing citizens, wrecking Egyptian commerce and tourism, progressives applaud their action and the press and media folk run around bringing us the story yet, have no true understanding of Egyptian culture.

Am I missing something or maybe its that 'news' gets in the way of 'facts.'

That usually seems to be the case when reporting about Israel.(See 2 below.)
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Is it bayonet time in 'la la land?' (See 3 below.)
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George Friedman on Egypt - an update. (See 4 below.)
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Merkel said it first now Cameron. Perhaps there is a modicum of truth to the assertion that 'multi-culturalism' between Western Civilization and Arabs/Muslims is premature and has failed.

Perhaps when a lion wants to devour the lamb it is not a good idea they should lie together. (See 5 below.)
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I am conducting an art bus tour beginning tomorrow and going through Friday late.

We will be visiting three museums, attending a music concert and ending with a visit to the home of a private collector. Consequently, I will not be posting for the rest of the week so I thought I would end on a bit of southern humor:


One day, Joe Bob was walking down Main Street when he saw his buddy Bubba driving a brand new pickup.

Bubba pulled up to him with a wide grin.

'Bubba, where'd you git that truck?'

'Jenny give it to me,' Bubba replied.

'She give it to ya? I know'd she wuz kinda sweet on ya, but a new truck?'

'Well, Joe Bob, let me tell you what happened. We wuz drivin' out on County Road 6, in the middle of nowheres.

Jenny pulled off the road, put the truck in 4-wheel drive, and headed into the woods. She parked, got out, threw off all her clothes and said, 'Bubba,take whatever you want.' So I took the truck!'

'Bubba, yore a smart man! Them clothes woulda never fit ya!'
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Have a great rest of the week.

Dick
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1)Obama's Foxy Evasions
By Jan LaRue

Bill O'Reilly's interview of President Obama on Fox News just prior to the Super Bowl confirmed that he remains a self-absorbed leftist.


Now that he's ardently denied moving to the political center, maybe pundits and Republicans like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will finally get it, unless they naïvely believe he's been there all along.


Obama's responses qualified for more penalty flags than were thrown during the game. His reaction to the crisis in Egypt is similar to his comment about the Super Bowl. He refused to "pick sides." The transcript is available online.


Obama revealed his alarming apathy about the Muslim Brotherhood seizing power in the aftermath of the Egyptian crisis. While Obama easily faulted "the judge in Florida" who declared "ObamaCare" unconstitutional, he couldn't manage to criticize the Brotherhood despite its commitment to a worldwide caliphate imposing Shariah Law and Jihad on all nations.


Its "spiritual leader," Imam Yusuf al-Qaradawi, hosts a daily TV show viewed by 40 million Muslims. He defends Hitler, suicide bombings, killing Jews, and Muslims employing nuclear weapons "to terrorize." Despite all the evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's radicalism, Obama created a false dilemma by contrasting the Brotherhood with the "suppressed Egyptian people" under the current regime of President Hosni Mubarak.


O'REILLY: The Muslim Brotherhood, a great concern to a lot of people. Are they a threat to the USA?

OBAMA: I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don't have majority support in Egypt. They are --

O'REILLY: Are they a threat?

OBAMA: But they are well-organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti-U.S. There's no doubt about it. But here's the thing that we have to understand. There are a whole bunch of secular folks in Egypt, there are a whole bunch of educators and civil society in Egypt that wants to come to the fore as well. And it's important for us not to say that our only two options are either the Muslim Brotherhood or a suppressed Egyptian people.

O'REILLY: But you don't want the Muslim Brotherhood ....

OBAMA: What I want is a representative government in Egypt. And I have confidence that if Egypt moves in an orderly transition process, that we will have a government in Egypt that we can work with together as a partner.


When asked what is the "absolute worst part of being president," Obama's self-absorption was evident:


O'REILLY: Okay. Worst part of this job? What's the worst, absolute worst part of being president of the United States?

OBAMA: Worst part of the job is, first of all, I've got a jacket on Super Bowl Sunday.

O'REILLY: That's true.

OBAMA: If I wasn't president, that would not be happening.

O'REILLY: I have a tie. You don't have a tie.

OBAMA: The biggest problem for me is being in the bubble. It's very hard to escape. You know, you can't go to the corner ....

O'REILLY: Everybody watching every move you make.

OBAMA: Every move you make. And you - over time, you know, what happens is you feel like - that you're not able to just have a spontaneous conversation with folks.

O'REILLY: Yes.


OBAMA: And that's a loss. That's a big loss.


Most presidents say that sending America's soldiers into harm's way is the worst part of being president, not the loss of their personal comfort zone.


In his book, An American Life, President Reagan recounts telling a group of children: "As I've said, the hardest part of the job was having to send young men and women into situations of danger and then having to tell the families of some why they weren't coming back."


Every president has experienced the discomfort of "being in the bubble." For Obama, it's all about him.


Obama didn't deny that he's a "big government liberal." But he flatly denied that he's "a man who wants to redistribute wealth," claiming that he "lowered taxes over the last two years." O'Reilly let that pass and didn't remind Obama of the 2001 interview in which he championed redistribution of wealth and criticized the Supreme Court for failing to do so.


Recall Obama telling "Joe the Plumber" in 2008 that it's good "to spread the wealth around":


JOE WURZELBACHER, PLUMBER: Your new tax plan is going tax me more, isn't it?


OBAMA: It's not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they've got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.


Obama said he's "the same guy" he's always been.


Both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Big Government guys are counting on it.


Jan LaRue is senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.
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2) From an Eye-Witness to the Egyptian Rebellion: If not Now, then When?
By James Bloom

I am no polemicist. I am rarely even political. I am writing this piece solely because I happened to find myself involved in the events it discusses. Last Thursday, I flew out of Cairo airport with my wife and fourteen year old son on tickets bought for me by my step-father, Richard Weltz, a regular contributor to American Thinker and an old-school conservative, who urged me to write this. I hadn't wanted to leave Cairo. I had never felt under threat during the week since the mass demonstrations had begun. I had also always wanted to witness the fall of a dictatorship first hand. However, I thought we'd better take up my step-father's offer to fly out as we were running out of money, our bank's branch offices were showing no signs of opening, and fewer and fewer cash machines had any cash left in them.


When we arrived in Madrid, where we lived for several years before moving to Cairo in September, 2007, and where we still have a house, I finally had time to look properly into American reactions to the upheaval in Egypt. This hadn't been possible while we were still in Cairo as the Mubarak regime had cut internet access across Egypt for nearly a week.


Of course, I knew from satellite television news coverage that the Obama administration had vacillated, first urging Mubarak to ignore the demonstrators' demands for his immediate resignation, then when he announced that he'd step down after six months at the end of his current term of office, insisting that he go now. In so far as vacillation has come to be the hallmark of the current administration in matters of foreign policy, and since the Egyptian rebellion had arisen suddenly in response to the revolution in Tunisia, this was to be expected. Less comprehensible were the warm words from Barack Obama about a dictator, just as oppressive as his cognates around the region, being a reasonable man who clearly loves his country, or from Hillary Clinton about the Mubaraks' being close personal friends.


What came as a far greater surprise though, was the extent of the division among conservatives as to the appropriate response to recent developments in Egypt. To the English-speaking Egyptians, younger and older, religious or secular, who were eager to discuss the future of their country with me when I went down to Tahrir Square each day, the right reaction from us was abundantly clear. Hadn't the Bush administration's long term aim in invading Iraq been to create a base from which the rule of law and democracy could be seeded around the Arab world, and hadn't all efforts to achieve that aim in Iraq foundered? Similarly, didn't the insistence of the Egyptian people in the streets upon free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections, upon the repeal of the Emergency Law, upon freedom of speech and of the press, upon the curtailment of corruption and the reform of the judicial system amount to the same thing, only called for, and to be achieved, from within the Arab world's most influential and populous nation, instead of being imposed from without?


This line of thought on the part of educated, middle-class Egyptians is so much at odds with the views of some conservative thinkers in the United States that it is as if the two are speaking of different sets of events. To take a typical, prominent case in point, John Bolton has advised that America, and presumably Americans, would best serve our interests by continuing to support the current dictatorship in Egypt. As far as I can see, this is a classic "better the devil you know" position.


The problem with this is that 'the better the devil you know' argument is a fallacy. Consider the simplest sort of example: "Better not to stop being an alcoholic because, who knows, if you do, you might become a barbiturate, or maybe even a heroin, addict!" On the other hand, one might stop being an addict at all. We might try this again with something rather more complex such as, "Better not give up the gold standard, even if it is strangling our economy, because if we do, there might be runaway inflation." On the other hand, doing so might, or rather did, allow huge economic growth. Whatever change is proposed, a "better the devil you know" argument nay-says it by proposing negative consequences that are by no means bound to occur, while ignoring all possible positive results of change.


In the case of the nascent Egyptian revolution, the particular "better the devil you know" argument that I have come across again and again is the following piece of analogical ‘reasoning' -- if one can call it that.... In 1979, Jimmy Carter, a naively optimistic (Democrat) president failed adequately to support a pro-American (and pro-Israel) secular dictatorship in a large and populous Muslim country only to find this replaced by an anti-American (and anti-Israel) Islamist state. Therefore, if another naively optimistic (Democrat) president fails to support another loyally pro-American (and pro-Israel) secular dictatorship in another large and populous Muslim country in 2011, the same thing will happen all over again.


We are onto another fallacy here, that of false analogy. Sure, Egypt and Iran are both Muslim countries. Both even have ancient heritage. So what? Britain and Russia are both Christian nations in Europe roughly as far away from one another as Iran and Egypt. Were their histories been bound to unfold similarly? In the last quarter of the 18th century, the American Colonies and France both went through anti-monarchical revolutions spawned by social-contractarian Enlightenment though and ideals and of liberty and equality. Were these events ineluctably fated to pan out in the same way?


This false analogy becomes more bogus when it is linked to spurious history. I have now come across several articles pointing out how the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamists remained in the Iranian Revolution working the strings on moderate marionettes until the final act...and how this is what may be happening in Egypt now. Not only is there no evidence to suggest that such a phenomenon is occurring in Egypt now, but this is also not even what happened in the Iranian Revolution. A look back at front page news articles from the time puts Khomeini and Co. onstage from the very start of the show.


By contrast, I didn't notice the Egyptian pro-democracy, anti-corruption protesters burning American flags or chanting slogans about death to the Great red, white and blue Satan or the little white and blue Beelzebub. I haven't seen westerners kidnapped, or attacked, or vilified during the recent demonstrations in Cairo, other than by the thugs from the Mukhabarat, or as Egyptians will sometimes jest, the Mubarakhat. I couldn't spot bearded imams taking the ideological lead for the past fortnight in Cairo. Indeed, those taking the ideological lead in Cairo at present seem to be the same breed of frustrated, middle-class, educated, secular, young people who aspired to overthrow the Iranian theocracy following the rigged election last year.


When Americans believe that the removal of Mr. Mubarak and the end of his regime will necessarily result in an Islamist state in Egypt, we are continuing to fall foul of a final, foul fallacy, that of the false dilemma. It's a false dilemma that all three of modern Egypt's leaders, along with those of every other modern Arab state, have worked assiduously to make real by relentlessly squashing both a moderate, democratic opposition and the core institutions of liberal (in the old-fashioned British sense of the word!) civil society. In Egypt at present, the West has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to influence and abet the end of autocracy in the Mid-East and North Africa. We lost this last generation not by abandoning the Shah of Iran a little too soon, but rather by propping him up for far too long. If we throw away this opportunity, it may be another generation before it comes again.


The high road for Americans -- whether Republican or Democrat -- to take in the matter of Egypt -- or of any people in rebellion against dictatorship -- can be found in the original on the high ground of the National Archive. Here it is, word for word, just past the part many of us memorized in high school:


"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all Experience has shown that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their security."
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3)Egypt nears military coup. USS warships in Suez Canal

A fresh surge of popular anti-Mubarak protest ripping across Egypt Tuesday, Feb. 8 has brought the country closer to a military coup to stem the anarchy than at any time since the street caught fire on Jan. 25.

Vice President Omar Suleiman warned a group of Egyptian news editors that the only choice is between a descent into further lawlessness and a military takeover in Cairo. The distinguished political pundit of the 1960s and 1970s Hasnin Heikal saw no other way out of the crisis but a government ruling by the army's bayonets.

The arrival of US naval, marine and air forces in the Suez Canal's Greater Bitter Lake indicated that the crisis was quickly swerving out of control.

Military sources report the American force consists of the USS Kearsarge Expeditionary Strike Group of six warships. Helicopters on some of their decks are there to carry and drop the 2,200 marines of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit which has been bolstered by two special operations battalions.

The flotilla has a rapid strike stealth submarine, the USS Scranton, which is designed to support special forces' operations.

The US strike force has taken up position at a strategic point opposite Ismailia between the west bank of the Suez Canal and its eastern Sinai bank. It is poised for rapid response in the event passage of about 40 percent of the world's marine freights through the Suez Canal are threatened or any other extreme occurrence warranting US military intervention.

For a few hours Tuesday, it looked as though Egypt was finally going back to normal after a two-week popular uprising. But then, suddenly, thousands again took to the streets and squares of Egyptian towns - from the Western desert on the Libyan border up to the northern Sinai town of El Arish in the east, recalling Hosni Mubarak's warning of chaos if he were to depart too soon.

They mounted their biggest demonstration of the campaign to oust Mubarak - in Cairo, Alexandria, the Delta Cities, the industrial belt around Mahalla-el-Kebir and the steel city of Heluan, shouting "Death to Mubarak!" and "Hang Mubarak!"
Although reforms and pay hikes have been pledged by the new Egyptian government, large groups of workers, mainly in Cairo, rebelled against state-appointed managements and set up "Revolutionary Committees" to run factories and other work places, including Egyptian state TV and Egypt's biggest weekly "Ros el-Yusuf."

The stock market and the pyramids remained closed and traffic blocked solid on the streets of Cairo
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4)Egypt, Israel and a Strategic Reconsideration
By George Friedman

The events in Egypt have sent shock waves through Israel. The 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel have been the bedrock of Israeli national security. In three of the four wars Israel fought before the accords, a catastrophic outcome for Israel was conceivable. In 1948, 1967 and 1973, credible scenarios existed in which the Israelis were defeated and the state of Israel ceased to exist. In 1973, it appeared for several days that one of those scenarios was unfolding.

The survival of Israel was no longer at stake after 1978. In the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the various Palestinian intifadas and the wars with Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008, Israeli interests were involved, but not survival. There is a huge difference between the two. Israel had achieved a geopolitical ideal after 1978 in which it had divided and effectively made peace with two of the four Arab states that bordered it, and neutralized one of those states. The treaty with Egypt removed the threat to the Negev and the southern coastal approaches to Tel Aviv.

The agreement with Jordan in 1994, which formalized a long-standing relationship, secured the longest and most vulnerable border along the Jordan River. The situation in Lebanon was such that whatever threat emerged from there was limited. Only Syria remained hostile but, by itself, it could not threaten Israel. Damascus was far more focused on Lebanon anyway. As for the Palestinians, they posed a problem for Israel, but without the foreign military forces along the frontiers, the Palestinians could trouble but not destroy Israel. Israel's existence was not at stake, nor was it an issue for 33 years.

THE HISTORIC EGYPTIAN THREAT TO ISRAEL
The center of gravity of Israel's strategic challenge was always Egypt. The largest Arab country, with about 80 million people, Egypt could field the most substantial army. More to the point, Egypt could absorb casualties at a far higher rate than Israel. The danger that the Egyptian army posed was that it could close with the Israelis and engage in extended, high-intensity combat that would break the back of Israel Defense Forces by imposing a rate of attrition that Israel could not sustain. If Israel were to be simultaneously engaged with Syria, dividing its forces and its logistical capabilities, it could run out of troops long before Egypt, even if Egypt were absorbing far more casualties.

The solution for the Israelis was to initiate combat at a time and place of their own choosing, preferably with surprise, as they did in 1956 and 1967. Failing that, as they did in 1973, the Israelis would be forced into a holding action they could not sustain and forced onto an offensive in which the risks of failure — and the possibility — would be substantial.

It was to the great benefit of Israel that Egyptian forces were generally poorly commanded and trained and that Egyptian war-fighting doctrine, derived from Britain and the Soviet Union, was not suited to the battle problem Israel posed. In 1967, Israel won its most complete victory over Egypt, as well as Jordan and Syria. It appeared to the Israelis that the Arabs in general and Egyptians in particular were culturally incapable of mastering modern warfare.

Thus it was an extraordinary shock when, just six years after their 1967 defeat, the Egyptians mounted a two-army assault across the Suez, coordinated with a simultaneous Syrian attack on the Golan Heights. Even more stunning than the assault was the operational security the Egyptians maintained and the degree of surprise they achieved. One of Israel's fundamental assumptions was that Israeli intelligence would provide ample warning of an attack. And one of the fundamental assumptions of Israeli intelligence was that Egypt could not mount an attack while Israel maintained air superiority. Both assumptions were wrong. But the most important error was the assumption that Egypt could not, by itself, coordinate a massive and complex military operation. In the end, the Israelis defeated the Egyptians, but at the cost of the confidence they achieved in 1967 and a recognition that comfortable assumptions were impermissible in warfare in general and regarding Egypt in particular.

The Egyptians had also learned lessons. The most important was that the existence of the state of Israel did not represent a challenge to Egypt's national interest. Israel existed across a fairly wide and inhospitable buffer zone — the Sinai Peninsula. The logistical problems involved in deploying a massive force to the east had resulted in three major defeats, while the single partial victory took place on much shorter lines of supply. Holding or taking the Sinai was difficult and possible only with a massive infusion of weapons and supplies from the outside, from the Soviet Union. This meant that Egypt was a hostage to Soviet interests. Egypt had a greater interest in breaking its dependency on the Soviets than in defeating Israel. It could do the former more readily than the latt

The Egyptian recognition that its interests in Israel were minimal and the Israeli recognition that eliminating the potential threat from Egypt guaranteed its national security have been the foundation of the regional balance since 1978. All other considerations — Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest — were trivial in comparison. Geography — the Sinai — made this strategic distancing possible. So did American aid to Egypt. The substitution of American weapons for Soviet ones in the years after the treaty achieved two things. First, they ended Egypt's dependency on the Soviets. Second, they further guaranteed Israel's security by creating an Egyptian army dependent on a steady flow of spare parts and contractors from the United States. Cut the flow and the Egyptian army would be crippled.

The governments of Anwar Sadat and then Hosni Mubarak were content with this arrangement. The generation that came to power with Gamal Nasser had fought four wars with Israel and had little stomach for any more. They had proved themselves in October 1973 on the Suez and had no appetite to fight again or to send their sons to war. It is not that they created an oasis of prosperity in Egypt. But they no longer had to go to war every few years, and they were able, as military officers, to live good lives. What is now regarded as corruption was then regarded as just rewards for bleeding in four wars against the Israelis.

MUBARAK AND THE MILITARY
But now is 33 years later, and the world has changed. The generation that fought is very old. Today's Egyptian military trains with the Americans, and its officers pass through the American command and staff and war colleges. This generation has close ties to the United States, but not nearly as close ties to the British-trained generation that fought the Israelis or to Egypt's former patrons, the Russians. Mubarak has locked the younger generation, in their fifties and sixties, out of senior command positions and away from the wealth his generation has accumulated. They want him out.

For this younger generation, the idea of Gamal Mubarak being allowed to take over the presidency was the last straw. They wanted the elder Mubarak to leave not only because he had ambitions for his son but also because he didn't want to leave after more than a quarter century of pressure. Mubarak wanted guarantees that, if he left, his possessions, in addition to his honor, would remain intact. If Gamal could not be president, then no one's promise had value. So Mubarak locked himself into position.

The cameras love demonstrations, but they are frequently not the real story. The demonstrators who wanted democracy are a real faction, but they don't speak for the shopkeepers and peasants more interested in prosperity than wealth. Since Egypt is a Muslim country, the West freezes when anything happens, dreading the hand of Osama bin Laden. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was once a powerful force, and it might become one again someday, but right now it is a shadow of its former self. What is going on now is a struggle within the military, between generations, for the future of the Egyptian military and therefore the heart of the Egyptian regime. Mubarak will leave, the younger officers will emerge, the constitution will make some changes and life will continue.

The Israelis will return to their complacency. They should not. The usual first warning of a heart attack is death. Among the fortunate, it is a mild coronary followed by a dramatic change of life style. The events in Egypt should be taken as a mild coronary and treated with great relief by Israel that it wasn't worse.

RECONSIDERING THE ISRAELI POSITION
I have laid out the reasons why the 1978 treaty is in Egypt's national interest. I have left out two pieces. The first is ideology. The ideological tenor of the Middle East prior to 1978 was secular and socialist. Today it is increasingly Islamist. Egypt is not immune to this trend, even if the Muslim Brotherhood should not be seen as the embodiment of that threat. Second, military technology, skills and terrain have made Egypt a defensive power for the past 33 years. But military technology and skills can change, on both sides. Egyptian defensiveness is built on assumptions of Israeli military capability and interest. As Israeli ideology becomes more militant and as its capabilities grow, Egypt may be forced to reconsider its strategic posture. As new generations of officers arise, who have heard of war only from their grandfathers, the fear of war declines and the desire for glory grows. Combine that with ideology in Egypt and Israel and things change. They won't change quickly — a generation of military transformation will be needed once regimes have changed and the decisions to prepare for war have been made — but they can change.

Two things from this should strike the Israelis. The first is how badly they need peace with Egypt. It is easy to forget what things were like 40 years back, but it is important to remember that the prosperity of Israel today depends in part on the treaty with Egypt. Iran is a distant abstraction, with a notional bomb whose completion date keeps moving. Israel can fight many wars with Egypt and win. It need lose only one. The second lesson is that Israel should do everything possible to make certain that the transfer of power in Egypt is from Mubarak to the next generation of military officers and that these officers maintain their credibility in Egypt. Whether Israel likes it or not, there is an Islamist movement in Egypt. Whether the new generation controls that movement as the previous one did or whether they succumb to it is the existential question for Israel. If the treaty with Egypt is the foundation of Israel's national security, it is logical that the Israelis should do everything possible to preserve it.

This was not the fatal heart attack. It might not even have been more than indigestion. But recent events in Egypt point to a long-term problem with Israeli strategy. Given the strategic and ideological crosscurrents in Egypt, it is in Israel's national interest to minimize the intensity of the ideological and make certain that Israel is not perceived as a threat. In Gaza, for example, Israel and Egypt may have shared a common interest in containing Hamas, and the next generation of Egyptian officers may share it as well. But what didn't materialize in the streets this time could in the future: an Islamist rising. In that case, the Egyptian military might find it in its interest to preserve its power by accommodating the Islamists. At this point, Egypt becomes the problem and not part of the solution.

Keeping Egypt from coming to this is the imperative of military dispassion. If the long-term center of gravity of Israel's national security is at least the neutrality of Egypt, then doing everything to maintain that is a military requirement. That military requirement must be carried out by political means. That requires the recognition of priorities. The future of Gaza or the precise borders of a Palestinian state are trivial compared to preserving the treaty with Egypt. If it is found that a particular political strategy undermines the strategic requirement, then that political strategy must be sacrificed.

In other words, the worst-case scenario for Israel would be a return to the pre-1978 relationship with Egypt without a settlement with the Palestinians. That would open the door for a potential two-front war with an intifada in the middle. To avoid that, the ideological pressure on Egypt must be eased, and that means a settlement with the Palestinians on less-than-optimal terms. The alternative is to stay the current course and let Israel take its chances. The question is where the greater safety lies. Israel has assumed that it lies with confrontation with the Palestinians. That's true only if Egypt stays neutral. If the pressure on the Palestinians destabilizes Egypt, it is not the most prudent course.

There are those in Israel who would argue that any release in pressure on the Palestinians will be met with rejection. If that is true, then, in my view, that is catastrophic news for Israel. In due course, ideological shifts and recalculations of Israeli intentions will cause a change in Egyptian policy. This will take several decades to turn into effective military force, and the first conflicts may well end in Israeli victory. But, as I have said before, it must always be remembered that no matter how many times Israel wins, it need only lose once to be annihilated.

To some it means that Israel should remain as strong as possible. To me it means that Israel should avoid rolling the dice too often, regardless of how strong it thinks it is. The Mubarak affair might open a strategic reconsideration of the Israeli position
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5)Cameron's Multicultural Wake-Up Call
The growth of Islamist extremism in the West is something even the politically correct can no longer ignore.
By DOUGLAS MURRAY

'Multiculturalism has failed," said British Prime Minister David Cameron last weekend in Munich. If anybody thought they had read those words before, it is because they have. Many times. Last October German Chancellor Angela Merkel (sitting onstage with Mr. Cameron when he gave his speech on Saturday) said the same. Finally, Europe's mainstream party leaders seem to be realizing what others have long noticed: Multiculturalism has been the most pernicious and divisive policy pursued by Western governments since World War II.

Multiculturalism is a deeply misunderstood idea. That was one of the reasons for its political success. People were led to believe that "multiculturalism" meant multiracialism, or pluralism. It did not. Nevertheless, for years anybody who criticized multiculturalism was immediately decried as a "racist."

But the true character and effects of the policy could not be permanently hidden. State-sponsored multiculturalism treated European countries like hostelries. It judged that the state should not "impose" rules and values on newcomers. Rather, it should bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of immigrants. The resultant policy was that states treated and judged people by the criteria of whatever "community" they found themselves born into.

In Britain, for instance, this meant that if you were a white English girl born into a white English family and your family decided to marry you against your will to a randy old pervert, the state would intervene. But if you had the misfortune to be born into an "Asian-background" family and the same happened, then the state would look the other way.

In 1984, a British school principal named Ray Honeyford politely suggested in an article in the Salisbury Review that it might be a good idea if students at his state-funded school were able to speak English and did not disappear to Pakistan for months at a time. The result was a siren of accusations of "racism," which willfully ignored his arguments and precipitated the end of his career.

The multicultural model may have continued a lot longer if it hadn't been for radical Islam. The terrorist assaults and plots across Britain and Europe—often from home-grown extremists—provided a breaking point that few sentient people could ignore. The question now is what can be done.

In his speech in Munich, Mr. Cameron rightly focused on the problem of home-grown Islamic extremism. He stressed several preliminary steps—among them that groups whose values are opposed to those of the state will no longer be bestowed with taxpayer money. It is a symptom of how low we have sunk that ceasing to fund our societies' opponents would constitute an improvement.

But this is a first, not a final, policy. The fact is that Britain, Germany, Holland and many other European countries have nurtured more than one generation of citizens who seem to feel no loyalty toward their country and who, on the contrary, often seem to despise it.

The first step forward is that from school-age upward our societies must reassert a shared national narrative—including a common national culture. Some years ago the German Muslim writer Bassam Tibi coined the term "Leitkultur"—core culture—to describe this. It is the most decent and properly liberal antidote to multiculturalism. It concedes that in societies that have had high immigration there are all sorts of different cultures—which will only work together if they are united by a common theme.

The Muslim communities that Mr. Cameron focused on will not reform themselves. So the British government will have to shut down and prosecute terrorist and extremist organizations, including some "charities." There are groups that are banned in the U.S. but can and do still operate with charitable status in the U.K. Clerics and other individuals who come from abroad to preach hate and division should be deported.

Will Mr. Cameron manage to do any of this? There is reason to be skeptical. In the wake of the 2005 subway and bus bombings in London—attacks carried out by British-born Muslims—Tony Blair announced that "the rules of the game are changing." They then stayed the same.

It is possible that Mr. Cameron will show more political courage. If he does, he will undoubtedly be lambasted by the defenders of multiculturalism. He will also become a leader of significance. If he doesn't, then future generations may well associate him with Munich. But it will not be for Saturday's speech. It will be with a previous prime minister who also went to that city and who returned with an honor that proved deeply temporary.

Mr. Murray is director of the Center for Social Cohesion in London.
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