Egypt is standing firm, and we are with it

By Jihad Al-Khazen

CAIRO - 8 September 2017: I would first like the reader to check the below titles of two articles recently published in the Washington Post:

- The decision to cut aid to Egypt was historic. Now the hard work begins.

- Trump has sent the right signal to Egypt. But there’s more he needs to do.

Second, the Washington Post was on the verge of bankruptcy and was sold by its Jewish owners to a new owner, also Jewish, CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezo.

The Washington Post publishes real news and provides graceful commentary, but blindly supports Israel. Not only are some of its writers Likudnik, but some others are also Machiavellian who turn a blind eye to the crimes of occupation and murder of the Israeli government.

Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, and its murderous Prime Minister, Netanyahu, still commits such killings. In the summer of 2014, not very long ago, Netanyahu’s war on Gaza killed 2200 Palestinians, 518 of which were children.

He still murders Palestinians sparsely, for every now and then we see the news of a young man or woman killed for no reason at all save their resistance to the occupiers of their own land.

The whole of Palestine is devoid of any Jewish antiquities or monuments, yet the Congress often unanimously votes in favor of the apartheid criminal state of Israel.

Many members of the Congress receive money from the Israel lobby and the Likud to maintain their loyalty and unwavering allegiance to Israeli causes rather than U.S. ones.

The American administration cancelled $95.7 millions of military aid to Egypt and suspended $195 millions more because Egypt, as Trump’s administration claims, has failed to make progress on respecting human rights and democratic norms. This is outrageous. Egypt is currently heavily engaged in a war with terrorism from the Delta to Sinai in which soldiers and civilians are being killed.

The congress turns a blind eye to this as much as it does to the crimes of Israel. I personally believe that the Congress, not Trump, came up with a pretext to punish Egypt for its relations with North Korea.

Egypt recently signed an agreement with Russia whereby the latter would build the first nuclear power station for the former, and President Sissi has invited President Putin to visit Egypt to attend the inception of the station’s construction work.

What is the Congress going to do about this? After it already closed some of Russia’s diplomatic offices for no good reason, is it going to cut relations with Russia altogether? The station is designed solely for power generation purposes, but I really wish the Egyptian government would consider the military use of nuclear power as well so that Israel’s nuclear weaponry could be equalized by a similar power in the region.

But what is it exactly that President Sissi did so that the Washington Post justifies the measures against Egypt? The first article of the two whose titles are listed above says that Sissi has been using “U.S.-provided attack helicopters and rockets in its fight against Islamist militants in the Sinai Peninsula” (the article calls them militants, not terrorists), and that he signed a “draconian” law that regulates NGOs (some of which receive funds from American institutions), and finally, that “in the pretext of fighting terrorism, Sissi has overseen a dramatic escalation of rights abuses against political opponents, civil society leaders and journalists”.

I’m not related to Sissi, but I support him against America’s Likud inside the Washington Post and outside of it. He is the president of a heavily-populated country, latest estimates say 100 millions; a country with limited resources and little cultivable land which will hopefully grow with the New Valley reclamation project; and most importantly, a country which will experience a massive income boost when gas starts to get drilled out of the Zohr gas field.

The American Likud- be it writers in the media, the lobby, or research circles with Israeli inclinations- prefer to see Egypt ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood because the latter would destroy what’s left of the Egyptian identity. This would consequently devastate half the nation, the half which still rejects everything related to Israel, including Israeli tourists.

Egypt will prevail, and the Israeli Likud will pay the price for its evils.


Egypt Today translated this article that was originally published on AlHayat daily pan-Arab newspaper on Thursday. The writer is Jihad el-Khazen, a Lebanese columnist, and a holder of a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Sciences and a Master's Degree in Arabic Literature.