Friday, December 11, 2009
Asymmetrical outrage: The Egyptians build a wall, where's the outrage?
In what a sane person can regard only as great news, the Egyptians are building a wall to keep the Palestinian from smuggling weapons into the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip.
Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned.
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
Here's the really great part:
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
Why is it great? Because that means that the Obama administration is -- quietly, at least -- acknowledging through potentially unpopular action that there will be no peace in the area until Hamas goes down. The first step to beating Hamas (which will never just throw in the towel by dint of "diplomacy") is cutting off its supply of arms. And the Egyptians are going along. That is good news for everybody in the region other than Hamas.
One is, though, forced to wonder whether the world will react to an Egyptian wall with the same faux outrage it dumped on Israel.
15 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Fri Dec 11, 07:26:00 AM:
Clearly the answer to the Palistinian problem is to give them their own land...and then build a 25 foot wall around it.
I wonder how long this has been going on? Can Bush be "blamed"?
By Pyrus, at
Fri Dec 11, 09:12:00 AM:
Well, I don't know how "faux" the outrage was seeing as one wall is for an internationally recognized border and the other is for an internationally recognized occupation. But from the neocon vantage point that's a big Whatever I guess.
By Brian, at
Fri Dec 11, 12:05:00 PM:
To the credit of the Bush Administration, they said the problem with the Israeli wall was the fact that the Israelis located it inside the West Bank instead of along the border of the West Bank and Israel.
By 
, at
Fri Dec 11, 12:47:00 PM:
Oh, so a wall intended to protect ones citizens needs to be erected on an international border? So I guess the wall between the US and the drug smugglers, coyotes, illegal aliens and terrorists that the US is slooowly erecting on our southern border is just fine with the left?
By , at
Fri Dec 11, 02:00:00 PM:
Well, I don't know how "faux" the outrage was seeing as one wall is for an internationally recognized border and the other is for an internationally recognized occupation. But from the neocon vantage point that's a big Whatever I guess.
Interesting, since the land occupied from the Egyptians, why aren't they building the wall on the north side of Gaza, and protect their citizens from those evil Israelis? Unless Egypt doesn't want their occupied land back.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Fri Dec 11, 02:19:00 PM:
TH: "One is, though, forced to wonder whether the world will react to an Egyptian wall with the same faux outrage it dumped on Israel."
I don't know. But "The Wall" by Pink Floyd was the best-selling album of 1980 in the U.S.
By Brian Schmidt, at
Fri Dec 11, 02:58:00 PM:
Tryee, that US border wall has other problems, but to be analogous to the Israeli wall, it would have to partially constructed within Mexico. I'd suggest that would be something of an issue.
By , at
Fri Dec 11, 04:41:00 PM:
Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels
Considering that the Muslim Brotherhood (the assassins of Anwar Sadat) basically runs Egypt, and Hamas (the Palestinian jihad group) is a branch of it, I'd say this announcement is a lie. Not the wall itself necessarily, since it will be visible to the naked eye, but the claim this wall is part of a bona fide effort on the part of Egypt to stamp out the flow of weapons to jihad groups.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Dec 11, 06:06:00 PM:
"Considering that the Muslim Brotherhood (the assassins of Anwar Sadat) basically runs Egypt"
A gross overstatement. Wrong, really. MB operatives are arrested, tortured, and executed by government security, not the other way around. Al-Zawahiri left Egypt and joined up with bin Laden because they lost, not because they won.
Hosni Mubarak runs Egypt. And the Egyptians really are taking pretty serious efforts against Hamas. Not because they hate Hamas or love Israel, but because Hamas has become a tool of Iran (who was just busted for smuggling weapons into Gaza through Egypt, which really rubbed the Egyptians the wrong way).
The Arabs hate and fear the Persians, and it's only gotten worse since it was revealed that the Iranians are trying to become a nuclear power. 3 or 4 decades of nuclear Israel didn't bother them, but the idea of a nuclear Iran scares the shit out of them...
Got a little off topic there, but it helps put the recent (since last year, I think) Egyptian clamp down on Hamas in perspective.
By , at
Fri Dec 11, 07:13:00 PM:
Got a little off topic there, but it helps put the recent (since last year, I think) Egyptian clamp down on Hamas in perspective.
Egypt says they're clamping down on Hamas, and yet the number of tons of weapons, food, and supplies being smuggled into Gaza keeps going up. I call a foul. Egypt is no more clamping down on Hamas than Pakistan is clamping down on the Taliban. They run a few ops for show but otherwise don't significantly dent smuggling activity. They're taking our billions of dollars in aid, telling us what we want to hear, and then stabbing us in the back by taking our own money and funding enemy jihad groups with it (or just plain enriching themselves).
If Mubarak had a genuine philosophical objection to Hamas' goals smuggling would decrease, not increase. Of course, if that happened he'd be as dead as Sadat, since his government is so riddled with MB operatives. Mubarak may be the titular head, but he rules only at the Brotherhood's sufferance. You may recall that Sadat supported the Brotherhood, and they murdered him anyway even though Sadat never honored a single provision of the treaty he signed with Israel.
By , at
Fri Dec 11, 10:56:00 PM:
Well, if the left doesn't pitch a fit over the Egyptian wall they better pipe down about the American one.
By Brian, at
Sat Dec 12, 12:18:00 AM:
Glad we've settled the issue of the difference between the Egyptian and Israeli walls.
I'll mostly agree with Dawnfire for once, except for an overgeneralization about Arabs not caring about Israeli nukes. They did, and with nuclear bombs on either side of them now, they'll be even more interested in their own nuclear weapons.
This is one reason to be cautious about nuclear power as a solution to the world's problems.
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Dec 12, 03:40:00 AM:
"to be analogous to the Israeli wall, it would have to partially constructed within Mexico."
Earth to Brian, there is no such country as "Palestine". Furthermore, UN resolutions after the 1967 war did NOT fix any type of border for Israel. I guess it's only Jooos who don't have the right to protect themselves - as well as Israeli Arabs - from suicide bombers.
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Dec 12, 03:44:00 AM:
"an overgeneralization about Arabs not caring about Israeli nukes"
Is there a shred of evidence Arabs ever thought Israel would use nukes aggressively? The fact that Israel has not even publicly acknowledged they have them shows they are meant strictly for deterrence, in sharp contrast to Iran which likes to talk about wiping out Israel. And don't give me that semantic dodge "no they only predicted Israel would cease to exist".
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Dec 12, 03:47:00 AM:
And I guarantee you that even if Israel *had* put the wall right on the "border" the same characters from Jew-baiting Jimmy Carter on down would still be yammering about the "apartheid wall".
