Biden Withholds $130 Million in Military Aid to Egypt, after Approving $2.5 Billion Weapons Sale,

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1. ” Current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made it his mission to crack down on Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. The cabinet designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist group in December 2013, “indefinitely” closed the Rafah border crossing to Gaza, and is now building a separation barrier between Gaza and the Sinai

   Peninsula.https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/1956

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2. I’m sure it’s true. But, So what?*
   ” Current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made it his mission to crack down on Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian branch, Hamas. The cabinet designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist group in December 2013, “indefinitely” closed the Rafah border crossing to Gaza, and is now building a separation barrier between Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/195677
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   * https://palwatch.org/page/9132
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   “When you weaken one side, you automatically strengthen the other.”
   George Orwell

3. “In a television interview that the paper [the New York Times] said he made months later, Morsi described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

   https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/mohamed_morsis_i_didnt_say_what_i_said_defense.html

   Morsi’s Sharia Justice: Death Penalties for Expatriate ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Producers (Updated)
   On September 23, 2012, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Muhammad Morsi issued presidential order No 1/2012 appointing 3,649 judges to Emergency State Security Courts (ESSC). The ESSC, which operated during Egypt’s 31-year state of emergency under the previous Hosni Mubarak regime, and the military transition to Morsi’s June, 2012 election to power, have notoriously violated basic due process guarantees.

   Today (11/28/12), consistent with both that three decades long ignoble history, and Islam’s ongoing, millennial, Sharia-based rejection of freedom of speech, an Egyptian state security court issued a verdict which sentenced six (or seven) expatriate Coptic Egyptians to the death penalty for “blaspheming” Islam..”
   https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/morsis_sharia_justice_death_penalties_for_expatriate_innocence_of_muslims_producers.html

   “London — President Mohamed Morsy’s Constitutional Declaration granting his decrees and laws immunity from judicial review even if they violate human rights until mid-2013 undermines the rule of law in Egypt.”

   https://allafrica.com/stories/201211270272.html

4. I remembered this but had to search for it on DuckDuckGo. Google censors.

   “When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt under Muhammad Morsi following the ousting of Murbarak, the new Egyptian Constitution drafted by the Morsi removed all prohibitions against slavery, stating it was legal under Sharia. Morsi likewise refused to address the issue of human trafficking and stated the government would not abide by any form of International Law that went against Sharia. This clearly gave a green light to the Muslim Brotherhood and all other Islamists throughout Egypt that the sex slavery and forced conversion of Coptic girls would go without any intrusion by the new Egyptian government under Morsi.”

   http://bridgeofgracemissions.blogspot.com/2018/05/sex-trafficking-of-coptic-women-of-egypt.html

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5. Morsi was a fascist who won an election and implemented Shariah law. Sisi was a moderate Muslim general who came to power in a popular coup followed by an election who rolled Shariah back and wsrmed relations with Israel. Sisi is like MBS. The neocons and luberals have a fetish for electoral mechanisms even when they are substantively antidemocratic. See https://www.algemeiner.com/2013/12/17/with-sharia-law-scaled-back-egyptians-hopeful-about-constitution/

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6. Thanks for the lowdown on DAWN..
   But I wonder if those claims about Egypt are true or not.

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7. This is the expose of DAWN in Middle East Forum that Sebastien just referenced. Great call, Sebastien.

   Sarah Leah Whitson, the head of this group, is a well-known anti-Israel activist and fundraiser.

   I disagree with the author on thing: about Kashoggi’s murder. Even if I am the only person in the world who questions the official story. I believe there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Kashoggi was murdered by Turkish President Erdogan, not MBS of Saudi Arabia.

   The DAWN of an Islamist Think Tank in DC
   by Martha Lee
   The Investigative Journal
   January 4, 2021

   The ideology of DAWN brainchild Jamal Khashoggi was, like his murder, violent and outrageous.
   On September 29, friends and colleagues of deceased Saudi dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, launched his “brainchild” – a new, shiny D.C. thinktank named DAWN, or Democracy for the Arab World Now. Led by Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN “seeks to highlight and celebrate democratic reforms in the Arab world, while also shining a light on human rights violations and arbitrary and abusive practices.”

   “Abusive” is putting it lightly. Few can forget that the horror of Khashoggi’s murder. Killed and dismembered in 2018 inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey, his death sparked outrage around the world. But such outrage, and the gruesomeness of his murder, must not be used to sanitize Khashoggi’s ideology.

   In reality, Khashoggi was an open supporter of violent, theocratic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. His public commentary included open support for designated terrorist organizations and unabashed anti-Semitism. Khashoggi appears to have reinvented himself as an exiled ‘human rights’ dissident only once he lost influence in Saudi Arabia after the rise of reformist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and presumably trusting that his editors at the Washington Post would not bother to read the fascistic posts on his Twitter feed too closely. As even the Post itself reports, Khashoggi’s columns were “shaped” by a top official of the Qatari regime’s Qatar Foundation.

   Khashoggi was a spin doctor for theocrats, not a crusading voice for a better world.
   Khashoggi was not a crusading voice for a better world; he was a spin doctor for theocrats in Doha and Ankara, who met a terrible end.

   As with Khashoggi, while DAWN’s declared objectives may sound admirable, it appears, on just the slightest of closer inspections, that its publications and choice of staff serve to continue the legacy of Khashoggi by defending extremists and justifying religious totalitarianism, all, once again, under the cover of promoting human rights and democratic ideals.

   Among DAWN’s inaugural publications is a presentation of the extremist Saudi cleric, Salman Al-Odah, as an innocent reformist, persecuted by the Saudi government for mere political dissent. According to DAWN, the charges brought by a Saudi court against Al-Odah in 2018 are an attempt to punish his “peaceful speech advocating reforms.”

   Saudi cleric Salman Al-Odah is hardly a peaceful reformist.
   Al-Odah was first jailed in the 1990s after he called on his followers to engage in jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq. Al-Odah even served at one point as a mentor to Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. He claimed to have moderated while in jail. But in 2005, he again issued a call for jihad in Iraq. Since then, in 2012, he insisted that the Holocaust was exaggerated and turned into a “myth” and “a source for extortion.” He has promoted various antisemitic theories, justified cyber-attacks on “un-Islamic” websites, and as recently as 2017 issued a fatwa prohibiting women from wearing trousers in front of others as, according to him, they show the size of women’s sexual organs, causing “sedition and excitement.”

   Nonetheless, DAWN presents this Jew-hating, women-degrading, violence-supporting preacher of hate as a “popular scholar,” known for his “reformist” and “peaceful” views.

   DAWN’s investigation into the alleged persecution of Al-Odah relied on “information, court memoranda, and other legal documents.” It may come as little surprise that this information – including “court memoranda, and other legal documents” – was provided by Al-Odah’s son, Abdullah Alaoudh, who, it turns out, is a DAWN researcher.

   It is instructive to look at DAWN’s other officials. Who are the other leaders of tomorrow “pursuing [Khashoggi’s] dream of democracy and human rights in the Arab world?”

   DAWN board member Asim Ghafoor worked for and represented several prominent Al Qaeda charities.
   One board member is Asim Ghafoor. In filed corporation documents, DAWN is registered to his address. Presented as a leading attorney on “high-profile cases related to national security and terrorism,” Ghafoor in fact worked for and represented several prominent Al Qaeda charities subsequently designated by the U.S. government. He served, for example, as a spokesman for the Global Relief Foundation, which was designated by the US in 2002, with the federal government reporting it “has connections to, has provided support for, and has provided assistance to Usama Bin Ladin, the al Qaida Network, and other known terrorist groups.”

   Ghafoor also represented the U.S. branch of the Saudi Al Haramain Foundation (AHF) charity, which was designated in 2004. An investigation run by the IRS, FBI and ICE found that the charity’s U.S. branch had “direct links” to bin Laden. AHF engaged in “money laundering offenses,” in which funds it claimed to use to purchase a prayer house in Missouri were in fact earmarked for jihadists in Chechnya. The Treasury Department reports that “funds that were donated to AHF with the intention of supporting Chechen refugees were diverted to support mujahideen, as well as Chechen leaders affiliated with the al Qaida network.”

   DAWN board member Nihad Awad is co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
   Other board members include several leading Islamist activists such as Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which federal prosecutors named as an unindicted coconspirator in a 2007 terror finance case. Before founding CAIR, Awad worked for the (now defunct) Islamic Association for Palestine, which fundraised for Hamas and published pamphlets warning about “America’s Greatest Enemy: THE JEW!” Awad himself had made regular antisemitic statements over the years.

   Support for one of the world’s most infamous theocratic movements does seem to be a possible requirement for membership. DAWN’s other officials (described as non-resident fellows) include Nader Hashemi, who argues that Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood offer a bulwark against jihadists, and, perversely, that when “moderate forms of political Islam are crushed and denied a public voice, radical Islam thrives.”

   DAWN non-resident fellows Nader Hashemi (left) and Khalil Al-Anani (right) advocate Islamist empowerment in the Arab world.
   Hashemi’s colleague at DAWN, political science professor Khalil Al-Anani, offers similar ideas. He is apparently incapable of imagining a Middle East without Islamism, claiming that it would be similar to a “China without Han” and declaring it better to “move beyond this obvious fact.” Aside from it being illogical to compare a theocratic ideology to an ethnicity, more than 90% of China’s population is Han. According to Al-Anani’s analogy, not only would the near-totality of Middle Easterners be Islamists, but it would also be impossible for them to be anything else.

   Another of DAWN’s non-resident fellows, Emad Shahin, fled Egypt shortly before being charged “along with several senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood with conspiring with foreign organizations to undermine national security.” He was later convicted in absentia of “conspiring with foreign armed groups, including Hamas and the Lebanese group Hezbollah to destabilize Egypt.”

   DAWN even recently published an article by Amr Darrag, a former minister in the short-lived despotic Morsi regime, painting the Morsi regime as an honest, committed guardian of liberal democratic ideals, in contrast with the “instability” of Egypt’s current (equally authoritarian) government.

   Although, according to DAWN’s Whitson, the organization hopes to expand its work eventually to all countries in the Middle East and North Africa, she states it will be focusing for the moment on Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt – as these are “governments with close ties to the United States and […] that is where we have the greatest responsibility.” It seems to us unlikely a coincidence that DAWN is just focusing on the greatest antagonists of the Qatari regime.

   DAWN is an Islamist-support organization determined to advance an illiberal, anti-democratic agenda.
   DAWN was only launched recently, but from its ideological alignment with violent radical movements in the Middle East, to its officials’ connections to Al Qaeda and Hamas networks, and its vision of democracy entwined with Islamism, it is patently clear that DAWN is yet another Islamist-support organization, determined to advance an illiberal, anti-democratic agenda, all somehow under the cover of liberal, democratic rhetoric.

   Martha Lee is the research fellow of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

8. DAWN is an Islamist front group https://www.meforum.org/61908/dc-acquires-yet-another-disinformation-thinktank