Retired Egyptian general praises murderer. He used to head Egyptian Army Moral Affairs.

The former head of the Egyptian army's reconnaissance service and strategic expert, Maj. Gen. Samir Farag, confirmed that "what the Egyptian soldier Mohamed Salah did is the biggest blow dealt to Israel since 1973."

Speaking to RT, the retired general said that "Egyptian soldier Mohamed Salah dealt the biggest security blow to Israel since 1973, when he attacked the Israeli army forces and shot down 3 soldiers with a rifle that contained only 100 rounds."

Major General Al-Masry stated, "Israel is trying to justify the biggest blow it has suffered since Egypt's victory in the October War, by saying that what happened was not a security breach, and that it was only smuggling."

Faraj added, "The Egyptian youth, Mohamed Salah, attacked the smugglers crossing the Egyptian border, and entered the occupied borders with a rifle and 100 bullets. It is certain that the 'Israeli' leaders are involved with the drug smugglers."

Throughout the interview, he spoke as if Israel was Egypt's enemy. But in reality the murders are the equivalent of someone dressing up as a medic and then using that as a way to shoot people, or pretending to surrender and shooting behind a white flag. 

Looking at Farag's resume, one can see that he is not a fringe character. He was the governor of Luxor and is the former Assistant of Ministry of Defense for Egypt.

And from 1993-1999, Farag was head of the Army Moral Affairs Department.

So this person praising a murderer is an expert on Egyptian morality.

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John Glubb and Leila Khaled (guest post)

Guest post from Paul M.

John and Leila

The most effective army Israel faced in its 1948 war of independence was the Arab Legion of Transjordan. There’s a reason for that: It was not just armed and trained by Britain, it was led by British officers as well, commanded by Lt. General Sir John Bagot Glubb, affectionately known by the Ottoman honorific Glubb Pasha.

Glubb was a career soldier, a much-decorated British officer from 1915 until 1956, through two world wars and the assault on the new Jewish state. He was much-honored too, with an alphabet behind his name: KCB, CMG, DSO, OBE, MC, KStJ & KPM.

If, in the fighting world, you wanted to find Lt. General Sir John Bagot Glubb’s diametric opposite, you might be tempted to choose Leila Khaled, member of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP, serial airplane hijacker, pin-up for terrorism groupies everywhere.

And, surprisingly, you might be wrong. They’re less different than you would imagine.

In 1973 Leila Khaled wrote her autobiography, called “My People Shall Live.” (I expect there will be a second volume someday, “Your People Should Die,” but I digress.) Who supplied the foreword? John Bagot Glubb. I had always assumed Lt. General Glubb was simply a good soldier, following orders to serve his country by serving his country’s client, but it seems it was more personal than that.

The first thing to strike you about Glubb’s foreword is how naive it is. He simply takes her words at face value. Everything else written on Palestine is “prejudiced, if not pure propaganda,” full of “half-truths,” “distortions” and “intentional deception.” Khaled, by contrast, is “refreshing” because her position is so clear. The things she has to say are “simple facts.” Perhaps we should give him credit for at least acknowledging that she’s not impartial but there’s almost nothing to show that he has any opinion of his own on the morality of her refreshingly clear position or its consequences.

He does, though, eventually find a flaw. Her politics are “oversimplified” to the point of paranoia and her rejection of anyone who doesn’t embrace violence makes it hard for her sympathizers to help her. As you read this, you can’t help but feel his personal sense of unfair treatment. Perhaps it pulled at the quarter-century-old scar of his dismissal by King Abdullah.

What begins by seeming like amorality, a disinterest in Khaled’s choices, veers into something else soon enough. Before the end of the first page Glubb presents the conclusion of his moral thinking. Violence begets violence, but Palestinian violence is their “only means of recovering their country and their freedom.” Wait, wasn’t that what the Jews were doing?. He quotes Khaled,”As a Palestinian, I had to believe in the gun as an embodiment of my humanity,”without comment except to note that she’s a bit down on anyone who thinks otherwise. Even so, he wants us to know that she cried when John Kennedy was shot. When he turns to the Jews, it’s different: Jewish violence is inherited from the Nazis. 

Now we know where to place him. We’ve heard that one before.

Her contempt for non-violence and political difference notwithstanding, Glubb simply takes Khaled at her word when she says Jews and Arabs will be equals in the democratic Palestinian state she and her friends are going to create. The real problem is the Jews won’t allow it. They “desire to have an all-Jewish state.” Like the one we see today, presumably.

Glubb ends by solemnly informing us that “It is easy for us, who have never been the victims of foreign conquest ... to denounce with vehemence the crimes of the evicted Palestinians.” That’s some chutzpah from a son and servant of the empire on which the sun never set. It’s world-class chutzpah when we remember that Transjordan’s purpose in invading on May 15th 1948 was not to free the Palestinian Arabs—who could have had their freedom for the asking but chose war instead—but to annex the land to itself. Abdullah had said as much to Jews and Arabs alike(1).

In his own memoirs, Glubb wrote that he came to love the Arabs(2). That must have been British understatement, because what shines through this foreword is not just love but infatuation. This is the Glubb Pasha who led his army into the Old City of Jerusalem and who had ultimate responsibility for the emptying, looting & burning of the Jewish Quarter. Some people (not me, obviously) can say much in a few words. Glubb was accidentally one of those. It’s hard not to wonder how many others among the British military and functionaries, in Mandatory Palestine and back in London, felt the way he did.

1) Howard Sachar, “A History of Israel” 2007, p.321–322

2) John Bagot Glubb, “A Soldier with the Arabs” 1957, p.5

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10/05 Links: The Yom Kippur War: Fifty minus one; On Yom Kippur, Cornell Set to Host Professor Who Compared Jews to Nazis; Medics treat 2,741 for cycling injuries, Yom Kippur fasting effects, deliver 1 baby

From Ian:

The Yom Kippur War: Fifty minus one

Next year will mark fifty years. Fifty years ago, as a young, almost twenty-three-year-old, I had the experience of a lifetime.

Was I a foolish idealist? Perhaps. I had wanted to be “kravi,” a warrior soldier. I had wished for a combat unit. I excelled and had all of the recommendations that accompanied that excellence. Although assigned to guard an IDF intel unit and fully aware of what was happening “de facto” in front of my eyes, nothing prepared me for the brutality of what was to come a few months later, Yom Kippur, October 6th, 1973. Nothing.

The sounds, the deafening roar of low-flying fighter jets, the explosions of artillery and mortar shells all around, the firing of my own weapons. The smell, cordite and death, fire and destruction smoldering everywhere, along roads and fields. The sights, yes, those sights, leaving indelible imprints on my memory to this very day.

And yet, the war itself prepared me for my love of peace. After countless days in Syria, after a new call to duty to become a tank commander, after so many deployments to Israel’s southern front, the Sinai at first, later Egypt and the new border, and then the Gaza Strip and Gaza City itself, all that prepared me for the love of peace.

I served with farmers, kibbutzniks like myself, and like myself watched as we collectively allowed our idealism to slip away. I served with small-town entrepreneurs, small business owners, calculating their economic losses while they bravely defended the homeland. City dwellers, bankers and professionals, CEOs and police detectives, we all wore green and we all came when we were called. And with our own eyes, we saw the dire poverty within the Strip and the contrasting opulence of the villas in Gaza City.

And then Hebron, where some residents of Kiryat Arba went on nightly excursions to vandalize Palestinian property. And, the next morning it was our small two-jeep patrols who would pay the price, having rocks and Molotov cocktails hurled in our direction.

Yes, the Yom Kippur War, fifty years less one ago, prepared me for all that and prepared me for peace. Do not mistake my love of peace. I remain a hawk when it comes to dealing harshly with those who wish to harm the citizens of Israel. Do not mistake my love of peace for weakness in the face of terror. I have seen it. I have experienced it. I have lost dear friends to terror.

The trauma of Israel's Yom Kippur War was fully justified

One of the first decisions that Gen. David Elazar faced when he was appointed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff in 1970 was whether to continue resting Israel’s front line on the Suez Canal. Gen. Ariel Sharon and others warned that such a deployment in an area dominated by massive Egyptian artillery and anti-tank weapons could become a trap – not just for the soldiers in scattered outposts along the 100-mile-long canal but for the tanks that would undoubtedly be sent to rescue them if war broke out. Sharon recommended establishing the front line well back from the canal, beyond Egyptian artillery range, to reduce the danger of a surprise attack. But Elazar decided to remain on the canal where – for political reasons – Israel could “show the flag.” Of the 500 Israeli soldiers manning the line, a third would be killed, a third taken prisoner and a third would manage to escape at night through the Egyptian encirclement.

THE SAGGER
The Armored Corps had been informed by AMAN that the Arab armies had acquired large stocks of a new Soviet anti-tank weapon, the Sagger. Unlike the ubiquitous RPG, which could kill a tank within 300 meters, the Sagger could be fired accurately by a soldier lying in the sand a mile away, virtually invisible to the Israeli tank crews. The armored corps was attempting to devise tactics to deal with the threat but meanwhile it had not informed the corps as a whole about the Sagger’s existence. When Israeli tanks attempted to reach the beleaguered Bar-Lev Line in the opening hours of the war many were knocked out by Saggers without the tank crews knowing what hit them. For several days, these weapons succeeded in keeping Israel’s formidable tank units at bay just as the air force was being kept at bay over the battlefields.

Despite the war’s nightmarish opening, the IDF succeeded, after the ground steadied under its feet, in staging one of the most dramatic turnarounds in military history, a feat too complex to be described here. The war ended with the Israeli army on the roads to Damascus and Cairo. It was a victory not only over Egypt and Syria but over the Arab world, from North Africa to Iraq, which sent fresh contingents to the battlefronts, even as Israeli troops were being steadily eroded. In Iraq’s case, two tank brigades blocked the Israelis who had reached artillery range of Damascus.

The cost of the fierce battles on both fronts would be high. Israel suffered three times more fatalities per capita in 18 days of combat than the Americans suffered in Vietnam in a decade.

It would be years before Israelis could view the war as anything but a disaster. Eventually, however, most would concede to themselves that it had been a military victory. In fact, Israel’s greatest. If the country could overcome the terrible hand it had dealt itself on Yom Kippur it would survive. The war was an extraordinary demonstration of Israel’s resilience and the Arab world would see it too. Six years later Israel would sign a peace treaty with its most formidable opponent, Egypt – the first with an Arab country but not the last.

Yom Kippur War: Why Israelis haven't made fictional films about it

Why have so many years gone by since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and so few Israeli filmmakers have turned their hands to depicting it? There have been a plethora of television documentaries about bereavement and about the soldiers – those who survived and those who didn’t – but, not many feature films have been made about this important war in Israel’s history.

Why have our most successful filmmakers, all of whom have made serious (anti-)war films, not made fictional accounts of the Yom Kippur War?

The answer is certainly complicated, mostly dealing with the deep and long-lasting trauma of the war, which makes it so difficult to confront.

According to Aner Preminger, who teaches cinema studies at Hebrew University and is a well-known filmmaker, the Yom Kippur War is “the most traumatic war that Israel ever went through, for a number of reasons: its intensiveness; the number of deaths, wounded, and victims of shell shock during such a short period; the surprise; and the downfall after the euphoria of the Six Day War,” he says.

“In fact, we are still today in the post-traumatic period of this war,” Preminger says. “Dealing face-on with such a difficult wound of trauma is complex and complicated, psychologically speaking. It is more natural to hide from it and to deal with it only from afar.”

According to this view, the trauma of the surprise attack and the terrible losses on the battlefield of the Yom Kippur War remain very much with us, and therefore it is very difficult to portray it in fictional films.

Another reason that Israeli filmmakers have kept away from the difficult subject matter of this war has to do with the fact that this particular war was accepted – throughout Israeli society – as a war of defense, a war for which we had no choice, thereby making it difficult to look at it critically: cinematically, politically or militarily.

In contrast, the War in Lebanon from 1982-2000 lent itself to criticism from the very beginning. It was a war of choice, a war entered into recklessly and without forethought about the long-term implications, which provided excellent material that filmmakers could easily dig their teeth into.

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Arabs still claiming to have won the Yom Kippur War

It's October, and Arab media are talking about their "victory" in the Yom Kippur War 49 years ago. 

There is no doubt that the beginning of the war was disastrous for Israel, and the repercussions of that failure were felt for years. 

But somehow the Arab media never mentions the position of the Israeli forces at the time of the final ceasefire:

1. The IDF surrounded Egypt's Third Army and Suez City inside Egyptian territory and could have crushed them.

2. There was nothing between the IDF and Cairo. 

3. Israel ended up on the outskirts of Damascus.

4. Israel lost 114 planes during the war, but only 20 in battle. Israeli pilots shot down at least 450 Arab aircraft in dogfights.

5. About 2700 IDF soldiers were killed - a horrific amount. But Syria and Egypt lost over 11,000 soldiers.

By any objective measure, the Arab side lost badly. Calling it a "victory" is ridiculous. But when people have a zero-sum mentality, and they can see that Israel was hurt - which it was -  they cannot distinguish between "Israel hurt" and "Arab victory."

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Former Egyptian official calls on Egypt to abrogate peace with Israel

Arabi21, a pan-Arab news channel, published an unusual op-ed by Abdullah Al-Ashaal, a former Egyptian presidential candidate and former assistant to the Egyptian Foreign Minister. He is described as an ambassador, but I cannot find to where.

Al-Ashaal argues that Egypt should abrogate is peace treaty with Israel - and that Sadat was under Zionist influence when he decided not to destroy Israel completely in the Yom Kippur War.

His delusions are apparent throughout the article:

"Israel is not an ordinary country, but rather the spearhead of the Zionist project and was planted in this particular region to destroy Egypt."

"Israel insisted on forcing Egypt to violate the principles of international law in many of its provisions" of the peace agreement.

"If Sadat had better planned the October War with the best of the Egyptian military,.... the end of Israel would have been the October War, but there is a contradiction between the management of the war in the first week and the setback [in following weeks.]"

"The [peace] treaty does not prevent Egypt from supporting the resistance, nor does it prevent Arab solidarity and the restoration of the joint Arab defense treaty. Egypt can, at its own will, amend the peace agreement...A state may review or cancel some provisions of the treaty or suspend some of its provisions."

He says he is writing a book about how terrible the peace treaty is. 

Al-Ashaal is apparently still living in 1975.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Russia declares 1973 "anti-Zionist" film "extremist" (video)

From BBC Russian:

The Russian Ministry of Justice has included in the list of extremist materials the Soviet propaganda film "Secret and Explicit. Aims and Deeds of the Zionists." The film was shot in the 1970s on the wave of "anti-Zionism" in the USSR, but it never made it to the wide screen because of the fears of the Soviet authorities.

The decision to ban the film was made by the Syktyvkar City Court in July this year, but it was only on November 8 that it was officially included in the list of extremist materials.

The documentary black and white tape was released in 1973 by the Central Documentary Film Studio. 

[T]he script for the film was approved at the highest level - in the international department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, a whole group of reputable consultants from the USSR Academy of Sciences, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the KGB were assigned to work on the picture. The filmmakers were even allowed to travel to Europe to collect material.

The well-known historian of the Soviet era Yevgeny Dobrenko wrote: "This film was the Soviet version of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion ," so odious and wild even by Soviet standards that it was assessed as anti-Semitic and banned even by the KGB and the Central Committee."

I found a version of the film where it appears that someone added clips from the 1990s (Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak). But it seems to include the original complete film.

I don't understand Russian but the antisemitism is obvious - scenes of Jews praying, shots of Jewish books that are almost certainly being claimed to demean non-Jews, accusations that Jews collaborated with Nazis on the Holocaust. 

 

Leftist anti-Zionism started off indistinguishable from classic antisemitism. After missteps like this film, the Left learned to hide their Jew-hate a little better, always insisting that they weren't anti-Jew but only anti-Israel. 

That doesn't change the fact that the anti-Zionists are still motivated by the same hate for Jews that they always were. Hiding it better doesn't make that any less true.

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Thoughts on Yom Hazikaron (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

A few moments ago, at exactly 11 am, I went up to my roof to stand at attention for two minutes during the siren that honors the 23,928 people, soldiers and civilians, who have died since 1860 in the struggle to create and defend the Jewish state.

Today, Wednesday, is Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. It’s been said that on Yom Hazikaron we consider the price of having a state, while on last week’s Yom Hashoa, we think about the price of being without one. Most Israelis understand that the latter’s cost would be much greater, but still, the pain of those who have lost loved ones is almost unbearable. And that pain is worsened when the loss was avoidable, perhaps caused by incompetence, laziness, or selfishness on the part of political or military leaders that failed those who put their trust in them (and who mostly had no choice in the matter).

The 1973 war is considered the most prominent example of unnecessary losses in the history of the state. Repeated failures by military and political officials (including the PM, Golda Meir) to take seriously the warnings from numerous sources that an attack was imminent – even King Hussein of Jordan personally warned Meir – led to the catastrophic lack of preparation for the joint Egyptian-Syrian attack. At least 2,500 Israeli soldiers died in the war that followed, many of them in the first hours of the war when inadequate Israeli forces faced large invading armies on the Golan Heights and the Sinai.

After the war, a commission of inquiry (the Agranat Commission) investigated the failures, and after the release of its report, several military commanders were forced to resign, as well as Meir and her cabinet. Although Meir’s government was succeeded by one led by Yitzhak Rabin, it’s generally thought that the debacle of 1973 led directly to the end of the left-wing monopoly on power, the triumph of Menachem Begin’s Likud Party in 1977.

Another, more recent example was the Second Lebanon War. The three men who managed the war in the summer of 2006 were unqualified to do so. The Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Defense Minister, Amir Peretz, had little military experience and went to war without a clear objective or exit strategy. The Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, was an Air Force officer who didn’t understand the workings of the ground forces, and how to get them to do what he wanted. The army, especially the ground forces, suffered from a long-term lack of discipline, which manifested itself in an abysmal lack of preparation. There were serious failures in intelligence, logistics, tactics, and execution. 121 Israeli soldiers died in the inconclusive month-long war, which ended in a UN Security Council resolution that proved worthless in preventing Hezbollah from rearming for a second round.

The theme of the tragic loss of young people in war pervades Israeli culture; it appears throughout popular music, films, and literature. It’s felt especially strongly on Yom Hazikaron – the newspaper, radio, and TV are full of stories about young men and women who were everything to their parents, who were full of plans for the future, had talents and dreams, but whose lives ended at the age of 23, or 20, or 19. And the thought that it may not have been necessary is excruciating.

Today Israel is facing Iran, a large country whose leaders seem to have a limitless hatred for us, a hatred greater than just their geopolitical ambitions. They have surrounded us with proxies, in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, armed and waiting for the conflict to begin. The Iranian regime is committed to building nuclear weapons, and we are committed to stopping them. For both sides, this is an issue that is not amenable to compromise. Unless something very unexpected happens, there will be war yet again, and yet again our young people will offer themselves generously on behalf of the am Yisrael. We know, beyond any doubt, that they will not all return to take their after-army trips around the world, or go to university, or marry their sweethearts. We know this for certain. This is the terrible cost of defending the Jewish state, which is still less expensive than the cost of not having one.

If there isn’t a way to prevent it – and I think there isn’t – at least we can do our best to minimize the number of those that will be lost because of incompetence, laziness, and selfishness in the higher echelons of the government and the military.

The present situation in which there is no permanent government, in which vital functions – including the military budget – are held hostage to the ambitions, fears, personal grudges, and egos of a few dozen people who lead our political parties and our legal establishment, must end now. Not after the missiles start falling on the unprepared home front, and not after reserve soldiers whose training was cancelled for budgetary reasons are thrown into combat.

You know who you are – Bibi, Bennett, Lapid, Sa’ar, Smotrich, Gantz, Lieberman, as well as Kochavi, Mandelblit, Hayut, and all the rest. You know that the state is in a perilous situation, and that it needs the attention of leaders that will put aside everything else except the good of am Yisrael and its nation-state, who will start earning the exorbitant salaries that we pay them. You know what you have to do. Do it.
Now. Before it is too late.

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