Until 1967, Gaza was part of Egypt. The Arabs who lived in Gaza considered themselves – get this – Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood was active and quite popular in Gaza – and outlawed by the Egyptian government.
It’s important to be aware of the Muslim Brotherhood because it paved the way for today’s brew of transnational Islamic jihadists. The Brotherhood laid the basic groundwork in Gaza for today’s popular and genocidal Hamas.
In fact, Al Qaeda’s number-two man, Ayman Muhammad Rabaie al-Zawahiri, got his murderous start with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood is dead serious about overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s regime, and will do everything in its power to make sure that Hosni’s son, Gamal, does not get daddy’s job.
Apparently, Hosni’s wife Suzanne wields considerable power behind the throne – an Egyptian Lady Macbeth – and she’s making brass-knuckle moves to ensure that Junior inherits the presidency – for life. (If those crude gangsters in Syria can pull it off, surely it should be easy as pie for the glorious Egyptians.)
The only real competition comes from Defense Minister Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein Tantawi and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. Look for the Brotherhood to throw its support, provisionally, behind either of these two men. It’s a toxic brew, a deal with the devil, but that’s business as usual in Arab/Muslim countries.
Egyptian President for Life (in the Arab world, is there any other kind?) Mubarak is 79 years old. He’s ill, having just returned from Germany where he underwent a “medical review.” In short, he’s fading fast. The shakeout should be interesting – and bloody. The Brotherhood will be a major player when Mubarak kicks the bucket, and the dogs of war will be let loose.
Jordan, Miniskirts and Big Lies
Judea and Samaria, known as the West Bank, were part of Jordan until the Arabs launched and lost the 1967 Six-Day War.
Here’s a pop quiz: Before 1967, what did the Arabs in Judea and Samaria call themselves?
1) Brooklynites
2) Klingons
3) Jordanians
4) Palestinians
If you answered 4, it means you probably read The New York Times far too often – and believe what you read. Or you watch Hizbullah’s Al Manar TV and believe what you see. Not a lot of difference between the two news organizations at this point.
The correct answer happens to be 3.
Anyway, the Muslim Brotherhood was never big in Judea and Samaria. Three reasons:
1) Jordanian security services, staffed exclusively by officers loyal to the Hashemite Kingdom, are brutal beyond words. They did not and do not tolerate the Brotherhood.
2) The Hashemite kingdom has a much smaller population than Egypt, making it easier for the ruthless Jordanian security services to penetrate and smash any dissenting organizations.
3) The Hashemites have always been far more comfortable in Western society than in the sands of Arabia. The Jordanian fellahin, peasants, secretly mock the current king’s funny Arab accent. His cool Oxford English is far better.
We need to take this into account: Jordanian society has recently morphed into a far more open and secular culture than any other in Arab society, even rivaling Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East. Hang out in Amman and you’ll see women in miniskirts and men in coffee shops hunched over sleek laptops surfing blogsites from Israel.
With all that, Jordan does have a budding jihadist insurgency in the Islamic Action Front, an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood. It remains to be seen if this group will gain traction in the tightly controlled Hashemite kingdom.
Persia in Gaza, Jihad Everywhere
The notion that so-called Palestinian society is one united culture has always been a big lie perpetuated by the chimera of a society built on big lies. The gulf between Gaza and Judea and Samaria is vast and unbridgeable.
It was always just a matter of time before they started executing each other in the streets of Gaza before wailing wives and children, torturing each other to death in filthy basements, flinging one another off high-rise buildings.
It was always just a matter of time before the Christian Arab minority would be mercilessly persecuted, their churches plundered, torched, their congregations forced into perpetual exile.
Well aware of this cultural divide, Egyptian-born terrorist leader Yasir Arafat bound Palestinian society together through a false narrative based on victimhood and malignant Jew-hatred. There is no great or minor literature, no art, no music, no common history – only a vast tissue of lies combined with denial of Jewish history.