Egyptians smell an American plot

Egypt has alienated the U.S. at the worst possible time, said Philip Whitfield in the Cairo Daily News Egypt. The arrest of 19 Americans, charged last week with the crime of working for unlicensed pro-democracy organizations, has prompted the U.S. to threaten to withhold more than $1 billion in military aid. This is assistance that Egypt desperately needs to combat rising “urban terrorism.” The police must be trained, and now. They were utterly inept in responding to this month’s soccer riots, and meanwhile criminals have been helping themselves to “huge quantities of guns smuggled in from Libya.” Certainly the Egyptian government should audit foreign organizations, but can’t it do so without jeopardizing military funding?

The evidence against these groups is damning, said Yusuf Jamal Masrawi in El Akhbar. The two judges who ordered the Americans arrested said that their investigation of foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations had turned up some alarming documents. Several of the groups had conducted polls asking Egyptian citizens “peculiar” questions about their religious affiliations and “even where army bases are located.” At the offices of the International Republican Institute—the group Sam LaHood, the son of the U.S. transportation secretary, worked for—maps were found that “divided Egypt into four regions.”

That’s the most ominous of the findings, said Muhammad Dunia in Al Ahram. According to the map discovered at the IRI, the Sinai “would be under Jewish influence”; a second state, with Alexandria as its capital, would be Christian; a third would be in the Nubian region; and the fourth “would be a Berber state,” with Cairo as its capital. We know, of course, that this is hardly the first Western plot to partition Egypt. Back in 1980, during the Iran-Iraq war, the Pentagon commissioned “Zionist conspirator Bernard Lewis,” a British Jew with American citizenship, to “draw up his now-famous scheme to dismantle” all Arab and Muslim states in the Middle East and reorganize them along religious lines into smaller states “that would be incapable of facing down the major global blocs.” What we didn’t know until now was that the plot had been revived. The raid on the NGOs has turned up proof that “foreign hands seek to topple Egypt by exploiting the violence that has erupted since the revolution.”

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If it’s a conspiracy you seek, said Ezzat Ibrahim in Al-Ahram Weekly, you need look no further than Cairo. Fayza Abul-Naga, the current minister of international cooperation, is a carryover from the Mubarak regime, and she’s the main force behind the crackdown on dissent. “The political motivations and vindictive nature behind these accusations are overwhelmingly clear,” says one of the defendants, Sherif Mansour of NGO Freedom House. “The investigation is part of a wider crackdown on Egyptian civil society.” Expect more of the same.