Was Egypt’s Al-Sisi Serving as a Cut-Out for Israel to Bribe Trump?
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo, Egypt, on January 30, 2023. RussiaGate was always small potatoes in comparison to the influence exerted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over first Candidate and then President Donald Trump, with perhaps the most egregious instance being relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem. That move, a mad fantasy in the minds of the Revisionist Zionist wing of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was overtly provocative and antagonizing towards the Palestinians living in the city who have been ethnically cleansed for generations as a result of efforts in the ‘Judaization of Jerusalem’ <yehud Yerushalayim>. (These policy moves on Israel also should have brushed away the warped fantasy that Trump’s isolationist nativism can align with an ethical anti-imperial project for the Left.)
A recent report by the Washington Post was quite bereft of this context in reporting on connections, licit or otherwise, between President Donald Trump’s administration and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Some further nuances on Israeli politics require acknowledgement in order to better comprehend whether or not the Post’s reportage merits deeper skepticism. This is particularly in light of how the diplomatic relationship between Israel and Egypt directly governs administration of domestic policing today in the streets of Cairo with a bloody affect. In a story on August 2, 2024 headlined “$10M Cash Withdrawal Drove Secret Probe Into Whether Trump Took Money From Egypt” and authored by Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig. It is certainly impressive reporting, although a great many details are acknowledged as unable to be confirmed nor denied, as stated in paragraphs four and five of the report:
Since receiving the intelligence about Sisi, the Justice Department had been examining whether money moved from Cairo to Trump, potentially violating federal law that bans U.S. candidates from taking foreign funds. Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sisi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money. Those questions, at least in the view of several investigators on the case, would never be answered, The Post found.
In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Leonnig further indicated that, since the statute of limitations has expired, it is almost impossible to envision a new investigation of the matter. In the same interview, Leonnig makes more explicit her own angle, suggesting that Egypt’s injection of funds into the Trump-Pence 2016 campaign war chest was essentially a geopolitical ‘pay-to-play’ scheme:
At that time, Donald Trump’s campaign was cash-starved. He was running out of money, and his advisers were trying to convince him to cut a check from his own accounts to help fund the last little bit of media buys that the campaign needed to purchase in order to stay…vibrant and alive in the race. And he did not want to put any more of his own money in the campaign, because he thought he was going to lose. But after he meets el-Sisi…privately…[joined by only] an interpreter from Egypt. And investigators found that very curious, because then, on October 28th, a month later, Donald Trump does agree to write a check to his own campaign, after much, much pleading from his advisers. Investigators saw this as an important moment: why, if Donald Trump had been absolutely insisting he wouldn’t donate to his campaign anymore, he finally did.
The claim of Sisi being a major campaign media advertising financier brushes aside acknowledgement that many journalists, such as Paul Jay at The Real News and Jane Mayer at The New Yorker, have previously emphasized the pivotal role played by shadowy hedge funder Robert Mercer, the big money behind a multitude of organizations including Citizens United and the Breitbart media group. Mercer and his lieutenants, such as Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, came as a package deal with a massive cash injection into the Trump campaign following the Summer 2016 Republican National Convention. Mercer’s agents renovated the campaign organization’s key infrastructure so to gain the upper hand against Clinton in the pivotal battleground states. The connections between the various Mercer-financed political projects and the Likud party are substantial and well-documented. Further connections are presented via Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who used to loan Netanyahu his boyhood bedroom in New Jersey for sleep-overs when the Israeli politician visited the United Nations.
But there are other missing details that are hard to ignore with this reporting.
First, look at the run-down of Sisi’s profile in the Post story:
The [Trump] campaign’s account of the closed-door meeting gave no indication that Trump had held the Egyptian leader at arm’s length, as U.S. officials typically had done since Sisi seized power in a military coup three years earlier [in 2013] and swept aside the country’s first democratically elected president.
As readers shall come to understand momentarily, the proposition that the Obama administration “had held the Egyptian leader at arm’s length” is pretty ludicrous. But the most glaring dearth is that of the words ‘President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood,’ rather shamefully left unnamed as “the country’s first democratically elected president.” Why?
Perhaps the explanation lies within the disparity between the Post’s actual verbiage surrounding Morsi’s name during the time of his ouster and the necessary implications in today’s reportage attendant an authoritarian dictator like Sisi. Strangely enough, the Post website linked to a quite revealing archived story headlined “Egyptian Military Ousts Morsi, Suspends Constitution,” dated July 3, 2013 and authored by Abigail Hauslohner, William Booth and Sharaf al-Hourani. This is the most immediate journalism filed by the Post about the coup that installed General Sisi.
How did the Post describe Morsi’s ouster eleven years ago?
CAIRO — A year after coming to office, Egypt’s first democratically elected president was swept aside by the military leaders who long presided over this country and proved Wednesday in a series of extraordinary maneuvers that they never really left. President Mohamed Morsi’s dramatic fall from power came after months of political turmoil and days of tense protests, as millions of Egyptians took to the streets to call for his exit. Those protesters were jubilant Wednesday night, celebrating the ouster of a leader they viewed as both autocratic and incompetent.
Quite a tonal change if one is honest about all things currently under consideration.
Sisi claimed eleven years ago that his coup was driven by a secular democratic impulse. David Brooks wrote a column on July 4, 2013 literally entitled “Defending the Coup” that was especially vomit-inducing:
…Members of the Muslim Brotherhood are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity. When you elect fanatics, they continue, you have not advanced democracy. You have empowered people who are going to wind up subverting democracy. The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup. The goal is to weaken political Islam, by nearly any means… Radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death… They lack the mental equipment to govern. Once in office, they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them… Incompetence is built into the intellectual DNA of radical Islam. We’ve seen that in Algeria, Iran, Palestine and Egypt: real-world, practical ineptitude that leads to the implosion of the governing apparatus… It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.
Brooks has always appealed to a supposedly Burkean conservative politics in television interviews. Yet here, the racist disdain for Arab parliamentary democracy and self-determination is far beyond a simplistic bigotry and into the realm of a pathology most disturbing. He’s demeaning the mental capacity of the entire nation that literally built the pyramids and the Sphinx! It is difficult to find an appeal to Burke’s critique of the French Revolution in such filth. The fact the Times printed this on American Independence Day bespeaks the richness of it all.
The Post continued in its report on the 2013 coup:
Sissi said that the country’s new constitution — ratified under Morsi — would be suspended and that the chief of Egypt’s constitutional court will assume the presidency on an interim basis until the elections are held. Sissi said the interim president — Adly Mansour, who assumed the position of the nation’s top judicial authority just three days ago — will have the right to declare laws during the transitional period. Without mentioning Morsi by name in his eight-minute speech, Sissi said the military had responded to the Egyptian people’s demands in an act of “public service… The armed forces have tried in recent months, both directly and indirectly, to contain the internal situation and to foster national reconciliation between the political powers, including the presidency,” Sissi said. But those efforts failed, he said. The president, he added, “responded with negativity in the final minutes.” Afterward, Morsi and his supporters were defiant. “Measures announced by the armed forces’ leadership represent a full coup categorically rejected by all the free men of our nation,” Morsi tweeted from his official Twitter account Wednesday night after Sissi’s statement.
Certainly a jarring contrast for the role Sisi played in the Cairo pageantry. In the decade since Morsi’s ouster, we have come to learn, thanks to secret audio recordings disclosed to the public via regional Islamist news websites, that Sisi led the coup with financing provided directly by the United Arab Emirates.
At the time of Morsi’s overthrow, Jo Biddle of The Australian noted this significant point that further contravenes the claims embedded within the Post’s characterization of Sisi in 2024:
Washington has decided to avoid the tricky question of whether the toppling of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was a coup, which would have forced a freeze of $US1.5 billion ($A1.63 billion) in aid. “The law does not require us to make a formal determination…as to whether a coup took place, and it is not in our national interest to make such a determination,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Friday… “We believe that the continued provision of assistance to Egypt, consistent with our law, is important to our goal of advancing a responsible transition to democratic governance and is consistent with our national security interest,” Psaki told reporters.
What does this mean in juxtaposition with Leonnig’s claims on her Democracy Now interview? She told Goodman:
Donald Trump really flipped the switch on U.S. policy towards Egypt. You may and your listeners may know that el-Sisi was viewed by the United States as both an ally, but a worrisome ally. Egypt is very important to the United States’ position in the Middle East, but el-Sisi had risen to power through a violent coup, a military coup. And in the wake of his rise to power, it became known that he was suspected to have played a key role in the military killing of supporters of his opponent, who had been democratically elected. He was also viewed as very comfortable with a host of human rights abuses against opponents and critics in his country and trying to violently shut down that opposition, using military and spy power to do that. So the United States viewed him with a little bit of remove and had put a hold on this very valuable military aid and had asked him and pressed him numerous times to do better on human rights at home.
What?
This is completely ridiculous, as the record amply demonstrates.
Mark Hertsgaard reported for The Daily Beast on May 10, 2015:
…The tapes [secretly recording Sisi plotting the coup] raise embarrassing questions for U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in particular. Besides rigging the legal case against Morsi, the tapes describe the Egyptian military’s role in fomenting the street protests that el-Sisi used to justify Morsi’s removal—a revelation that undercuts the military’s assertion that it took power as part of a popular “revolution,” not a coup. U.S. law prohibits supplying advanced military equipment to a government that seized power in a coup. Obama froze U.S. military aid to Egypt immediately after Morsi’s overthrow, but recently reversed course. In a March 31 telephone call, the president informed el-Sisi that the U.S. would be sending $47 million worth of F-16 fighter jets, Harpoon missiles, and other weaponry to Egypt, fortifying Egypt’s role as the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, behind Israel. Kerry heaped fulsome praise on el-Sisi during a March 13 [2015] visit to Egypt, asserting that the new Egyptian president “deserves enormous credit for working to improve the basic business climate in Egypt.” [Emphasis added]
Does Hertsgaard make it sound like the Obama administration “put a hold on this very valuable military aid” to the Sisi regime, to quote Leonnig’s claims to Amy Goodman?
President Morsi would later die in a jail cell, due in no small part to abominable conditions and lack of proper medical treatment. There have been no democratic elections since Sisi took power. Here’s what Ken Silverstein wrote for Harper’s on July 30, 2013 in a column titled “On the Selling of the Egyptian Coup to Liberals,” with the subhead ‘How the mass killing of Islamists is being justified in America’:
…The secularists beloved of the American political class have little support among Egyptians. Mohammed El-Baradei, who settled for the post of vice president after the military initially chose him to lead the “interim” regime, had returned to the country after the mass demonstrations that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. “If [people] want me to lead the transition, I will not let them down,” he said at the time. But the people didn’t want him to lead. Though he declared his intention to run for the presidency, he withdrew when it became clear he didn’t have anywhere near the support he would need to be elected, and Morsi ultimately won the race in 2012… Certainly huge numbers of people took to the streets to demonstrate against Morsi, but his supporters have also been out in huge numbers, before and after the coup, and unlike his enemies they are risking their lives to do so. This isn’t an endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whose policies and ideas I find abhorrent, especially regarding civil liberties. But I am quite certain that General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the man who appears to be in charge now and who provoked last weekend’s bloodbath, is also not a fan of gays and feminists (who didn’t thrive under Mubarak, either). We may not like the Muslim Brotherhood, but we can’t have democracy in Egypt without it, and the same holds true for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. As I wrote for Harper’s in 2007 after interviewing senior officials in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah, the U.S. government needs to deal with “radical” Islamists because they are widely supported actors in their countries. The alternative to giving them a fair share of power is mass arrests and executions.
And so what exactly is Leonnig’s point when she tells Amy Goodman in 2024 “In the wake of his rise to power, it became known that he was suspected to have played a key role in the military killing of supporters of his opponent, who had been democratically elected”?
That’s not a revelation, it is a truism at CIA Headquarters in Langley.
We know this is a truism because the Clinton Email Server Cache is brimming with memos that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her loyal lieutenant Sid Blumenthal were shooting back and forth between one another on an hourly basis. Instead of actually filling in vital information, Leonnig is obscuring essential (but inconvenient) context that has been available for more than eight years via Wikileaks.
Edward Said dedicated a chapter of his magnum opus Culture and Imperialism to Verdi’s Aida, an opera rent through with affectations for the verdant banks of the Nile, and it is hard to ignore not just the superficial guffaw but the deeper reflection. For both Verdi and the Post, Egypt functions as something reflecting not just its own historical, political, geographical and cultural reality but also the gaze of the Western observer, a kind of mirror to the ego of great maestro back then and, now, the Post journalists. When our propaganda system requires the ‘ancient’ Egyptian intellectual tradition to serve as one of the earliest vertebrae in the backbone of Western civilization, it is presented with much lighter skin and heightened intellectual maturity. But likewise, when necessary, contemporary Egypt still can be presented to the Western cable television news viewer as just one more untamed land full of Brown Indigenes unworthy of egalitarian recognition and respect. The Pharaohs with their pyramids and their Egyptian Book of the Dead helped build the foundation of Western thought, but now their contemporary Arabic voters are too backward to have their democratic agency and self-determination respected by the West.
When Sisi plays the convenient role of a ‘law-and-order’ power broker backed by supposed secularists as opposed to Muslim Brotherhood Islamists, his purpose was one of Modernity subduing the Orient, and its most particularly foreboding manifestation, political Islamism sitting on the southwestern border of Israel, separated from Gaza by the Sinai and Rafah Crossing. The operatic rendition of Israel as the vulnerable democracy surrounded by the Saracen hordes requires that the Jewish State’s geographic neighbors play a vital geopolitical role in order to help the propaganda line fit smoothly with events on the ground. As such, Morsi the Barbarian needed to be subdued by Sisi the Modernist.
Yet now, because Sisi can be shown to support Trump, the dichotomy is that of Liberal Democratic American Federalism as opposed to the growing network Global Authoritarianism that includes other luminaries such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, the Greek Golden Dawn party, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, and the revanchist Catholic government of Poland. These contours of Liberal discourse provide a striking parallel with the Conservative one, insofar the distinctions within the farcical coverage of that fantastical place “the Muslim World” by each camp demonstrates the underbelly of American propaganda as hegemonic ideology buttressing imperialism. Trump pals around with this particularly grotesque dictator and so we should feel quite understandable and justifiable revulsion. However, this smugness might betray quite a few by the end.
Consider the barely-mentioned point near the bottom of the 2013 Post story reporting on the coup:
Political analysts have warned that no matter how warmly the military’s move may have been received by the many liberal and secular Egyptians who deeply resent Islamist rule, it would not bode well for the country’s democratic future. Even if Egypt moves quickly to new elections, they said, future civilian leaders will govern with the knowledge that the military could step in at any time. Before Morsi’s election, the nation was effectively governed by the military for six decades.
Plus ça change…
There is another point to add.
Sisi fundamentally reversed President Morsi’s position on Palestinian liberation to the most lurid effect. The underground tunnels connecting the Sinai to Gaza (the only viable method of subverting the blockade) were flooded with sewage or demolished so to establish a supposed ‘buffer zone.’
Consider this coverage from The New York Times headlined “Egypt Flattens Neighborhoods to Create a Buffer With Gaza” and authored by Kareem Fahim and Merna Thomas on Oct. 29, 2014:
CAIRO — With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gaza in a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier. The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday… The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse… It was also the latest instance of the government using the overwhelming force of its security apparatus to confront what it sees as a threat to Egypt’s existence, whether the growing strength of militants or the demonstrations by thousands of Islamists during the overthrow of the government of Mohamed Morsi. Some of the recent measures, including a crackdown on university protests and a presidential decree issued Monday putting public facilities like power stations and roads under the protection of the military, were “confirmation of a conviction we have had for months,” said Gamal Eid, the head of the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights Information. “Egypt is solidifying the rule of the police and the military,” he said.
The most astonishing dimension of American journalism is how completely oblivious the press keeps its US readers to well-known truisms throughout the rest of the world. That in turn would dictate obviating the major concern on the Israeli side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt stemmed from the formal and institutional international relations between Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas governments. The democratic election of Morsi’s party presented a dire and objective threat to the Revisionist Zionist bloc in the Knesset during the Obama administration, and for good reasons.
One significant reason is the personal acrimony fostered intentionally by Benjamin Netanyahu towards both the Clintons and, later, Obama. It was Netanyahu’s rabble-rousing and lynch mob rantings that brought domestic Israeli politics to the fever pitch, resulting in the murder of Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and the scuttling of the Oslo Process, something felt as a deep slight by the publicity-minded Clinton administration. With Obama, Netanyahu consistently leaned into a visceral and deep-seated anti-Black racism he learned as a boy when his family lived in the United States and recognized as ascendant within the Tea Party movement’s most lurid elements. His public antagonism towards Obama regarding everything from the expansion of illegal settlements to the Iran nuclear deal created a blatant GOP-Likud alliance that at times seemed to violate the Logan Act of 1799. The Republican courtship of the Jewish vote by that point had all but imploded (Jewish voter returns for Obama were historic on their own count in both presidential elections); however, it found a deeper wellspring of support with the Christian Zionist vote, whose own dispensationist eschatology is synoptic with the maximalist designs of Revisionist Zionism (i.e complete Jewish control of Jerusalem, reconstruction of the Jewish Temple on the site of a demolished Muslim Dome of the Rock, complete and total expansion of the settlements in the West Bank). This convergence between the most extremist religious nationalist elements in both countries provides a rather jarring yet powerful juxtaposition and their synthesis is one of the most disturbing elements of a political horizon that remains unaltered regardless of any plebiscite.
In a policy brief titled The Dangerous Exceptionalism of Christian Zionism, authored by Halah Ahmad with Mimi Kirk and published on October 3, 2023 by the Middle East Policy Network’s Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network, one reads:
The Christian Zionist consensus that took hold in the US and elsewhere, especially after the 1967 war and in the 1980s, sees the modern-day Zionist colonial project as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, preceding the ascendance of Christians to heaven and the destruction of all others on earth. Even among those Christians who believe in these precursors to Armageddon but who gloss over the end-of-times scenario, the ultimate focus is on Christian salvation that requires Jewish settlement in Palestine. Though many Jewish Zionist leaders acknowledge the cynical nature of an alliance with Christian Zionists, their support is ultimately welcomed as it advances the Israeli regime’s political goals and shields it from critique. One of the ways Christian Zionists accomplish this is by contributing to narratives of the regime’s vulnerability in the midst of hostile Arab and Muslim neighbors who are also depicted as characteristically inferior. These narratives invoke racist ideas of Palestinians and Muslims as backwards, violent, technologically underdeveloped, and expendable—narratives similar to those used among white supremacists. In fact, Christian evangelicals have been among the most virulent propagators of anti-Muslim racism in the US.
This anti-Muslim racism has manifested most notably, at least in my lifetime, via the Birther conspiracy theory and other elements of the Tea Party propaganda, which aggregated into a partisan cudgel all the bigotries loosed by the 9/11 attacks so to accost Obama with crude characterizations as a promoter of things like Sharia law.
Furthermore, through intentional and manipulative invocation of crude stereotypes and politically-convenient references to American Evangelical Christian theology, a unique political development emerges here meriting further consideration.
Revisionist Zionism is a distinct element in the halls of the Knesset, predicated upon the teachings of the fascist ideologue Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940). It promotes the maximalist Greater Israel political program, seeking complete annexation and expropriation of historic Palestine (and even parts of Jordan, depending on the extremity of the position held by a particular Member of the Knesset). Lest it be mistaken, Labor Zionism, which historically served as the other significant pole of politics within the Knesset, is equally guilty of Palestinian dispossession. As just two instances, the largest expansion of settlements occurred under Labor governments during the twentieth century and Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, who partnered with Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat in the Oslo Process, was most brutal in his militarized police response to the First Intifada. It is impossible to call the Israeli Labor Party truly “egalitarian” but it is distinctively secular as well as predicated upon a politics that is altogether distinctive in comparison with that of Revisionism. This indication seems meritorious in a fashion obviating a beneficial point for the Palestine solidarity movement and its rhetorical arguments with Israeli apologists.
First, it is important to acknowledge that, while American Jewish affinities for Israel are extant in the voting public, these are by no means simplistic “do-or-die” allegiances to whichever political party wins government. Indeed, as Norman Finkelstein and more recent scholars have amply documented, the increasingly-rightward shift of Israeli voters into the Revisionist camp of Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu has presented a tremendous strain upon American Jewish affinities for Israel owing to the US voting demographic’s undeniably liberal politics.
Secondly, and stemming from this, there are a good many contrasts to indicate herein which further illume the disparity between Israeli voters and Jewish American voters. Donald Trump was a universally-unpopular American president in world opinion, a figure detested across the globe. That is, except in Israel, where he was embraced wildly in opinion polls. Shibley Telhami reported on May 14, 2018 in a story titled “Poll: Jewish Israelis Love Trump” for Politico that:
Fifty-nine percent of Jewish Israelis have a favorable opinion of the president, including more than 70 percent of Haredi Jews and non-Haredi religious Jews. Even among secular Israeli Jews, 45 percent have favorable views of Trump, and 30 percent have unfavorable views. It’s important to keep in mind that as this poll was being conducted, Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, a move the Israeli government has strongly pushed for; that may have since made Trump even more favorable to Jewish Israelis.
By contrast, American Jewish voters are second only to African Americans in their allegiance to “big government” liberalism and the egalitarian ethos underwriting such views. This liberalism is making it increasingly difficult for them to justify blatantly-obvious Zionist apartheid and the brutality of Gaza. The addition of the former Republican President’s orange visage to the equation might be a final break for many liberal Jewish voters that previously felt reticent on the matter.
Trump’s destruction of abortion rights and creation of a solidly-conservative and Catholic Supreme Court will have touched many of these voters who held those issues as genuine and legitimate “do-or-die” allegiances. Finkelstein was apt to point out in his work that a significant component of the “big government” allegiance is informed by memories of institutional antisemitism in the era of New York’s Irish Catholic Tammany Machine and jobs being vended on patronage by the ward bosses. Trump has replicated several of these dynamics and could bring many of those memories to the surface for voters. Except for the extremely marginal cohort of Jewish Republicans, such as the neocon remainders and oddball oligarchs like the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, American Jews have demonstrated repeatedly in the past several election cycles that they reliably vote for the Democrats.
Yet for Republicans, this has not presented a challenge; rather, it has opened up the ample opportunity to substitute American Jews with Evangelical Christian Zionists as donors and supporters of the most extreme forms of Zionist colonialism. Indeed, the greatest favor the Left does for Israeli hasbara propaganda is failing to emphasize the Revisionist-Evangelical alliance as being more powerful than anything possible within the American Jewish polity.
Rather than seeing the Israel Lobby as a force compelling dual loyalties from American Jews (in the wrong hands, little more than an antisemitic canard and carry-over from Cold War accusations about Jewish Communists with unbending loyalty to the Soviet Union), it is instead incumbent upon journalists to emphasize the uniquely American Evangelical Christian character of hasbara messaging to US audiences that is broadcast in order to garner support for the maximalist Greater Israel project and completely eliminate the presence of Palestinians from the river to the sea.
Here is the verbiage describing contemporary Israel from the website of the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem:
In modern times, the scattered Jewish people have returned to their ancient homeland and re-established their nation in the face of great opposition. Their rise from the ashes of the Holocaust and return to the family of nations is nothing short of a modern-day miracle. The wonders have continued as Israel has become the “Start-Up Nation,” leading the world in innovation and advancement.
In this passage, Evangelical Christian theology has instrumentalized Israelis in service of their own distinctively American articulation of prosperity, free market capitalism in a post-production economy. One shakes their head in disbelief at this blatant and crude recycling of good ole’ boy prejudices about “Jews being good with money,” which aligns with the Evangelical Prosperity Gospel theology propagated in the United States. The reification of Israelis as vanguards of the distinctively neoliberal iteration of finance capitalism obviates this further.
The alliance of Israelis and Evangelicals against the majority opinion of American Jewish voters may indeed be one of the most vital strategic elements in stopping American obstructionism at the United Nations.
Is that rupture perhaps more consequential than any other in the US voting population on the question of Palestine?
By the time of the 2012 Presidential debates, Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s references to Obama’s supposed weakness on Israel seemed to dog-whistle the Christian Zionist vote in an unambiguously macho fashion. When Joe Biden went against Paul Ryan in the Vice Presidential debates that year, it was hard to ignore the way Netanyahu was being invoked as a cudgel against the Democrats even though the Jewish American opinion on Israel had begun diverging with Likud for several years by then. The only purpose of such statements was solidifying the notion of Democrats being “weak on Israel” in the eyes of Christian Zionists as opposed to American Jewish voters:
[Paul Ryan:] What do [the Iranian state leaders] see? They see this administration trying to water down sanctions in Congress for over two years. They’re moving faster toward a nuclear weapon; they’re spinning the centrifuges faster. They see us saying, when we come into the administration, when they’re sworn in, we need more space with our ally Israel. They see President Obama in New York City the same day Bibi Netanyahu is, and he’s — instead of meeting with him goes on a — on a daily talk show.
This is the smugness of liberalism coming back with a vengeance. Inadvertently, by failing to be more assertive with respects to Netanyahu’s racist belligerence towards the first African American President, the Democratic Party strengthened the position of the Evangelical-Revisionist alliance as both Israel and the United States marched further rightward in domestic politics following the Arab Spring, the true flowering of democracy in this otherwise-wretched new century. It illustrates that the refusal to confront racism allows it to fester and metastasize in ways that are unimaginable until it is too late.
President Obama was apt to follow the guidance of the Clintons on the Arab Spring, as was demonstrated by the role of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aide Sidney Blumenthal in the planning and execution of the war on Qaddafi’s Libya (Julian Assange described it as “Hillary’s War” in an interview with the late John Pilger and Ken Silverstein authored a detailed explainer in 2015 for The Observer). Consider these cables hosted by Wikileaks, which show an administration that seemed to delegate the Egypt portfolio in toto to Secretary Clinton during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense, which claimed 1,391 Palestinian lives:
[November 15, 2012] Sources with direct access to the governments of Libya and Israel, as well as the highest levels of European governments, and Western Intelligence and security services [report] during the day on November 14, 2012, Egyptian President Mohamad Morsi discussed the current fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza with his senior Army commander General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and the leadership of the Military Intelligence Service (MI—Mukhabarat el-Khabeya). According to an extremely sensitive source, Morsi was concerned that if the situation in Gaza continues escalate Egypt could be drawn into the fighting. He also expressed frustration with the Hamas Government in Gaza, over which he has been unable to exert significant influence. Al-Sissi assured the President that while MI has not fixed the specific underlying cause of the exchange between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) both sides will continue to retaliate for each attack. That said, al-Sissi assured Morsi that MI officers were meeting secretly with their Israeli counterparts and the meetings remained professional in tone. In this regard the IDF commanders agreed with Morsi’s plan to send Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil to Gaza on November 16 in an effort to stop the pattern of retaliation, at least while he is on the scene. Al-Sissi added that he is not certain that the IDF officers coordinated this discussion with the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; it was clear to him that the IDF was looking for a way to stop the Hamas rocket attacks, which had now reached Tel Aviv, even if only for a few days… Source Comment: This knowledgeable individual adds that al-Sissi is concerned privately that the situation in Gaza will escalate beyond the capacity of any individual or government to control. He adds that certain IDF liaison officers point out in secret that Netanyahu is unpredictable, the Hamas leaders are fanatics, and Morsi is a new leader with a precarious hold on his country, which creates a dangerous environment. Al-Sissi has not shared this particular view with the Egyptian President, wishing to avoid undercutting his confidence at this critical time.
It is impossible to deny that Morsi, whatever his shortcomings (and he had quite a few), saw himself as a regional power player who would reverse the Quisling-like diplomacy trend first established by Anwar Sadat’s official recognition of Israel at Jimmy Carter’s Camps David Accords and upheld by his successor, Hosni Mubarak. Furthermore, recall that Sadat’s counterpart, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was himself a Likud member, meaning that Revisionist Zionism had shaped the orientation and dynamics between Cairo and Tel Aviv from the birth of that diplomatic relationship. Even if this cable reflects a Morsi who is cautious about those of the Islamist polity to his right, namely Egyptian Salafists, it still demonstrates a pan-Arab internationalism, not too dissimilar from Nasserism in another era of Egyptian history, that was a concern for Washington. It is fitting here to recall that Islamism was originally promulgated via the Saudi-based World Muslim League, founded in 1962, as a direct counter to emergent trends of secular Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism, embodied by figures like Gamal al-Nasser. Islamism served Washington by amplifying the contradictions of the Sunni-Shia divide, the role of women and minorities in civic society, and other nuances of the Arabic polity, thereby further hindering such internationalism, and Morsi’s attempts to buck that trend were clearly raising alarms.
Furthermore, Prime Minister Qandil’s visit to Gaza would have been a massive diplomatic coup breaking all expected protocols for American allies. The Prime Minister’s proposed visit would have effectively violated the illegal blockade on the Strip that was implemented in January 2006 after the election of a Hamas government. As the ironies of history would see fit, it was none other than Jared Kushner’s Observer news site that carried a story titled “2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election” by Ken Kurson, dated October 28, 2016, wherein then-Sen. Clinton is quoted saying:
I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win… I think you can make the case that whether you call it ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism,’ whatever the label is we’re going to give to this phenomenon, it’s a threat. It’s a global threat. To Europe, to Israel, to the United States…Therefore we need a global response. It’s a global threat and it needs a global response. That can be the, sort of, statement of principle… So I think sometimes having the global vision is a help as long as you realize that underneath that global vision there’s a lot of variety and differentiation that has to go on.
For context, Clinton’s jarring but rather typical anti-democratic rant was not idle chatter; rather, it was part of a larger rebuttal to President George W. Bush’s decision to support democratic elections in Palestine following enthusiastic endorsement from none other than ex-Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and Vice President Dick Cheney. Bush’s encouragement of the national Palestinian elections led to the ouster of Washington’s preferred collaborationist Fatah party and its replacement in Gaza with Hamas. The tone Senator Clinton used for discussing the Palestine election results in that recording certainly betrays the instincts of Secretary Clinton’s handling of the Egyptian portfolio six years later while serving in the Obama cabinet.
Lest anyone perceive a daft conspiracy theory, it is important at this juncture to indicate the convergence of US interests. Sec. Clinton had been given a memo via Blumenthal that emphasized Morsi’s inability to reign in Salafist political parties whose cadres were responsible for attacks on Western-owned properties, diplomatic buildings, and US soldiers stationed in the Sinai. In a memo dated September 14, 2012, we read:
Late in the day on September 14, 2012, Egyptian President Mohamad Morsi told senior European diplomats that he is increasingly concerned the current anti-U.S. and anti-Western violence spreading through Cairo and into the rest of Egypt may be part of an effort by his Salafist political rivals to destabilize his government, which many of them believe is too moderate in its positions regarding Islam, Israel, and the non-Muslim world. According to this source, Morsi, who is in Brussels for meetings with the European Union (EU), was particularly concerned over a message from Army commander General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, that Islamist guerrillas, believed to be drawn primarily from the Sawarki Bedouin’ tribe, had launched an attack on a base of the International Peacekeeping Force (IPF) in the Sinai. The General reported that the 1500 United Nations troops at the base, including some U.S. forces, were under heavy attack and casualty figures were not yet known. Morsi stated that this fight was an example of radical anti-government forces and Salafist Islamist dissidents taking advantage of the current situation to carry out attacks that demonstrate his government is unable to protect Western personnel and facilities in Egypt. Morsi stated that the success or failure of his regime is directly tied to his ability to establish a moderate Islamic state that can work with western business interests… On September 14, Morsi also stated to an EU official that he had received extremely forceful messages from both the U.S. State Department and the Office of the U.S. President, leaving no doubt in his mind that the U.S.—Egyptian relations and more than $1 billion in U.S. aid were at stake in this matter. Morsi added that since much of this aid goes to the Egyptian Army, he and al-Katany agreed that actions that put it in jeopardy would also damage the new Egyptian administration’s current good relationship with the Army.
It is impossible to locate a ‘smoking gun’ that served up the killshot for Egyptian democracy, particularly given the messy nature of parliamentary politics and coalition governments coming into contradiction with raw diplomatic power. (Egypt’s army today has a force of 310,000 in a country 111 million, making it a noteworthy employer within the domestic economy, and this is before one considers the substantial role Sisi’s army plays in commercial governance, which is quite interventionist.)
Yet this memo seemingly spells out the contours at play with the military coup Sisi eventually led against Morsi’s government. The US had a hard red-line with violence against diplomatic buildings and personnel, especially because this was only days after the September 11-12 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya that led to the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, US Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, and two CIA contractors (which in turn would catalyze the infamous Republican investigation of Secretary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election, which in turn was related, in part, to the disclosure of the Wikileaks cables quoted herein by your humble correspondent).
President Morsi’s implied dithering is further spelled out:
Morsi instructed the military and security forces to use all necessary force short of lethal measures to protect U.S. and Western facilities. In a private conversation, Morsi stated that he felt he is losing control of the political situation and fears that if the current fighting results in deaths, either of demonstrators, U.S. diplomats, Egyptian security personnel, or UN peacekeepers, the situation may spin out of control and. his government could fall. Al-Katany agreed, but said that taking no action would guarantee disaster. They agreed that when the situation calms down they will have to deal with the al Nour party, which they fear will, in the future, take advantage of circumstances to try to destabilize Morsi’s administration. With this in mind, Morsi ordered al-Sissi to direct the commanders of Military Intelligence (MI-Mukhabarat el-Khabeya) to step up operations collecting information on the activities of the al Nour leadership, focusing on any contacts with potentially violent Salafist dissidents. [Emphasis added]
There’s a certain stark reflection to derive from that notation, namely, the suggested usage of lethal measures to protect US/Western facilities being at least optional, if not preferable. This is the slow smothering of Egyptian democracy in a play-by-play fashion featuring direct collaboration of Washington, Brussels, and Abu Dhabi. Notations like “short of lethal measures” carry a certain tone at Langley.
To be clear, there is undeniably a hard dose of poetry to be found in the way Our Man in Cairo Sisi is now being thrown overboard in service of the Post’s own cynically-formulated coverage of Donald Trump’s political career. How many schemes can they try to pin on this guy before Trump’s Wikipedia page begins to look like a scene set inside a chaotic Toys R Us store circa 1985 as directed by Chris Columbus in collaboration with John Waters?
No, this is far more than a mere exercise in hearty vindictiveness or moral grandstanding.
Rather, it stands to reason how and why Sisi plays into the larger reconfiguration of the regional power dynamics following the Arab Spring, the war in Syria, the US military implosions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Iran. The Persian rehabilitation in turn is being diplomatically turbo-charged by China, case-and-point being Beijing’s brokerage of peace deal between Tehran and Riyadh after a long Islamist Cold War between the two economic petrol-power players. The petro-yuan is a currency project between Beijing and Riyadh that hypothetically would allow countries like Iran and Venezuela to return to the world market by going around US sanctions. That currency system might redefine the entire region, if not world trade entirely. The only reason for US American dollar world reserve currency hegemony status is because of it being the sole currency tied to the fluctuating value of the Saudi oil barrel. Or, until the Chinese yuan helps diversify the market and exchanges with their petro-currency.
What does it mean that Sisi, the client general who worked hand-in-glove alongside the US and EU with UAE funding to oust Morsi, is now a sacrificial lamb for the liberal media so to gin up yet another foreign bribery charge against Trump?
In journalistic lingo, a cut-out is a third party organization that governments and NGOs use to essentially launder money to escape oversight and jurisdiction of various regulatory bodies governing monetary transactions of this type. After having done so much to appease Washington and Tel Aviv, it is hard to find a tangible thread for antagonism except in a scenario wherein Sisi aligned himself more fully with Netanyahu during a period when the Israeli Prime Minister has made his partisan support for the GOP all but blatantly obvious. Perhaps Sisi recognized the relative weakness of the Biden administration and decided to hedge his bets with Netanyahu? Over the past decade, he has both expanded Egyptian trade with Israel and developed a strong personal relationship with Netanyahu. Shaul Mishal, professor emeritus of political science at Tel Aviv University and visiting professor at Yale and Harvard universities, told Debbie Mohnblatt at Medialine in August 2023 “There is a kind of personal trust between them… Even if, personally, Binyamin Netanyahu and el-Sisi would like to cooperate, it is hard to predict what will happen if all the Arab environment feels differently.” One can only presume the phrase “Arab environment” can be described by the precarious relationship between governance of domestic Egyptian security matters as they arise as responses to Israeli brutality. If Israel decides to blow Gaza to smithereens, Egyptians justifiably and rightfully express outrage at the unforgivable. In response, Sisi tightens the police state. Properly stated, this is less an “Arab environment” than it is carceral environment, the technology of human control that regulates human behavior in society via the hard power of policing.
Sisi has made some weak shows of protest since the start of the Gaza War. However, he likewise was working with the Israeli Defense Force on a joint-military collaboration for policing the Rafah Crossing and Sinai, which Vivian Yee alluded to in a December 10, 2023 report for the New York Times titled “Gaza War Has Buoyed Egypt’s Leader Ahead of Presidential Vote.” Yee described a Cairo living under police dictatorship where consumer boycotts are the only legal form of protest against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and where taking to the streets in protests can lead to police crackdown. In the days of the Arab Spring, the pages of the Times and other Western media outlets resounded with the sound of direct democracy in the street, loudly proclaiming their rejection of Mubarak. By contrast, Yee describes muted, non-confrontational shoppers who assiduously examine food and consumer product packaging in order to participate in an informal boycott of vendors and brands worldwide that profit off Israel. Aided with smart phones and simple lists, Egyptians show solidarity with Palestine using this limited act of resistance within a repressive regime enabled by American geopolitical designs.
Meanwhile, Pew Research Center’s Laura Silver and Jordan Lippert report:
A majority of Americans (53%) have little or no confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs, including 25% who have no confidence in him at all. Three-in-ten say they have at least some confidence in him, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 3,600 U.S. adults conducted April 1-7, 2024.
Why isn’t the Post leaning harder into obviating that point, especially when American opinion of Benjamin Netanyahu in particular is so low? Sisi and Netanyahu as a pair of authoritarian monsters lording over this part of the world thanks to white supremacist European imperialism? It would be a fitting overturning of any perceived racial exceptionalism by showing, whether Egyptian Muslim or Israeli Jewish, it is still possible for dictators to be evil towards the brutalized masses in that part of the world, particularly when owing to their own well-recorded ego and vanity (is it truly shocking to consider how shallow both of those men actually are?)
It hits home the other massive truism that is obscured by everyone in the US media but known by everyone else on planet earth:
The Palestinians have been subject to the greatest evils on both sides of that border and they still are.
The Muslim Brotherhood was imperfect, yes, but it was also a chance, like so many other chances, and that chance was lost. Morsi was seriously trying to talk about a revived Nasserism in those cables so as to find some answer to the question of Palestine. The fragility of his coalition was challenging. I would have a lot of trouble as a queer person in an Islamist Cairo, though I think it is a stretch to imagine the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to turn Alexandria into Tehran.
But that fragility, the imperfection, was likewise the only way to reach the beauty of democracy flowering by the banks of the Nile. Only precarity protects against dictatorship. In a 2020 retrospective-cum-tribute to the Arab Spring, Vijay Prashad wrote:
A decade later, US President Donald Trump carved the obituary on the tombstone of that “Arab Spring” rebellion when he used the immensity of US power to strengthen US allies—such as the Arab monarchies and Israel—to the detriment of the people of the region. What remains of the Arab Spring is a distant memory of the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; a better image of the present is that of the monarchs of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) kissing up to Israel to please the United States.
Trump would be the second US politician to have taken a bribe from Egypt, with the first being the adamantly pro-Israeli (and soon-to-be former) Sen. Bob Menendez. The disgraced New Jersey Senator, recently convicted for taking bribes from Sisi, provides a rather striking juxtaposition with President Trump (who incidentally owns properties in the Garden State, such as a casino at Atlantic City).
What is the point and what deeper interests are served by the spectacle of Menendez’s illicit gold bars hidden in a wardrobe and large wads of cash shoved in a freezer? Menendez has taken donations from the Kushner family and was one of the few Democrats to publicly oppose Obama’s nuclear deal. In 2017, reporter Herb Jackson wrote for North Jersey Media Group:
The $20,000 [Menendez campaign] contributions — $5,000 each from Lee, Marc, Jonathan and Aryeh Kushner — all came from the same address in Livingston, and were made on the same day in January. Lee Kushner is the wife of Murray Kushner, who has a long-running and well-publicized feud with his brother, Charles, who is Jared’s father. Marc and Jonathan are the sons of Lee and Murray Kushner.
But then again, there is the hilarious episode of Kushner wiring President Trump a prank call on Air Force One. Kevin Drum, in a June 30, 2018 column for Mother Jones aptly titled “Jared Kushner Is An Idiot,” wrote:
A comedian pretending to be Sen. Bob Menendez called President Trump on Wednesday and got a callback from Air Force One. They chatted and the comedian posted the conversation. But this is not the real story. The real story is that the competent people in the White House—and there are still a few left—called Menendez’s office and were told that the senator hadn’t tried to reach Trump. So they killed the call. But the comedian also managed to talk to Jared Kushner, who was fooled and sent the message along. That’s why Trump called back. Jared Kushner is an idiot.
Why would Kushner wire Menendez through to Air Force One in such a manner if Herb Jackson’s aforementioned claim of a schismatic Kushner family made a huge difference between its Democratic and Republican member-donors?
The fact Menendez and Jared Kushner both retain attorney Abbe Lowell might be little more than coincidence. One of the multitude of financiers of Menendez’s illicit gains was Dr. Salomon Melgen, who was tried alongside the Senator and later granted a pardon by President Trump, a point which certainly complicates Jackson’s claim.
Perhaps this is seeming nonsense. Yes, Sisi himself as a foreign leader exerting influence over a Senator and a sitting President is deeply alarming.
Yet what differentiates this rather shallow and crass graft, a twenty-first century reenactment of Tammany machinations on the international stage, with the much more intricate (and therefore much more effective) influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation, which we know in fact does serve as a cut-out for Arabic dictatorships?
The consistency of opposition to the Iran nuclear deal should be indicative of a wider reality few have fully comprehended. Now that China has officiated the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United States has been made more peripheral to wider diplomatic realities in the region. Israel is an albatross around the neck of Washington and undeniably cost Joe Biden the vital Michigan vote, where the 2016 Democratic primary victory of Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton was driven by Arab voters. Tel Aviv and Netanyahu no longer pretend to egalitarian platitudes about ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and instead allow Israel’s ethno-nationalism to buttress the Republican Party’s nativism and racism.
In this regard, it does not matter if Trump took a bribe from Egypt or not. Instead, the occurrence of such a scenario betrays a tremendous diminution of US geopolitical power. The governments of Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and President Morsi could be described, in harshest terms, as tin-pot dictatorships, lording over a country where the 1980 GDP per capita was $2,252 as opposed to the United States’ 1980 GDP per capita of $12,575.
Today, Egypt’s GDP per capita is $3,878 as opposed to $82,034 in the US.
The question therefore is not whether a US President has taken a bribe from a foreign leader, instead it is why would he be bribed by a client state such as Egypt? What diplomatic force might have been brought to bear had Trump and Menendez refused the bribes? Why are they so easily played by Sisi, who comes across as a much more strategic thinker in the Wikileaks cables?
Whether or not one can substantiate any connections with Netanyahu and Tel Aviv, the matter of political influence over the larger public is a vital metric, especially in this sense:
How many Egyptian-descended news broadcasters on CNN or MSNBC exert tremendous influence over the national discourse? Are there any Egyptian reporters in ranks of the cable broadcasters or the Editorial Board of the Washington Post? That blatantly racist reality underwrites the absurd scene of Donald Trump taking a bribe from General Sisi.
