Massive Anti-Israel Rally in Egypt Organized by...Facebook

This article is published on PajamasMedia.

By Barry Rubin

Repeatedly we were told about the alleged absence of anti-Israel rhetoric and signs in Tahrir square during the revolution. I don’t think it was true then. I certainly don’t think it is true now.

So check out the massive anti-Israel demonstrations in Cairo today. A picture is worth a thousand foreign policy mistakes that got us into this mess. That one is of the massive size of the demonstration; here's a nice one of an Israeli flag being burned.

Supposedly the rally was to protest sectarian violence within Egypt but it turned into one favoring more sectarian violence next door. The main focus became supporting the Hamas-Fatah coalition agreement and calling for Israel’s extinction.

Other demonstrations demanded breaking diplomatic relations with Israel and expelling the Israeli ambassador.

Remember all of those articles and statements about how the revolution was good for Israel if only those silly Israelis woke up and understand reality as understood in Berkeley and the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

Oh, and guess how the demonstration was largely organized. Ready? On Facebook! Hahaha. Those youthful hip twittering moderate young people!

Also notice how this is all happening before elections install a radical, nationalist, anti-Israel, anti-American president and a parliament dominated by revolutionary Islamist anti-American antisemites. What are we going to see after the people have spoken?

We can also look forward to similar demonstrations in Palestine’s capital, after independence takes place, demanding an abrogation of the Israel-Palestine peace treaty and the end to Israeli occupation of…Israel.

After people finally figured out in April-May what they should have known in January-February about Egypt, might be better to learn the lesson now rather than to repeat the same mistakes infinitely?

PS: Love the AP's "evenhanded" explanation of the Right to Return issue:

"The Palestinians have long maintained that the refugees have a moral and legal right to return to what was once Palestine—including land which is now Israel. But Israel has argued that granting the right of return would compromise the country's identity as the world's only Jewish state."

Yes, all those riots and massive terrorism leading to bloody civil war, with all the neighbors joining in, followed by the genocidal murder of millions of Jews and the transformation of Israel into an Arab and possibly (probably?) Islamist state that would ally with Iran, work to overturn all the region's non-radical regimes, trigger additional wars and massive suffering, and destroy U.S. influence in the Middle East would definitely be an inconvenience.


Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist at PajamasMedia http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/ His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is http://www.gloria-center.org. His PajamaMedia columns are mirrored and other articles available at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/.