Remember, Remember, the Third of July. By Avi Isaacharoff.

Remember, remember, the third of July. By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, July 3, 2013.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was the spearhead of a series of Islamist victories in the “Arab Spring.” As of Wednesday, that’s over.

A Steep Fall for the Muslim Brotherhood. By David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim. New York Times, July 2, 2013.

Egypt’s Crisis Signals the Unraveling of Yet Another Arab Nation-State. By Karl Vick. Time, July 2, 2013.

The Irony of Tahrir Square. By Ashraf Khalil. Foreign Affairs, July 2, 2013.

Female Foreign Journalist Gang-Raped in Horrific Tahrir Square Attack. By Callie Beusman. Jezebel, July 1, 2013.

Just How Bad Is It for Women in Egypt? Very. By Erin Gloria Ryan. Jezebel, June 28, 2012.

The myth of political Islam has been exposed in Egypt. By Bessma Momani. The Globe and Mail, July 3, 2013.

Momani:

What to make of huge turnout for protests against President Mohammed Morsi in Egypt – the most populous Arab country and bedrock of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence? The myth of Islamist political ideology as a solution to all political and economic woes has been broken.

 

Political Islamists throughout the Arab world had been forced into the background of political life – or the underground – in the years when most Arab governments discredited their right to participate in political life. But these Arab regimes were often corrupt and based their support on crony capitalism and sham elections. This helped Islamists, ironically, to be the champions of virtue, clean government, social welfare, and justice. With the single slogan “Islam is the solution,” they effectively captured the imagination and hope of millions in the Arab world, making people believe that they had an alternative to tyranny.

 

This first year under the Morsi government in Egypt – by far the largest pilot project ever staged for Islamists’ political ideology – has exposed the myth that Islamists have a real alternative.

 

Under Mr. Morsi, no new economic or political ideas were brought to the political table. Yes, the Egyptian “deep state” of Hosni Mubarak-era cronies prevented change, particularly in the judiciary and elements of the public sector. But Islamists had no real solution to the everyday problems of Egyptians such as traffic, garbage, insecurity, unemployment and the sheer chaos that characterizes the mundane life people lead. Like his predecessors, Mr. Morsi tried to court foreign capital, international donors, and international creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. In essence, Mr. Morsi's economic policies were business as usual.

 

Undoubtedly Mr. Morsi inherited an economic mess and a corrupted system that would take more than a year to weed out. Also, one could argue that like all countries, Egypt must play by the international economic rules, and has taken an economic beating with a depreciating exchange rate and rising debt burdens. The Islamists are also capitalists themselves, albeit small- to medium-sized businesses and not national oligarchs. So Islamists are not likely to shake the economic system underpinning Egypt.

 

But the point here is that Islamists never claimed governing was hard; in essence they simplified good governance to a single and effective slogan: “Islam is the solution!” To many Egyptians this is now an empty slogan and there is a demand for real policy ideas. This is a good thing as it sets the stage for political parties to mature beyond rhetoric into developing policy platforms.

 

Islamists will retain the respect of having cleaner hands than the Mubarak regime, but Egyptians and perhaps Arab electorates in other transition countries will also demand more. In a devout region, religious credentials will matter less than offering specific solutions to life's mundane problems.

This Is the Land. By Qanta Ahmed.

“Ascending a precipice [in southern Israel], we approach a lone tree reaching upwards to its Maker.” (photo: Qanta Ahmed).

The is the land. By Qanta Ahmed. The Times of Israel, June 26, 2013.

On her first visit to Israel recently, Dr. Qanta Ahmed saw the country “as God sees it.” The Muslim physician, professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrants was smitten by the natural beauty, history and modern achievements that came into vivid focus.

The many faces of Dr. Qanta Ahmed, an unlikely defender of Israel. By Judy Maltz. Haaretz, May 31, 2013.

Maltz:

Her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says, have been strongly influenced by her own family’s experiences.

 

“When India and Pakistan were divided overnight by partition [in 1947], my parents − who were little children then − were immediately relocated because they were in Hindu territory,” recalls Ahmed. “When I lived in Saudi or traveled to other countries in this region, one of the most vociferous things I would hear is that, because of Israel, the Palestinians were dispossessed from their property and land.

 

“I don’t know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in any kind of detail or with any kind of authority, but I do know what it was like for my parents to move with their parents because there were new borders, and I’ve seen how they’ve created lives migrating again. I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation. Some people will think it’s an unfair comparison, but both Israel and Pakistan were created to protect a minority that global powers believed was being persecuted.”

 

Does that justify the Israeli occupation? No, responds Ahmed, describing the occupation as a “terrible burden” both on the Palestinians and on Israel. “Those who are occupied are not liberated and not autonomous, but the occupation is also a burden on Israel for the same reasons it was on the U.S. in Iraq − it involves huge costs, a huge price and huge risks.”

 

Still, Ahmed admits, she’s not sure what the alternative is: “I’m well acquainted with Jihadist ideology and suicide bombers in Pakistan, so I don’t know what you do apart from building a wall to safeguard the Israeli territory. How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?”

 

Her professional medical work, she says, has also been instrumental in shaping her political mind-set. In recent years, at her sleep disorder center, she began treating policemen, firemen and other individuals who were first and second responders when the Twin Towers collapsed in New York City on September 11, 2001. “It made me even more committed to distinguishing violent political Islamist ideology and nonviolent political Islam from what I see as my faith, because I can see the suffering caused by this deviant ideology,” she explains.

 

Ahmed doesn’t draw the line with radical Islam, coming down strongly on her new adopted homeland for its drone attacks on the tribal territories of Pakistan. “I’ve seen acres and acres of patients suffering from PTSD because of these attacks,” she says, “but am I going to abandon the U.S. because they’re using this barbaric technology with impunity? No, I’m going to stay and try to educate. And by the way, that’s how I feel about Israel, too.”

 

If there’s one thing that’s impressed her beyond all in Israel, says Ahmed, it’s the level of religious freedom and pluralism enjoyed in the country. “One thing you can’t complain about here is the right to worship as you see fit,” she remarks.

 

When told that many Israelis would find that statement almost laughable, considering the recent battle over the rights of women to pray as they see fit at the Western Wall, she responds: “I’ve heard these arguments in Reform synagogues in Long Island, and I was absolutely agog. But the fact is that at the wall, women are able to pray. In Saudi Arabia, in Mecca, there are now moves to confine where women can pray. American Reform Jews who complain that they’re not recognized here, I invite them to please visit parts of the world that I’ve seen where religious freedom is completely lacking. There’s no comparison. Absolutely no comparison.”

Fight the Delegitimizing Lies, Don’t Embrace Them. By Gil Troy.

Fight the delegitimizing lies, don’t embrace them. By Gil Troy. Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2013. Also at SPME.

Troy:

Israel’s Justice Minister and chief Palestinian negotiator, Tzipi Livni, just won what I am going to call the “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” with a foolish, self-destructive speech in Eilat on Monday.

 

Livni legitimized Israel’s delegitimizers by echoing their unreasonable prejudices against the Jewish state to try encouraging Israeli peacemaking. Using inaccurate, harmful words like “colonialist” and “apartheid,” she echoed the rhetorical sloppiness of Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak who have also used our enemies’ language, warning Israel about becoming an “apartheid state” – when in Israel there never has been the benighted South African regime’s institutionalized, biological, state-sponsored racism.

 

Appalled by seeing our leaders internalizing our adversaries’ language, I will grant this “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” annually in these pages to condemn acts of outrageous rhetorical negligence – by smart leaders who should know better.

 

Because this award believes that words matter – here are Livni’s musings: “Europe is boycotting goods,” she said. “True, it starts with settlement [goods], but their problem is with Israel, which is seen as a colonialist country. Therefore, it won’t stop at the settlements, but [will spread] to all of Israel,” she warned. Then, praising young Israelis for protesting her own government’s decision to export natural gas, she insisted: “The time has come for the same youth to ask, to what kind of state do they want to leave the gas reserves? To a Jewish democratic Israel? Or to a binational Arab state? Or to an apartheid state?” Peace is only achievable if Israelis negotiate for the right reasons.

 

Israel should not compromise in an unrealistic attempt to woo Europeans, many of whose prejudices transcend what Israel does or does not do. Israel should compromise as part of a reality-based attempt at a just, necessary peace that preserves state security, maximizes individual satisfaction regionally, and respects Israeli and Palestinian national dignity.

 

“Europe” – which has a hard enough time cooperating about anything these days – is not “boycotting goods.” The European Commission website calls Israel “an important trading partner for the EU in the Mediterranean area, and the EU is the first trading partner for Israel with total trade amounting to approximately 29.4 billion euros in 2011” – some boycott.

 

Calling Israel “colonialist” is historically inaccurate and morally offensive. “Colonialism” means imposing foreigners on lands to which they do not belong. Calling Israel’s West Bank presence “colonial,” like using the words “settlements” to describe restored Jewish communities in Gush Etzion and elsewhere, ignores Jews’ historic, ideological, and legal ties to “Eretz Yisrael,” the land of Israel.

 

If the Jews have no valid national claim to Hebron, Jews have no valid claim anywhere.

 

Since the British Mandate, Jews have had the right to settle anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, despite the attempt to make the hastily improvised 1949 armistice “green line” sacred.

 

Of course, national greatness sometimes comes from refusing to assert all your claims, no matter how valid. 2013 is not 1913 or 13 BCE. Peace will emerge when most Israelis and Palestinians recognize that borders shifted, populations moved, so no one has exclusive claims, making compromise necessary.

 

Jews should no longer live in places like Hebron, where Palestinians outnumber Jews by more than 300 to 1. But those of us who acknowledge Jewish rights to Hebron and other parts of Jordan’s West Bank, yet would sacrifice them for peace, show far more commitment to peace – along with more historical authenticity and self-respect – than those who view Israelis there as colonialist brigands who should flee in shame.

 

Apartheid is an inflammatory word that should be banned from Middle East discourse. Apartheid imposed a biologically-based racist system of distinction between whites, blacks and colored.

 

The Palestinian-Israeli clash is national, not racial. Apartness is not apartheid, especially because more initiatives for true separation and purging of populations come from Palestinians, whereas most assume that Israeli Arabs will remain Israeli citizens even if Palestine becomes independent.

 

In the 1970s, egged on by Soviet manipulators seeking to woo the Third World and “South Africanize” Israel, Palestinian and Arab propagandists injected words like “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “racism” and “apartheid” into the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

Manipulators like Columbia University Professor Edward Said and the perpetual terrorist Yasser Arafat understood that if the conflict remained a local Arab-Jewish clash, the world would sympathize with Israel; but if the conflict could be globalized and linked to the broader – noble – fight against European crimes like racism, the Palestinians might win.

 

How ironic that the Jews, having been kicked out of Europe in the 1940s, were now being Europeanized in the 1970s – and that in 2013, some Europeans exorcise their collective guilt by self-righteously accusing Israel of European- style crimes.

 

How pathetic that some Israeli leaders – egged on by a worldwide propaganda campaign and inured to the truth by  Haaretz’s constant use of words like “apartheid” echo and implicitly validate this rhetorical assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

 

If Tzipi Livni and others want to nurture the Israeli peace consensus, weak arguments about making nice with Europe will fail. We need peace for our sake.

 

Those on the Left must be challenged to fight the delegitimizing lies about Israel to detoxify the environment and build an atmosphere conducive to peace.

 

Those on the Right must be challenged to acknowledge the realities of Palestinian demography and preserve Israeli democracy by finding new arrangements.

 

Smart leaders who build consensus by crossing political wires will win; scared politicians who want to be liked in Europe or elsewhere will lose. 

The “Legitimizing the Delegitimizers Award” comes with my free offer of bread crumbs, symbolizing the weak, cowardly, European Jews who used to beg for scraps in currying their oppressors’ favor. I look forward to a year when there will be no politician careless enough to win this booby prize.

 

 

Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic? By Ira Chernus.

Who Says Conservatives Are More Patriotic? By Ira Chernus. History News Network, July 2, 2013. Also at Tikkun.

The War Over Patriotism. By Peter Beinart. Time, June 26, 2008. NJBR, January 28, 2013.

Chernus:

As we got busy preparing for Fourth of July festivities, this question popped into my head: Are conservatives more patriotic than other Americans? If you were a foreigner spending some time in the USA, getting news from the mass media and just talking to people, you might easily get that impression – especially around the Fourth, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to display those big American flags.

 

In fact you might easily get that impression on any day of the year, when conservatives seem to be the ones most likely to put their love of country on display in all sorts of ways, aiming to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind about their patriotism.

 

But what’s the truth behind the display? Are conservatives really more patriotic than others? Well, it depends on what you mean by patriotism.

 

And there lies the heart of the matter: Conservatives appear to be more patriotic because they have so much control over the very meaning of the term. Most of the time, when anyone uses the word “patriotism,” it turns out to mean what conservatives say it means.

 

Debates about the meaning of patriotism may rage in the margins of our political life. But in ordinary day to day America, where the real action is, nobody pays much (if any) attention, because the fundamentals of patriotism are generally taken for granted. And they are assumed to be pretty much what conservatives usually say they are: the right words (“greatest, and freest, country on earth,” “support our troops,” “I regret that I have but one life to give,” etc.); the right images (Uncle Sam, Statue of Liberty, Capitol dome, etc.); the right actions (waving the flag, singing the national anthem, etc.) -- the words, images, and actions that they love to flourish on the right. So of course most Americans say the right is more patriotic.

 

Oh, sure, on the Fourth of July you’ll find even the most liberal politicians throughout the land proclaiming their particular brand of liberalism as truly American and genuinely patriotic. Politicians of every stripe do that every day. Most organizations that have any significant clout, across the political spectrum, will loudly assert their patriotism too, if they are pressed to say anything about the issue. But expressions of patriotism outside the conservative orbit are widely received as a kind of window-dressing, not to be taken too seriously.

 

Conservatives’ expressions, on the other hand, are generally seen, in the main stream of the culture, as the genuine article. They are credited as totally serious and as an essential piece of the whole conservative package – naturally, since patriotism is defined so largely in conservative terms.

 

But the intrinsic special connection between conservatism and patriotism is only an appearance. It’s like a magic trick. A good magician’s tricks are so dazzling because the audience wants to be dazzled; the trick is a transaction between the magician and the audience.

 

In the same way, the idea that conservatives are especially patriotic – that they understand and feel patriotism more deeply, that it’s more fundamental in their lives – has taken root throughout American political culture only because everyone who is not conservative has agreed to play along. Conservatives control the meaning of patriotism because most everyone else lets them get away with it.

 

As long as conservatives have such a strong lock on patriotism, they have a built-in advantage in the political arena – especially among the 20 percent or so of voters who don’t have any special allegiance to either major party, leaving their votes always up for grabs.

 

A lot of those uncommitted voters stay that way because they don’t see much clear-cut difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. When you look at two alternatives that appear roughly equally balanced, any one factor can tip the scales. Who knows how many votes Republicans get from voters who see the two parties as roughly equal, except that the GOP appears to be so much more devoted to patriotism. The GOP will always have that advantageous appearance as long its control over the language, imagery, and ritual of patriotism goes unchallenged.

 

Moderates and liberals could push back. They could take a firm stand in favor of their own brands of patriotism; show that theirs are just as genuine as any conservative’s; insist that patriotism is just as important in their lives as in any right-winger’s; make the meaning of patriotism a defining political battleground, as important as gender rights or immigration or Social Security. Even on the progressive far left, there is plenty to contribute to a conversation about patriotism.

 

Trying to challenge conservatives on this ground would be an uphill struggle, to be sure, because they have a major advantage on the right: They are generally quite sure that they know what patriotism is, and they tend to agree with each other on their definition. So they present a pretty solid united front (at least when viewed in the rather hazy, general terms that most Americans see all things political).

 

Everywhere else on the political spectrum there is a lot more questioning, disagreement, and uncertainty about the true meaning of patriotism, though the degree will surely vary from point to point on that spectrum. The further you go toward the left, the more uncertainty there is about whether patriotism of any kind has any value at all. Eventually you reach a point where it’s widely taken for granted that patriotism is something bad, something to be rejected out of hand.

 

That extreme stance is not likely to win too many votes, so it doesn’t have much direct political power. Nevertheless it has an important political effect: The questions about patriotism raised so pointedly on the far left have seeped across the whole left side, and even into the center, of the political spectrum, stirring up the uncertainty that weakens the Democratic Party on this issue.

 

It’s been going on for a long time. In the 1830s William Lloyd Garrison, the great preacher of nonviolent abolitionism, wrote: “Breaking down the narrow boundaries of a selfish patriotism, [I have] inscribed upon my banner this motto: My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.”

 

But the most important historical root of our current situation is, without doubt, the Vietnam war. As the antiwar movement grew, so did the belief that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrels who had led us into, and now perpetuated, the war – from Johnson and Nixon on down to the millions who gave unwavering support to those presidents’ war policies.

 

Those millions waved their flags and spouted patriotic rhetoric as a sign of their support for the war. So it was perhaps inevitable that, from the antiwar side, it became harder and harder to distinguish patriotism from militaristic chauvinism.

 

To be sure, some antiwar activists went out of their way to insist that they were the true patriots; they even carried American flags as they joined the protesting crowds. But their message was drowned out by the louder voices on their side decrying patriotism as a root of the war’s evil. And antiwar patriots were largely ignored by the mass media, who were eager to put the spotlight on every “Amerikka” sign they could find.

 

One telling example: When Martin Luther King first publicly denounced the Vietnam War (a year to the day before he was murdered) he stressed that he was speaking out because of his deep love for his country and its ideals. But in antiwar circles then (and in liberal circles now) his patriotism was almost always ignored. All that got remembered was his eloquent critique of the war and of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

 

The Vietnam war era raised questions about the meaning and value of patriotism more profoundly and persistently than ever before in U.S. history -- questions that large numbers of Americans found unsettling, at least, even if they never bothered to think them through very systematically. The war excised the taken-for-granted patriotism that had once been the heart of American political culture. Instead of sparking a public debate about patriotism, though, it left only a gaping hole in the body politic.

 

Surely one part (historians will always argue about how big a part) of the rightward shift of the latter 1970s was a desire to escape that unsettled feeling and fill that hole by returning to the “good old days” of unquestioned patriotism. Ronald Reagan was the ideal pitchman for the job, selling the old-fashioned wine of patriotism in new bottles that perfectly suited the times. The demand was huge. But the supply, from Reagan and the right-wing movement he led, was unlimited.

 

Those who refused to buy Reaganism also refused to buy the heady brew of patriotism he was peddling, and vice versa. But they had no alternative vision of patriotism to offer because they were caught in the uncertainty about, or outright rejection of, patriotism that the war had brought them.

 

So the deal was sealed: Patriotism would come from the right. And whatever came from the right would be – by definition – the accepted meaning of true patriotism. Where else could that meaning come from, with the rest of the political spectrum in such disarray on the subject?

 

Moreover, the right was offering expressions of patriotism that had deep roots in America’s past, while the rest, if they wanted patriotism at all, would be happy only with some genuinely new formulations. At a time when so many Americans felt like changes were coming too thick and fast, the seemingly old had a natural advantage over the new. Conserving the familiar expressions of patriotism was more popular than the alternative of liberating patriotism to find new meanings and new values.

 

This was one of the many lasting effects – and one of the great tragedies – of the Vietnam war. How different things might have been if all the war critics, all the liberals, even all the radicals, had followed Dr. King’s lead and framed their antiwar sentiment within an overarching patriotism: a commitment to making a better America because they loved America so much. They might have declared, in all honesty, that they were trying to save America, as well as Vietnam, from all the evils the war brought; that they clearly loved their country more than conservatives, who applauded a war that did the U.S. (and, of course, Vietnam) so much harm.

 

It didn’t happen that way, and the damage was done. But it’s never too late for moderates, liberals, and even leftist progressives to start proclaiming their patriotism loud and clear. Yes, it would be an uphill struggle to break the perception of a conservative monopoly on patriotism. The conservatives do have all those advantages. But fighting for what’s right against daunting odds is the American way. What could be more patriotic?

 

So this Fourth of July, if you’re sitting in a crowd waiting for the fireworks to begin and you’re not a conservative, you might seek out someone to your political right and say, “Hey, let’s talk about the real meaning of patriotism.” Maybe offer them a cold beer, too. It’s the American way.

 

Evaluating the Obama Administration’s Response to Unrest in Egypt.

Evaluating the Obama administration’s response to unrest in Egypt. Video with Ralph Peters and Marc Thiessen. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, July 3, 2013.

How Did the U.S. Lose the Egyptian People? By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 2, 2013.

Wall Street Journal Attacks “Blood and Soil” Republicans. By Joel B. Pollak.

WSJ Attacks “Blood and Soil” Republicans Over Opposition to Immigration Bill. By Joel B. Pollak. Breitbart, July 3, 2013.

A Pro-Growth Reform. Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2013.

Does War Between Egypt and Israel Loom? By Lee Smith.

Will Egypt Save Itself From Total Collapse by Going to War With Israel? By Lee Smith. Tablet, July 3, 2013.

Smith:

What is unfolding in Egypt is not about politics or the economy, it is simply a medieval carnival of grievance and rage, where every appetite, no matter how vicious, can be indulged, because no one feels a stake in preserving any larger, inclusive whole—however that whole is described. It is easier for Western commentators to get a fix on the chaos when it appears to be motivated by religious hatred. Last week, four members of Egypt’s minuscule Shia community were surrounded, beaten, and stabbed to death in their village outside Cairo. Since the mob was incited to murder by a Salafi sheikh, it was clear who was responsible for this bit of butchery, an Islamist fanatic.

 

The chain of accountability is a little more difficult for those same Western analysts to track when it’s the anti-Morsi forces who are drawing blood. All of the Muslim Brotherhood’s offices across Egypt have been stormed, and the national headquarters was torched. Sixteen people are dead, allegedly including Brotherhood supporters, whose apparent sin was backing a political party that won a free election—the last one that Egypt is likely to see for quite a while.

 

If foreign journalists and analysts have failed to be appropriately appalled by the demonstrations, it is because in their worldview, the Islamists are the bad guys and the secularists are the good guys. Now that Egyptians are mad at Morsi, the thinking goes, the Egyptians will get their liberal revolution back—along with that cool guy from Google. Reporters are told in man-on-the-street interviews that Morsi is the problem. The complaint should sound familiar because that’s exactly what the same protesters said about Mubarak. The one thing everyone is definitely agreed on is that the problem with Egyptian society isn’t the Egyptians themselves.

 

A competent leader, likely not Morsi, will soon come to see that he has no choice but to make a virtue of necessity and export the one commodity that Egypt has in abundance—violence. So, why not bind the warring, immature, and grandiose Egyptian factions together in a pact against Israel, the country’s sole transcendent object of loathing? Indeed, it’s not entirely clear why Egypt’s venomous strains of anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic sentiment have not yet hit fever pitch. Yes, Morsi doesn’t want to get the White House angry. And there’s also the obvious fact that Egyptians are too divided against themselves right now to be unified against anyone else. But that can’t last for long, or else Egypt will implode.

 

So, here are the facts that Egyptians and Western reporters alike would rather not face: There is simply no way that today’s Egypt can feed its own people, or fuel the tractors that harvest its crops—let alone attract tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment to grow a hi-tech miracle along the banks of the Nile. That’s fantasyland stuff—like the fantasy of an American-style constitutional democracy run by the Muslim Brotherhood and guaranteed by the Egyptian army.

 

So, what’s left? A short war today—precipitated by a border incident in Sinai, or a missile gone awry in the Gaza Strip, and concluded before the military runs out of the ammunition that Washington will surely not resupply—will reunify the country and earn Egypt money from an international community eager to broker peace. Taking up arms against Israel will also return Egypt to its former place of prominence in an Arab world that is adrift in a sea of blood. But even more important is the fact that there is no other plausible way out: Sacrificing thousands of her sons on the altar of war is the only way to save Mother Egypt from herself.

The Americans Who Risked Everything. By Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr.

The Americans Who Risked Everything. By Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr. RushLimbaugh.com, July 3, 2013.

New York Times Questions the Emperor. By Walter Russell Mead.

NYT Questions Emperor: So, About Those Clothes . . . By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 3, 2013.

Chaos in the Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel. By Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

Gettysburg: Why They Fought. By David Brooks.

Why They Fought. By David Brooks. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

The Terror of Being Black at Gettysburg. By Kevin M. Levin. History News Network, July 2, 2013.

General George Gordon Meade: The Hero of Gettysburg. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, June 30, 2013.

Orientalism, 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-Builders. By Edward Said.

Orientalism, 25 Years Later: Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-Builders. By Edward Said. CounterPunch, August 5, 2003.