Iran’s Warships in the Suez Canal: Will U.S. Defend Israel?

While the pliant liberal and American news media coo over the so-called “freedom” demonstrations in Egypt, there are riots and protests breaking out all over North Africa and beyond — Jordan, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, Tunisia.:  It is obvious to many (except the mainstream media) that the Muslim Brotherhood is attempting to institute a theocratic radical Islamic stronghold. This week, while the world looks “the other way,” Iran is making big moves on its own schedule with no opposition. This is “planned” chaos. By fomenting trouble spots in many locations, the Muslim Brotherhood tightens the noose around Israel, which is the first prize along the way to …..domination. It’s underway now and who is stopping it?

Middle East website Debka.com reported yesterday that oil pipeline service has been disrupted through the Suez Canal region and no one was reporting it. Update: Oil prices spike on the news of the Iranian warship movements.

Iranian: attack ships: this week are suddenly being allowed to dock in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and move through the Suez Canal. This has NEVER been allowed before. Why have the Saudis “softened” to Iran? Why is the Egyptian military allowing such a provocative move to be made so close to the Sinai?

Meanwhile, as UNCOVERAGE.net has reported, the United States has had aircraft carrier groups in the Mediterranean for the past many months.

Israel considers the Iranian ship movements “a provocation” and is planning accordingly. Will Israel stand alone? What is the Obama administration response or is “no” response a tacit nod of the head to proceed? Israel is now surrounded. Lebanon has fallen to Hezbollah and is bristling with armaments on Israel’s north border, itching for battle. Update: Egypt pretends not to know the Iranian warships are moving in the Canal. Israel asks if U.S. will help.

Debka.com (Tuesday)

The SudMed pipeline which carries Saudi and Persian Gulf oil to the Egyptian Mediterranean is at a standstill. The military rulers in Cairo and the SudMed owners, Arab Petroleum Pipelines, say it is working normally. But debkafile‘s sources have confirmed that the pipeline, which carries 3.1 million barrels of oil per day from the Red Sea northwest along 322 kilometers west of the Delta up to Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, was idle Monday and Tuesday morning, Feb. 14 and 15, due to a general strike by its Egyptian workers as part of their anti-regime protest.
Nonetheless, APP issued a statement that “Operations at the pipeline terminals at Ain Sukhna on the Red Sea and Sidi Kerir in the Mediterranean were running normally, with tankers being accommodated without delays.”

This week, US oil sources played down the impact of the SuMed stoppage on world energy and tanker freight prices. A spokesman of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) informed Congress Monday: “The increase in tanker requirements traffic would be modest in the context of current global oil shipment flows.”

Debka.com (Today)

In Beirut, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah said he was looking forward to Israel going to war on Lebanon because then his men would capture Galilee.

Israel was closely monitoring the Iranian flotilla, whose visit to the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah on Feb. 6 was first revealed exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 481 on February 10.

Up until now, Saudi Arabia, in close conjunction with Egypt and its President Hosni Mubarak, led the Sunni Arab thrust to contain Iranian expansion — especially in the Persian Gulf. However, the opening of a Saudi port to war ships of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time in the history of their relations points to a fundamental shift in Middle East trends in consequence of the Egyptian uprising. It was also the first time Cairo has permitted Iranian warships to transit Suez from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, although Israeli traffic in the opposite direction had been allowed.

Iran made no secret of its plants to expand its naval and military presence beyond the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to the Mediterranean via Suez: On February 2, Iran’s Deputy Navy Commander Rear Admiral Gholam-Reza Khadem Biqam announced the flotilla’s mission was to “enter the waters of the Red Sea and then be dispatched to the Mediterranean Sea.”

However, Israeli military intelligence which failed to foresee the Egyptian upheaval and its policy-makers ignored the Iranian admiral’s announcement and its strategic import, just as they failed to heed the significance of the Iranian flotilla’s docking in Jeddah.

debkafile’s military sources report that Iran is rapidly seizing the fall of the Mubarak regime in Cairo and the Saudi King Abdullah’s falling-out with President Barack Obama (see debkafile of Feb. 10, 2011) as an opportunity not to be missed for establishing a foothold along the Suez Canal and access to the Mediterranean for six gains:

1.To cut off, even partially, the US military and naval Persian Gulf forces from their main route for supplies and reinforcements;

2. To establish an Iranian military-naval grip on the Suez Canal, through which 40 percent of the world’s maritime freights pass every day:

3. To bring an Iranian military presence close enough to menace the Egyptian heartland of Cairo and the Nile Delta and squeeze it into joining the radical Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish alliance;

4. To thread a contiguous Iranian military-naval line from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip and up to the ports of Lebanon, where Hizballah has already seized power and toppled the pro-West government.

5. To eventually sever the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, annex it to the Gaza Strip and establish a large Hamas-ruled Palestinian state athwart the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea.

By comparison, a Fatah-led Palestinian state on the West Bank within the American orbit be politically and strategically inferior.

6. To tighten the naval and military siege on Israel.

Israel National News: The Muslim Brotherhood is fanning the flames behind the scenes, and using the “guise” of a student-led democratic revolution just as was done in 1979 in Iran. This is a move by radical Islam to establish a “caliphate” in North Africa and the Middle East :

Writing for JewishWorldReview.com, author Prof. Waller R. Newell of Carleton University in Ottawa says that historically, “the initial reformist phase of [revolutions such as that in Egypt] focusing on individual rights and opportunity, is swept aside by radicals who want an egalitarian and collectivist political order.” Specifically, Newell writes, in Egypt “we can predict a similar outcome for Mohammed El Baradei’s and other reformers’ opening to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders.”

Analyzing the progress of such revolutions, Newell concludes, “Should El Baradei (himself no friend of the U.S.and quite hostile to Israel) manage to lead the reformers in a coalition, he will be the transitional liberal figure… For the Muslim Brotherhood [is] waiting in the wings, bent on creating an Islamist collective ruled by the extreme version of Sharia law, an imitation of the Iranian theocracy. And, already, quite predictably, they are beginning to say that their new Egypt will pursue an aggressively anti-Western, and above all anti-Israel policy, making common cause with their revolutionary partners in Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.”

Muslim Brotherhood Member Gives Away the Secret
“A senior member of the Brotherhood has already announced that their aim will be to ‘prepare the Egyptian people for war with Israel’ and called for the Suez Canal to be closed so as to disrupt the West’s oil trade. Another announced that a newly elected legislature’s first duty will be to re-consider the peace treaty with Israel. As a matter of course, as soon as they can, the Brotherhood will terminate Egypt’s tourist industry, one of its chief sources of income and an employer of many of the people demonstrating in Cairo today, because they regard tourists as a foreign taint and their interest in ancient ruins as promoting paganism. As Islamist revolutionaries, whatever more palatable image they may choose to present for now, they do not have the slightest interest in raising the Egyptian people’s standard of living, because they detest liberal individualism and economic freedom.

Revolutions Take Time…
“As for the many commentators who observe that [the Muslim Brotherhood has] not yet asserted a leading role over the demonstrators, proving that the opposition is ‘broad-based,’ why would that surprise anyone after a mere three weeks? Five years elapsed between the opening of the French Revolution and the Terror of 1793. It took two years for Bani Sadr to go from being the president of the new Iranian Republic to being impeached by the Khomeinists and driven from the country… I predict that, within a few months of a transitional reformist regime taking over, headed by a coalition of largely secular reformists, we will see enormous demonstrations in the streets by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, far better organized and militant than the ones that drove out Mubarak, a sea of banners shouting for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of all American and western influence.

“Let’s make good and certain we know what we’re wishing for in Egypt. Authoritarian regimes can transition to liberal democracy, but it is an infinitely complex and potentially dangerous process.”

Muslim Brotherhood’s True Goals
Barry Rubin, writing on his RubinReports blog site, details the dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood. He says that contrary to El Baradei’s reassurances, the organization “has a great deal to do with extremism [ – ] a distinctively Egyptian Sunni form of extremism…The Brotherhood is quite unhappy with Egyptian society and wants to change it drastically. That is why it is a revolutionary group, even though it has been patient and careful about pushing the revolution… It dissolved its terrorist wing only because of government pressure, and has advocated terrorism against Americans and Israelis. It applauded and incited the assassinations of secular activists and Egypt’s leading novelist… Its rhetoric sounds quite like al-Qaeda… According to its platform, the Brotherhood favors greater rights for Muslims; fewer rights for women, and a strong unitary state based on religion… El Baradei has been dependent on the Brotherhood, which has furnished most of the support for his political career. He is not merely ‘including’ them [as he claims]; he must give them a big slice of power. And they are far stronger than he is…”

Obama Reminiscent of Chamberlain
New York Post columnist Arnold Ahlert adds that the Obama Administration’s refusal to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood or work against it “bears a remarkable resemblance to the fine line walked by Neville Chamberlain, whose ‘peace’ with Hitler was another seminal moment in time when such abject naivete coupled with arrogance strutted itself on the world stage… Israel certainly understands the stakes, and pundits in that country have made it clear that they consider the Obama administration’s determination to move the process along as quickly as possible –which accrues to no one’s interest more than the Muslim Brotherhood — as a ‘bullet in the back from Uncle Sam.’”

“Jewish Americans?,” Ahlert asks. “One can only wonder if there is a tipping point with regard to this administration in particular, and/or progressivism in general. Does the thought of Israel being potentially surrounded by those who yearn for its annihilation, and knowing that such potential is being facilitated by this president, raise cause for concern? If not, what does? It is really possible to ignore the historical parallels between the inexorable rise of Nazism and the current path of Islamic jihad?”

Update: Pamela Geller: Creating utter chaos in the region and world-wide is in the PLAN.

Update: Barry Secrest, Conservative ReFocus: The Ties that Blind: Big Media and Big Government Float Denial in Egypt

Cross-posted on UNCOVERAGE.net

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