by Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse
I was reviewing a Wall Street Journal article about the Sinai border between Egypt and Gaza and various Western opinion about Egypt’s unwillingness to allow Palestinian refugees to cross the heavily controlled border.
For those who do not know the deep background, the Western media context looks troublesome {GO DEEP}. However, I rise in defense of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, because we have tracked and discussed the issues for a long time. Egypt is in a very difficult position right now, and with Obama/Biden in the White House – the challenge is made even worse. First the WSJ framing of the issue:
TEL AVIV— A diplomatic effort to evacuate U.S. citizens from Gaza faltered after Egyptian officials said they would only allow foreigners to cross the border if aid could pass in the opposite direction.
Egypt’s refusal on Saturday, confirmed by three officials and in an announcement on state television, thwarted the latest U.S. push to evacuate any of the 500 or more Americans in Gaza wishing to leave through the enclave’s southern border with Egypt.
Israel—which has sealed off Gaza’s northern border with a ground invasion by Israeli forces believed imminent—said Saturday that it would give a few hours of safe passage for people in northern Gaza to move southward. A doctor in Gaza said corpses were piling up in the main hospital’s morgue and under rubble from Israeli airstrikes launched in response to Hamas militants’ lightning strike into Israel last Saturday.
[…] Egypt is apprehensive about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees being displaced into Egypt, or of getting drawn deeper into the conflict. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, an ardent enemy of Hamas, has also warned that a mass displacement from the enclave could mean an end to the aspirations of a Palestinian state.
Egypt told the U.S. that it has too many evacuation requests to accommodate U.S. nationals and that it can’t grant passage to one country over others, according to two Egyptian officials, who also cited security concerns related to a lack of screening of individuals. On the Palestinian side, damage from an Israeli missile has hindered access to the Rafah crossing.
Yet, Sisi earlier this week ordered tents to be pitched in the Egyptian towns of Sheikh Zuweid and Rafah, in preparation for potentially having to accept refugees from Gaza. He also ordered the creation of a 8.5-mile wide, 500-meter deep buffer zone in Rafah.
Israel’s military said Gazans could safely travel along two major routes south for six hours before 4 p.m. local time, as its forces prepare for an expected ground invasion aimed at routing Hamas. (read more)
Western media never discuss the extreme lengths al-Sisi had to go through in 2014 through 2017 to clear out the radical Islamists from Egypt. After Sisi kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, ISIS, enablers), he became the mortal enemy of tribal terrorism. The various terrorist elements put a fatwah on the head of Sisi and commanded all members of the Islamic Jihad to target Egypt…
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