Epstein Secrets

staff Sami Anan; and the heads of Egypt's army, navy and air force — as finally giving Egypt's revolution the chance to remove key remnants of the Mubarak regime and fulfill its promise. Others, particularly non-Islamists, are more prone to see recent actions as the Muslim Brotherhood removing any che

d Abbas. Early hopes that Egypt's new president, Muhammad Morsi, might put the Hamas genie back in its bottle have subsided. Under his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, donors meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in March 2009 committed $5 billion to repair damage from Israel's Gaza war in 2006 and promised to end the siege

he entire Middle East. "We have far more freedoms," one peddler hawking fruit in the same square lamented, "but far fewer jobs." Another noted that Mohamed Bouazizi, the vendor who set himself on fire, did so not to vote in a democratic election but because harassment by local officials had cost him his livelih

lt in Tunisia successfully ousted the old regime, the world reacted with amazement. Democracy from below in the Arab world? After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's 30 year-old regime in Egypt, the heartland of the Middle East, amazement has turned into certainty. The Middle East has awakened and begun to ent

oints out, oil prices are driven both by current conditions and by future expectations. Oil markets don't like surprises. The sudden ousting of Mr Mubarak and the unrest in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran and Algeria (which between them supply a tenth of the world's oil) had added 20% to oil prices by the

ountries, more were university graduates with higher expectations. Their frustration and anger became unbearable. The desperate act of one of them, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in front of a police station in a sad town in Tunisia's interior, became the symbol and catalyzing spark for the whole gen

; for the first time in a long time, Arabs are. In Tahrir Square, Egypt's young made a revolution. President Obama bowed to reality and helped show Hosni Mubarak the door; Benjamin Netanyahu stood athwart history, impotently yelling stop. Now Egypt's leaders are doing its people's will, bringing Hamas and Fa

g about a revolution. Tocqueville observed that a dictatorial regime faces the greatest danger when it is trying to reform itself. WHY, THEN, WERE Mubarak and Ali ousted so easily while other dictators are putting up a more determined resistance? Largely EFTA00586653 22 because they had stayed in p

burg rulers, led to the division between Belgium and Holland. In the case of the Arab awakening of 2011, 46-year-old policewoman Fedia Hamdi struck Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian stallholder in a market, and in protest he burned himself alive (in the subsequent investigation it appeared that in fact Hamdi had not

nd YouTube videos from Tunisia, protests broke out across much of the rest of the Arab world. Within weeks, millions were on the streets in Egypt and Hosni Mubarak was gone, shown the door in part by his longtime backer, the U.S. government. The Obama administration was captivated by this spontaneous outbreak of

In Riyadh, Saudi officials watched with alarm. They became furious when the Obama administration betrayed, to Saudi thinking, a longtime ally in Mr. Mubarak and urged him to step down in the face of the street demonstrations. The Egyptian leader represented a key bulwark in what Riyadh perceives as a gre

ered by the self- immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement bec

xtended and significant resistance against the regime having emerged. Meanwhile, Egypt is struggling with internal tension over the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the future of the military junta that replaced him. Add to this the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the potential rise of Iranian power, and the po

ple. The Pan-Arab rising is moribund. Where it once threatened the existence of Muslim states, like the Arab monarchies, it is now itself threatened. Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi all represented the old Pan-Arab vision. A much better way to understand the "Ara

a sizeable advantage. This is not naïve or farfetched. After all, it was the plight of Tunisian vendor HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031929 --- PAGE BREAK --- 18 Mohamed Bouazizi and the symbolism of his fate that sparked all the revolutions across the Middle East. The images of the rebels in Libya liberating their country (as