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A U.S. senator is blocking the delivery of 10 U.S. Apache attack helicopters urgently sought by the Egyptian government since last spring to battle al Qaeda terrorists in the Sinai peninsula. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) has prevented all U.S. military assistance to the Egyptians, asserting the Egyptian government had violated human rights in ousting the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood regime. Leahy imposed the hold on the aircraft five days after the Pentagon announced the helicopters were urgently needed to fight terrorism and would be delivered. White House and State Department officials said this week they are working with Congress to...

On a recent trip to Egypt with a delegation of national security experts and journalists we had the opportunity to meet with senior-level Egyptian security officials, as well as several members of the country’s various religious and civil society movements. The message being disseminated in the Western press about Egypt is contrary to the reality on the ground. A recent Los Angeles Times article repeats the accusation that Egypt’s response to terrorism is in fact the reason Egypt is in such trouble. This narrative has become entrenched in some circles of the US foreign policy establishment. To quote directly from...

Thirty-four people were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes during protests in Egypt on Sunday, state news agency MENA quoted the health ministry as saying. Fighting began after supporters and opponents of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood took to the streets to commemorate the "Egyptian victory" in the Yom Kippur War, that broke out on October 6, 1973.

Newark, New Jersey (My9NJ) - Is 27 the new 18 when it comes to living at your parents' house? According to the US census Bureau, at least 1 in 4 N.J. adults, ages 18-31 live at home and 42% are 24 or older. Experts call it an "epidemic" of millennials leaching off their parents, but does a bad economy and student loan debt crisis justify the situation? A new survey from Coldwell Banker says parents in the Northeast region are more lenient on this than anywhere else in the US on children moving back home. But, according to the survey,...

Fresh presidential and parliamentary elections have been announced in Egypt amid reports that Mohamed Morsi has been told he is no longer in charge of the country. Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper reported on its website that the army told Mr Mursi at 7pm (6pm UK time) that he was no longer head of state, quoting a presidential source. The country's leading Muslim and Christian clerics and opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei will shortly unveil the details of a political road map for a short transitional period followed by new national polls, state news agency MENA reported.

(Reuters) - Egyptian police battled thousands of protesters outside President Mohamed Mursi's palace in Cairo on Tuesday, prompting the Islamist leader to leave the building, two presidential sources said. Police fired teargas at demonstrators angered by Mursi's drive to hold a referendum on a new constitution on December 15. Some broke through police lines around his palace and protested next to the perimeter wall. Several thousand people had gathered nearby in what they dubbed "last warning" protests against Mursi, who infuriated opponents with a November 22 decree that expanded his powers. "The people want the downfall of the regime," the...

White House officials remained silent during the extended Thanksgiving weekend, as Egypt’s pro-democracy groups called on President Barack Obama to condemn Thursday’s power grab by their country’s Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi. Morsi decreed Nov. 22 that his pronouncements and edicts were beyond the reach of judicial review. The announcement was met by resistance from the nation’s top judges, who said they would fight Morsi’s unusual self-elevation to near-dictator status. “I am waiting to see, I hope soon, a very strong statement of condemnation by the U.S., by Europe and by everybody who really cares about human dignity,” declared Mohamed ElBaradei,...

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood planned a mass climax to its presidential campaign on Sunday, hoping to sway undecided voters and clinch victory in this week's election when Egyptians will choose their leader freely for the first time. On the last day of official campaigning, the Brotherhood told Egyptians to "book your place anywhere in Egypt" for evening rallies in support of its candidate Mohamed Mursi. Brotherhood supporters seem unfazed by surveys that show their unfancied contender trailing rivals who entered the race earlier and are spending heavily in the dash for votes. In one poll published last week in al-Masry al-Youm...

Here is yet more delightful evidence that Sharia is benign and completely compatible with U.S. Constitutional values, as we are constantly told. "Egypt’s women urge MPs not to pass early marriage, sex-after-death laws: report," by Abeer Tayel for Al Arabiya, April 25 (thanks to Stephen): Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper. The appeal came in a message...

Obama has recruited the annihilationist leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sheik Qaradawi, to negotiate with the heinous Taliban. That's like FDR reaching out to Hitler. Today the NY Times is reporting that the Obama administration has begun to reverse decades of US policy as it "seeks to forge closer ties with an organization once viewed as irreconcilably opposed to United States interests." What US interests? Freedom and human rights. Individual rights, equal rights under the law, freedom to worship, freedom of speech, freedom from genocide, Jew-hatred, and misogyny ....... this is unbelievable. If given a second term, Obama...

Hamas’ Gaza Prime Minister takes advantage of his diplomatic tour of Arab countries to meet with the leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’ Gaza Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, took advantage of his diplomatic tour of Arab countries to meet with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Channel 10 reported on Monday. Haniyeh, for whom this is the first trip outside Gaza since Hamas seized the coastal enclave from the PLO in a violent putsch in June of 2007, is scheduled to visit Sudan, Qatar, Bahrain, Tunisia, and Turkey. He began in Egypt, Channel 10 reported, where he met with leaders of the Muslim...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Ma) is in Egypt where he has been sucking up to the Muslim Brotherhood. With the US already $15 trillion in debt, Kerry wants the International Monetary Fund - for which the US provides the largest piece of the budget - to finance the Muslim Brotherhood's takeover of Egypt. In addition to praising the Brotherhood’s election as a model of transparency and integrity, Sen. Kerry also called for an infusion of cash from the International Monetary Fund to undergird Egypt’s new Islamist government.

Jihad Watch Oh, this bodes well for impartial and transparent governance in the New Egypt. Of course, the Ikhwan has gained popularity by railing against corruption under Mubarak. It is easy to criticize the other guy’s corruption and cronyism. But the Brotherhood has already shown its own propensity toward corruption, both in vote buying and other election tampering in two elections (last week’s, and the constitutional referendum in March), and now in its refusal to discuss it.

According to today’s New York Times, the current idol of Egypt is a man who scaled the walls of a multi-story building in order to get to the roof of Israel’s embassy in Cairo where he then hauled down the Israeli flag and replaced it with an Egyptian one. The man, now known as “flagman,” received a job and an apartment–both scarce commodities in Egypt–as a reward for his exploit.

CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian forces swinging electrified batons and shouting the battle cry "God is great" swiftly chased off dozens of activists Monday who had refused to end four weeks of renewed protests at Tahrir Square to pressure the country's transitional military rulers. Hundreds of riot police backed by armored vehicles and soldiers moved in to tear down the camp of dozens of tents after a group of holdout activists — some of them relatives of people killed in the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in February — refused pleas over loudspeakers to go home. Some in the crowd hurled...

Parliamentary elections in Egypt are scheduled for September; Muslim Brotherhood regraded as the most organized political force in Egypt in the post-Mubarak era. The Muslim Brotherhood said on Saturday it will contest up to half the parliamentary seats in elections scheduled for September. But the group said it will not field a candidate for the position of president in an election due to held after the parliamentary vote.

After joyously toppling a dictator, protesters trusted the army to hold power until elections—but a vicious show of force this week has soured their faith. Ursula Lindsey reports from Cairo. The warm relations between Egyptians protesters and their army are over. Military police and, reportedly, masked special forces violently broke up protests in downtown Cairo late Friday night. The attack—and ongoing reports of "disappearances" and abuse—has soured the once hopeful relations between the military and pro-democracy forces here. The film director Ahmad Abdalla was in a group of several hundred protesters standing and chanting in front of the Egyptian parliament...

Hosni Mubarak's departure from power does little to address the fundamental issues that brought protesters to Cairo's Tahrir Square for the past 18 days. In fact, their protests were never about Mubarak but about a sclerotic political system and an economic system that was full of cronyism and corruption. Mubarak sustained that system, but its backbone was always the Egyptian military. Mubarak nurtured the military, from which he came, and the military preserved him. Although the officers behind Egypt's 1952 revolution abandoned their uniforms long ago, Egypt's rulers have been generals in suits for decades.

The top shareholder in the East Mediterranean Gas Company (EMG) has fled Egypt, according to a report by the Associated Press. Hussein Salem, a close confidant of President Hosni Mubarak and the controlling shareholder in EMG, which holds long-term sales contracts to supply natural gas to Israel, fled the capital over the weekend. The company has a multi-billion dollar agreement the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC). Last month, a major agreement was also signed between EMG and Israel Corporation Ltd., Israel's largest holding company.

To be fair, the White House is in a tough spot, as Allahpundit noted yesterday. We traditionally oppose dictatorships and support democratization movements. In places like Tunisia, where democratization efforts are championed by secular, more Western-friendly forces, that’s an easy mission for the US to back. In Egypt, however, the energy behind the political opposition comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist force seeking not democracy but a new theocracy. And if this sounds familiar, it should: White House Declines to Say If US Still Supports Egypt’s Mubarak Asked Wednesday whether the U.S. still supports Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, White...