Mubarak Slammed U.S. in Phone Call with Israeli MK Before Resignation

Hosni Mubarak had harsh words for the United States and what he described as its misguided quest for democracy in the Middle East in a telephone call with an Israeli lawmaker a day before he quit as Egypt's president. The legislator, former cabinet minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, said on TV Friday that he came away from the 20-minute conversation on Thursday with the feeling the 82-year-old leader realized "it was the end of the Mubarak era". "He had very tough things to say about the United States," said Ben-Eliezer, a member of the Labor Party who has held talks with Mubarak on numerous occasions while serving in various Israeli coalition governments. "He gave me a lesson in democracy and said: 'We see the democracy the United States spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that's the fate of the Middle East,'" Ben-Eliezer said. "'They may be talking about democracy but they don't know what they're talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,'" he quoted Mubarak as saying. U.S. support for pro-democracy elements in Iran has not led to regime change in the Islamic Republic, and Hamas, a group Washington considers to be a terrorist organization, won a 2006 Palestinian election promoted by the United States. Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a coalition government it formed with Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas collapsed in a power struggle. Ben-Eliezer said Mubarak expanded in the telephone call on "what he expects will happen in the Middle East after his fall". "He contended the snowball (of civil unrest) won't stop in Egypt and it wouldn't skip any Arab country in the Middle East and in the Gulf.

“We will reap what we have sown.”

Before one sews, one must plow and till and fertilize, and one must sew in orderly furrows at a fixed depth, and cover the seeds with topsoil, and then irrigate, mulch and weed, as well as pray for rain. When you sew seeds higgledy-piggledy any which way, with no preliminary preparation and no follow-up, you get a see-saw crop where anything grows at all, and weeds everywhere else. You need a serious farmer to reap a good crop, and right now we’ve got a damned-fool dabbler, who doesn’t know which end is up on a hoe.

My problem with Mubarak’s comments is that he acts as if his dicatatorship was the ONLY alternative for the last 30 years - it wasn’t.

He didn’t just keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of any real political participation, he kept Egyptians that wanted to start secular moderate groups out of real political participation as well.

Worst of well, while keeping ALL opposition groups out of real political participation, he gave wide public latitude to the Muslim Brotherhood in academia and the media. In fact the public voice they obtained was larger than the secular moderate opposition groups. Like the Saudis do with the Wahabi clerics, he thought he was placating the Islamists.

He wasn’t. And, he was actually helping them - by their public voice - gain public acceptance, even though he gave them little or no legal political voice.

Mubarak would have everyone believe that for 30 years his dictatorship was the only solution.

When, in fact, he has had sufficient power for the last thirty years to have chosen to be the “agent of reform” himself, if he had wanted to.

Sorry, Mubarak, the “democratic” road ahead may not be an easy road, and so Egypts future is unceratian, but you were the one who could have paved a better road for Egypt yourself. You didn’t.

Claiming that your dictatorship has always been the only solution is a fraud and a delusion.

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