Lady Catherine Ashton, the EU’s top foreign policy official, has received a remarkable letter from the “European Eminent Persons Group on the Middle East Peace Process.” This self-selected collectivity might more accurately be called the “Formerly Eminent Persons Group,” inasmuch as the first word describing each one of its members is “Former,” but I suppose that these Formerly Eminent Persons do indeed also represent the views of Currently Eminent European Persons. The letter and its list of signatories are copied below. Read more »

That Egypt is encountering economic problems is no secret, but the gravity of the situation is being underestimated.

We know that the IMF negotiations with Egypt for a loan of $4.8 billion have dragged on month after month, and that the IMF team that was sent to conclude the deal left Egypt without doing so. On the other hand, Qatar and Libya agreed last week to increase aid to Egypt by $5 billion. And officially, Egypt claims to have about $16 billion in reserves. Read more »

The great risk in having a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee move over to be Secretary of State is that he will think the two jobs are very much alike. That is, in the new job as in the old one you travel a lot, you give press conferences, you pontificate, and you strategize. Read more »

When I began this blog a little more than two years ago, one of the early posts was entitled “Free Sandmonkey.” Sandmonkey is the “nom de blog” of Mahmoud Salem, then Egypt’s most famous blogger, and he had that day in 2011 been “ambushed & beaten by the police, my phone confiscated, my car ripped apar& supplies taken,” as he informed his readers. He continues to be one of the most interesting and persuasive commentators on events in Egypt. Read more »

Reuters reports that “Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad offered his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday following a rift between the two men over government policy….” Read more »

The Teachers Union of Ireland voted last week to commence a full boycott of Israel. Read more »

Last Saturday (March 30) Israel took a large step toward energy independence, as natural gas from the smaller of its newly discovered Mediterranean gas fields began to flow.

By the end of this decade Israel will not only be supplying its own needs fully, but exporting natural gas to the world market. It will be able to supply itself for at least 50 years and perhaps three times as long–reducing its energy costs, improving its environment, making the cost of production lower, and increasing prosperity and state revenues. This natural gas supply more than replaces what Israel used to receive from Egypt, but Egypt has become an unreliable supplier for Israel (and for Jordan as well). Read more »

Egypt’s situation is in many ways immensely complicated. But in others, it is simple: Egypt’s new government is restricting human rights in ways that no American should ever support. During the Mubarak years we often did support, or show indifference, to violations of the basic rights of citizens, and we should not repeat that error yet again. Read more »

I’ve written before (here) about the epidemic of prosecutions by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president for the “crime” of insulting him. Read more »

The degree of freedom in Egypt is declining steadily, and took another large step downward yesterday with the adoption of a law limiting political protests.

The new law, adopted by the Shura Council, requires three days’ notice to the police for any demonstration of more than 20 people–and the notice must name the organizers of the demonstration. Moreover, demonstrators must keep 600 feet away from any government building–making them invisible to the officials in that building in many cases. The punishment for “harming citizens’ interests” or posing a risk to national security is a fine and possible jail time at hard labor, as the Egypt Independent reports. Terms like “harming citizens’ interests” are purposely vague enough to permit officials to act against any protests they find inconvenient. Read more »