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Arab/Muslim States

Israeli MK confronts Egypt's anti-Israel Mubarak


By Stan Goodenough
October 30, 2008

A right wing Knesset member Wednesday slammed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for his refusal to ever officially visit the State of Israel despite the fact that 30 years have passed since the two countries signed the Camp David Accords peace treaty.

Addressing a special session of the Knesset - Israel's parliament - Avigdor Lieberman decried Israel's "self-effacement vis-a-vis the Egyptians."

"Time and time again our leaders go to Egypt to meet Mubarak, and he has never made a single official visit. Every self respecting leader would have conditioned such meetings on reciprocation."

If Mubarak "wants to talks to us, he should come here, and if he doesn't want to come, he can go to hell," Lieberman declared.

Israel's leftist leaders - State President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - rushed to apologize.

"All of us are very sorry about [what Lieberman said]. I want to make clear that we have the highest respect for President Mubarak. He is a really stable leader for peace in the Middle East. He does not stop for a moment from acting for peace. And he continues to do so," Peres said.

In a telephone call quickly made to Cairo, Olmert told Mubarak "Israel sees in Egypt's president a strategic partner and a close friend, and understands the utmost importance of tightening relations with Egypt and strengthening ties between countries in general."

Lieberman's charge: that as Israel's purported peace partner Mubarak's refusal to visit Israel is a disgrace that calls into question the sincerity of any lip service the Egyptian might pay to peace with his Jewish neighbor, was swept aside in the outrage.

While hundreds of thousands of Israelis have visited Egypt since 1978 and, as Lieberman pointed out, Israel's leaders have regularly made their way over to the other side of the Nile, Egyptian government policy is to strongly dissuade their citizens from traveling to Israel while permitting the officially approved Egyptian state press to regularly vilify the Jewish state.

Egyptian television is allowed to run the antisemitic forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and promote the dark-ages libel that says Jews use Christian children's blood to make unleavened bread for Passover.

Egypt has refused to crush Hamas' smuggling of weapons through tunnels from the Sinai into Gaza, effectively facilitating the transformation of the Strip into a Mecca for terrorism situated in the soft underbelly of the Jewish state.

Mubarak has always and only (and unsurprisingly) sided with the Arab side against Israel, never even pretending to play an impartial referee.

The list is extensive; but Peres and Olmert fawn before him, insisting the Egyptian is a friend of Israel and a peacemaker.

Responding - at the special request of the leftist Israeli paper Ha'aretz - to Lieberman's attack, a spokesman for the Egyptian foreign ministry said: "It is comforting to know that there are smart politicians in Israel like President Peres and Prime Minister Olmert, who were on hand to repair the damage."

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