Egyptian election results are our business, not just Israel's

Further down this page, you will find an article entitled "Egypt's election results are none of Israel's business? Indeed?" Well, Snoopy analyses the article and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that, actually, what happens next door (and sometimes several houses away, or even several blocks away) can be very much our (in this case, Israel's) concern. Indeed, as a citizen of country 3000 miles away, I'm concerned with what happens in Egypt, Iran and many other places because what happens there can have a serious effect on me, both directly (I want no mushroom clouds anywhere in the world) and indirectly (I'm a Zionist - and anyway I have family and friends in Israel). So, for my money and for Snoopy's, Lisa Goldman, writing on 972+, gets it wrong.

Now Richard Shepherd, main man at The Commentator, has weighed in, with an opinion piece at The Jewish Chronicle that he has cross posted at The Commentator. His particular target is Human Rights Watch. As he says "HRW is aware of the potential dangers for minority rights as well as of the possibility of a lurch back to authoritarianism but its thinking betrays a profound sense of confusion." Furthermore, he argues, "there's the obligatory slating of Israel."

In between, Shepherd wonders whether HRW "...truly think the Muslim Brotherhood is like Germany's Christian Democrats?" To see how he reaches this point (and goes on from there), read the whole article here. If you weren't aware of HRW biases, you could do a lot worse than clicking on the website of NGO Monitor, here, and go down to the paragraph which states (or possibly asserts, if one is a fan of HRW) that "In October 2009, HRW founder Robert Bernstein published an article in the New York Times (“Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast”), strongly criticizing the organization for ignoring severe human rights violations in closed societies, for its anti-Israel bias, and for 'issuing reports...that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.'"

By Brian Goldfarb.