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Residents of Egypt's northern Sinai threaten protests

Egyptians in the restive northern Sinai city of al-Arish are threatening civil disobedience to protest against what they claim to be the extrajudicial killing of six youths by security forces.

The residents met Saturday night and issued a statement, also demanding the release of youths detained without charge. A video of the meeting circulated online shows around 100 people gathered in the home of a prominent local family. Northern Sinai is home to an insurgency led by an Islamic State affiliate. Residents often complain of what they say are heavy-handed tactics used by security forces.

the Sinai-based militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or ABM, allegedly announces its allegiance to ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.

blames tyrants and their "Jewish agents and their allies" for decades of Muslim suffering. The message also calls ISIS "the emergence of a new dawn."

The group has killed hundreds of Egyptian police officers and soldiers. The largest attack was last month in the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 31 soldiers.

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says

Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997

The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Targeted by ISIS, Egyptian Christians Flee Violence

Dozens of Egyptian Christian families fled their homes in the northern Sinai Peninsula on Friday, driven by a targeted campaign of Islamist violence that has killed at least seven people in recent weeks.

The Islamic State affiliate in Sinai is small compared with Iraq or Syria, but it has been increasingly active in recent weeks. It has carried out two rocket attacks on Israel in the past two weeks. There were no reported casualties, and Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said in a newspaper interview that such attacks, while “vexing,” did not pose a major security threat.

Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.

The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.

"The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.

A few weeks ago, terrorists laid siege to a mosque in the small town of Bir al-Abd that lies just off the east-west road spanning the northern Sinai Peninsula. They killed 305 people and wounded many others. The photos from the scene were macabre—the stuff of Baghdad or Karachi, not Egypt. Until the attack on the al-Rawdah Mosque on November 24, the deadliest terror incident in Egypt occurred in 1997, when a group called al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya killed 57 people—most of them Japanese and British tourists—at the Temple of Hatshepsut near Luxor. The recent bloodletting in the Sinai is believed to be the work of Wilayat Sina, the Sinai branch of the self-styled Islamic State, though no one has claimed responsibility.

perpetrators are adherents of a worldview that views violence as the principal means of purifying what they believe to be un-Islamic societies. It was not a coincidence that the attackers went after a mosque associated with Sufism—a mystical variant of traditional Islam that violent and nonviolent fundamentalists consider apostasy.

If democracy or democratic change were the remedy to the extremism of the Islamic State and other groups, then Tunisia—the oft-cited success of the Arab Spring—would not reportedly produce as many followers of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as it does.

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

In just the last two weeks, Islamist militants have detonated a car bomb at the gates of the capital’s security headquarters, gunned down a senior Interior Ministry official in broad daylight and shot down a military helicopter over Sinai with a portable surface-to-air missile.

Egyptians returning from jihad abroad to join a campaign of terrorism against the military-backed government.

But until last summer, when the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi and began a bloody crackdown on his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt remained largely insulated from the Islamist violence that flared up around it.

In response to some private hospitals’ decision to bar partners, New York will order all hospitals to allow partners in delivery rooms, despite the coronavirus risk.

Women preparing to give birth at some hospitals in New York City will no longer have to labor alone, state officials said Saturday.

The order, which the governor released Saturday night, is a response to a decision earlier this week by two major New York City hospital systems, NewYork-Presbyterian and Mount Sinai, to ban support people from labor and delivery rooms because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The police, all in plainclothes, were inspecting security in the southern Cairo suburb of Helwan early Sunday when four gunmen in a pickup truck attacked them, according to Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency.

The Islamic State said in a statement on Twitter that “a carefully selected group of the soldiers of the caliphate” c

t said the attack was to commemorate 1,000 days since Egyptian security forces massacred what human rights groups describe as hundreds of protesters in August 2013 at Rabaa Square in Cairo.

Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered an inquiry into the activities in Britain of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamic organizations, to determine in part whether it is using London as a base for planning extremist attacks following the military crackdown in Egypt, officials and media reports said on Tuesday.

“Given the concerns now being expressed about the group and its alleged links to violent extremism, it’s absolutely right and prudent that we get a better handle of what the Brotherhood stands for, how they intend to achieve their aims and what that means for Britain,”

Word of the inquiry first emerged in The Times of London, which said leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met in London last year to plan their response to Mr. Morsi’s overthrow.

E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”

From Libya to Palestine to parts of the Egyptian Sinai, armed—and increasingly hard-line—Islamist groups are making significant inroads. This is the Arab world’s Salafi-Jihadi moment.

In Libya and Syria, even non-Salafi groups like the Brotherhood are adapting to the new world of anti-politics, allying themselves with local armed groups or working to form their own militias.

This is one of the great tragedies of the past few years—that a movement meant to demonstrate that peaceful protest could work ultimately demonstrated the opposite.

The attack took place near El Arish, the main town in the north of the restive peninsula. Three more died in a shooting in the town itself.

The area has become increasingly lawless since President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in 2011.

Militants further stepped up their attacks after Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was ousted by the army last year.

How the ISIS fight went global

Just one day before multiple machine gun and bomb attacks in the French capital left almost 500 people from all walks of life dead or wounded, U.S. President Barack Obama said that the U.S. strategy against the jihadist group has "contained" it but not yet succeeded in its effort to "decapitate" the group's leadership.

Two suicide bombers detonated devices in the port city on Thursday, claiming the lives of at least 43 and wounding another 239.

Egypt’s Parliament on Wednesday expelled a well-known television personality turned lawmaker over a dinner he had with the Israeli ambassador — a vote that exposed a raw nerve in the mostly tranquil relationship between the two countries.

Although Egypt and Israel enjoy close security cooperation, particularly in the struggle against Islamist extremists in Sinai, many Egyptians view Israel with hostility over its policies toward the Palestinians, and public interactions with Israeli officials are considered taboo.

That fear, he said, has its basis in a conspiracy theory: that Israel has secretly been helping Ethiopia build the dam as a means of hurting Egyptian interests.

Later an Obama aide said the two men appeared to reach an agreement on political path forward in Syria --

"The killing of innocent people based on a twisted ideology is an attack not just on France, not just on Turkey, it is an attack on the civilized world,"

Obama said, adding later that he and Erdoğan discussed ways to fortify Turkey's border with Syria and a strategy for addressing the refugee crisis.

The group's rise in Iraq -- and its capture of thousands of square miles of land -

"We have not defeated the idea," he is reported to have said. "We do not even understand the idea."

A global caliphate secured through a global war. To that end it speaks of "remaining and expanding" its existing hold over much of Iraq and Syria. It aims to replace existing, man-made borders, to overcome what it sees as the Shiite "crescent" that has emerged across the Middle East, to take its war -- Islam's war -- to Europe and America, and ultimately to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against the "disbelievers."

Obama has called the Islamic State the "face of evil"

Pope Francis suggests the West already is at war -- a kind of "third world war."

We are effectively at war with ISIS right now. A U.S.-led coalition has been bombing targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, and in recent months Russia has been doing the same.