Peres, you plonker…

Ha’aretz:

Peres warned against the possibility that Mubarak's ouster would bring the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's best organized opposition movement, to power, saying the fundamentalist group won't bring peace.

"We're very worried about having a change in government or a change in the system of elections without introducing a change in the reasons that brought this explosion, this bitterness," Peres said.

Also in Ha’aretz, Yitzhak Laor:

The problem with Orientalist discourse of our commentators − which sees the world through the prism of the Shin Bet Security Service − is that it helps to seal off the ghetto into which we are gradually locking ourselves, a ghetto within the Middle East and within world history.

That’s just the blurb but the rest is unequivocally and passionately correct. Take this bit for example:

But the person who deserves the prize for folly is Dr. Oded Eran, formerly our ambassador to Jordan. He suggested organizing elections in Egypt under European supervision, to ensure that monitors would turn a blind eye to fraud by the regime during the vote count.

For years, our Orientalists saw a danger in ‏(secular‏) Arab nationalism. Both the right and the left examined Arab intellectuals with a fine-toothed comb in order to prove that they were “pan-Arabists.” What lay behind this, always, was a colonialist questioning of their right to self-determination on a par with our own standards.