While the New York Times calls the existing, troubled Mideast regimes “American-backed,” the Telegraph calls the protesters “American-backed”

Here is the lead of today’s lead story in the New York Times:

Thousands of protesters on Thursday took to the streets of Yemen, one of the Middle East’s most impoverished countries, and secular and Islamist Egyptian opposition leaders vowed to join large protests expected Friday as calls for change rang across the Arab world.

The Yemeni protests were another moment of tumult in a region whose aging order of American-backed governments appears to be staggering. In a span of just weeks, Tunisia’s government has fallen, Egypt’s appears shaken and countries like Jordan and Yemen are bracing against demands of movements with divergent goals but similar means….

In Yemen, organizers vowed to continue protests on Friday and for weeks to come until the 32-year-old American-backed government of Ali Abdullah Saleh either fell or consented to reforms. [emphasis added.]

From reading that, you’d think that the most significant fact about the existing regimes in the Mideast is that they are “American-backed,” implying that they are maintained by America. In reality, these regimes exist, and our government recognizes their existence and deals with them, as it does with all existing regimes which are not our declared enemies. But the disgusting anti-American bigotry that governs the Times requires that the presumed badness of the existing, rotten, corrupt, “staggering” Mideast Arab order be associated with America.

But now, from the Telegraph, comes very different information about whom the U.S. is backing:

Egypt protests: America’s secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising

The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning “regime change” for the past three years, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph.

The crisis in Egypt follows the toppling of Tunisian president Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, who fled the country after widespread protests forced him from office.

The disclosures, contained in previously secret US diplomatic dispatches released by the WikiLeaks website, show American officials pressed the Egyptian government to release other dissidents who had been detained by the police.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2011 06:27 PM | Send