“I think there’s a fundamental assumption this administration has made that the Middle East doesn’t matter,”said Vali Nasr during a panel discussion promoting his new book “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat” at the Brookings Institution.

Nasr’s book draws on his experience working as a senior adviser for the late Richard Holbrooke.

The current dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Nasr said the administration has sought “to downgrade the Middle East as important to global politics and American foreign policy,” and has not used its full influence to support democracy movements during the Arab spring and to support the Syrian rebellion.

“This is couched in the pivot-to-Asia language, but it’s become the bedrock of our approach to the region,” he said.

While Nasr said he does not believe “that the Chinese are gunning to replace us” in the Middle East, he does see a “rising strategic concern [for China]” in the region.

“They need the energy,” he said. “The energy comes from central Asia, comes from the Persian Gulf.”

China has been making significant investments in building infrastructure, including pipelines and ports, aimed at bringing minerals and oil out of the Middle East, Nasr said.

Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan, who has critiqued the idea of inevitable American decline, pushed back on parts of Nasr’s argument during the discussion.

“Far be it from me to defend the Obama administration,” said Kagan. “[But] the missing part of your story so far is, what is the situation that Obama inherited?”

Kagan said the economic crisis could have discouraged the Obama administration from making a larger investment in Arab spring democratization and added that there was “a real [domestic] unhappiness with the policies that had been conducted by the previous administration, rightly or wrongly, in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Nasr responded that the administration still has a responsibility to “push back against domestic sentiments.”

“You don’t have the luxury of saying you can hit a pause button on foreign policy because you have domestic issues or you have a fatigue,” he said.

Nasr also criticized the U.S. surge in Afghanistan, which he said was unsustainable and signaled to the Taliban that America did not have the stamina for a long-term fight.

“The way that we conducted this war essentially was that there is no victory and there is no political settlement,” he said.

While acknowledging the constraints the financial crisis placed on the administration, Nasr argued for a scaled-back approach to Afghanistan that he said would have been more sustainable.

“Three months, two months of the war in Afghanistan would have been transformative in Egypt,” he said.

Mohammed Morsi’s regime lost Justice Minister Ahmed Mekky, First Deputy Finance Minister Hany Kadry Dimian, Communications Minister Hany Mahmoud, and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Mohamed Mahsoub.

Egypt’s justice minister recently resigned over Islamist efforts to “cleanse” the Egyptian judiciary of judges seen as opposed to the country’s Brotherhood-linked president Mohammed Morsi. […]

[First Deputy Finance Minister] Dimian was a key senior negotiators in Cairo’s efforts to secure a badly-needed $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. Talks thus far have floundered in the face of the Morsi government’s refusal to undertake financial reforms demanded by the IMF. […]

Communications Minister Hany Mahmoud also recently quit, explaining that he was unable “to adapt to the government’s working culture”. So has parliamentary affairs minister Mohamed Mahsoub, who said that he was unable to serve in the government because “a lot of [its] policies and efforts contradict with my personal beliefs.”

According to the Tower, the resignations suggest Morsi’s government is growing unstable and weak.

The resignation of Mohammed Fouad Gadallah is just the latest in ongoing tensions between the Brotherhood and Egypt’s judiciary. Gadallah’s resignation letter criticizes sharply the Morsi administration, the Associated Press reports:

In his three-page resignation letter, Gadallah said he wanted to shed light “on the extent of the danger facing the country,” at a time when “personal interests are overwhelming national interests.”

He said there is “no clear vision” in running state affairs and that “a single (political) current” monopolizes decision-making, excluding experts and the opposition. He also pointed to the current dispute over the courts, complaining of attempts to “assassinate the judiciary.” [...]

Particularly, he said he opposed a decree that temporarily granted Morsi’s decisions immunity from judicial review, but he said his opinion was ignored. After the public outcry, some Brotherhood members had blamed Gadallah for those decrees.

Nobody was hurt in the attack, police said, although one rocket exploded near the courtyard of a house. A shadowy hardline Muslim group, likely based in the Gaza Strip, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the remains of two Grad-style rockets had been found and bomb experts were looking for more. [...]

Israel believes militants from the Gaza Strip, which also borders Sinai, are also operating in the area. Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, has said security in southern Israel from threats in Sinai is a high priority. The regime change in Egypt, now governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, has not damaged cooperation between the countries’ security forces, he added.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attending the funeral of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but has discussed internally how to respond, according to the AP.

The more than $1 billion in annual U.S. aid to Egypt is “going directly to a regime that tortures people, that just a couple weeks ago refused to sign a [United Nations] declaration [to combat] violence against women,” an Egyptian blogger known as The Big Pharaoh said.

He asked that his name not be revealed for fear of retribution. Under the leadership of President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood has sought to silence progressive voices and reporters by imprisoning them or worse.

“Do you want your money going there?” Pharaoh asked at the event, which was organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Peace. “No. Make it conditional on political reform. At least do something good with it.”

Pharaoh, who was in Washington, D.C., to meet with State Department officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, warned that the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming increasingly totalitarian as the Obama administration sits on the sidelines, hesitant to criticize the Egyptian government.

“We don’t want to be seen as intervening in Egyptian domestic affairs,” Pharaoh recalled a source on Capitol Hill as saying. “But it’s already happening! It’s already there and there’s nothing the United States can do to remove or minimize this perception.”

The Obama administration should push the Muslim Brotherhood to enact widespread political reforms, Pharaoh said.

After the Brotherhood began targeting Christians and other citizens, “Everyone was asking, ‘Where is the U.S.?’” Pharoah said. “The reaction by the U.S. was dreadful.”

Pharoah also expressed worry about a government-orchestrated crackdown on opposition voices and journalists.

“I don’t know what could happen with me,” Pharaoh said in response to a question from the Washington Free Beacon. “One month ago I thought it would be impossible for [the Muslim Brotherhood] to do anything.”

That is until the arrest of Egyptian talk show host Bassem Youssef, who was charged with insulting Islam and mocking Morsi.

Pharaoh now fears that he could be censored or worse for his writings, which are critical of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“I’m just a blogger,” Pharaoh said. “But what we have seen that they have been going after people randomly. You just don’t know when it will be your time.

Egypt could be spiraling towards another revolution, as dissatisfied citizens begin to sour on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“People are starting to see their true colors, especially the middle class,” Pharaoh said as he displayed pictures of bloodied liberal protestors who were abused at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood’s extremist backers.

“There’s a huge shift that’s very evident,” Pharaoh said, criticizing Morsi for ratifying a new constitution that liberal critics have dubbed a dangerous Islamist document.

“This constitution has to be taken and if you don’t have toilet paper you can use it,” Pharaoh said.

“Long live the descendants of apes and pigs,” Khalid Muntasir sarcastically wrote in the daily al-Watan, a bold jab at Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi who famously referred to Jews as descendants of apes and pigs in a widely seen video.

Muntasir based his column on the recent establishment of a foundation in the United States aimed at encouraging research in the life sciences by awarding prize winners $3 million each, compared to $1.1 million that goes with a Nobel Prize.

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation was established by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google; and Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire and Internet investor.

All three are Jewish, Muntasir noted.

“Who is more conscionable, moral, and loves life and his fellow man? Is it these three Jews who contribute to science, health, happiness, and the improvement of life, or [al Qaeda leaders] bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar?” Muntasir asked in his column according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors the press in the Middle East.

He compared the life-changing scholarship pursued by the scientific award winners with the scholarship of “those whom (Muslims) call scholars merely because they memorized 100 old books and can recite them without interpreting or even understanding them.”

While reading an article about the ceremony at which the first 11 prize winners were awarded $33 million for their work in fields like molecular biology and genetics, wrote Muntasir, he also watched a video from a friend showing a lecture by “an important [Muslim] speaker” on the benefits of having a beard for treating impotence.

“I closed the article, shut the computer, sighed and said: ‘It’s no use. … The voice of the sheikh in the neighboring mosque rose and echoed as he cursed the Jews, descendants of apes and pigs … while the worshipers rejoiced.’”

[Youssef was] summoned for questioning by Egypt’s public prosecutor after an arrest warrant was issued on accusations of insulting Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the Islamic faith. Youssef appeared in court on Sunday where he posted a $2,200 bail on three lawsuits filed against him, according to CNN. He wrote on Twitter that there was a fourth pending, but that no date had been given for an investigation. Youssef has been sued before, but this is the first time the prosecutor has followed up with legal action. …

‘The Program,’ is watched by a reported 30 million viewers across the Middle East. Per the BBC, sketches in which Youssef put Morsi’s image on a pillow and separately portrayed him as a pharaoh dubbed “Super Morsi,” so angered one Islamist lawyer that it resulted in a formal complaint leading to the warrant this weekend. …

Youssef’s arrest comes as the Morsi government has been accused of trying to stifle free speech.

According to U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports, the government of President Mohamed Morsi is covertly taking steps to take control over the pro-Western military and the police forces as part of a campaign to solidify Islamist control.

Egypt for decades had banned the Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islamist groups from both the military and police academies after Islamic terrorists in the military assassinated Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat in 1981.

The Egyptian military also for decades has maintained close ties to the U.S. military. Analysts in the U.S. intelligence community and the military are viewing the introduction of Islamists into the national military academy, disclosed last week, with concern.

Muslim Brotherhood members and hardline Salafi groups are regarded as dedicated first to jihad, or holy war, and other Islamist principles rather than to the country.

“Any opening of the Egyptian military to Islamist elements would be a big and complicated change,” said one U.S. official. “It’s not clear how it would be managed or how well the rank and file would absorb it.”

Disclosure that the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamists are now being admitted to the military academy was made public March 19 in Egyptian news reports.

The head of the military academy, Ismat Murad, told reporters the new batch of Islamist students included the nephew of Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials said intelligence agencies are investigating reports that Morsi recently concluded a secret agreement with the Palestinian terror group Hamas, another disturbing sign the Egyptian government is shifting away from its former pro-Western stance and toward radical Islam.

There are concerns the agreement involves collusion between the Muslim Brotherhood and a plan to settle Palestinians in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Hamas militants in recent days have attacked Egyptian troops engaged in demolishing tunnels from the Sinai into Israel. Hamas has asked the Egyptian government to halt the tunnel demolition. The tunnels are a major source of covert support into Gaza.

Morsi was elected president last year. His Freedom and Justice Party was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, an anti-democratic Islamic political movement whose motto states, “Jihad is our way.” The group claims to be nonviolent but has spawned numerous Islamic terror organizations including al Qaeda.

Under Morsi, the Egyptian government has appointed hardline Islamists as presidential advisers and assistants, including members of the Salafist Al-Nour Party.

In addition to the military academy, Cairo also is taking steps to Islamicize the police forces.

According to recent reports, the Muslim Brotherhood is planning to restructure the Egyptian Interior Ministry. The restructuring is said to include plans to place Brotherhood members in key ministry positions.

On the secret agreement with Hamas, Egyptian daily Al-Watan published documents in early February purportedly exposing a secret agreement between the government and Hamas. One document stated that Hamas’ military wing was sending militants to Egypt to defend the current regime from supporters of the ousted Mubarak government.

A second document was written by a Qatari foreign affairs official granting Hamas $250 million to support Morsi.

The Morsi administration has agreed to several construction deals in Gaza, along with security and intelligence-sharing agreements with Hamas.

Morsi also has sought closer ties to Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Cairo in February. Intelligence officials said the two intelligence services also are collaborating.

Many Persian Gulf states are worried about the threat to their regimes posed by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, with the exception of Qatar emerging as a connection point for Brotherhood’s expansion efforts.

In Saudi Arabia, several Islamist Saudi clerics are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood transformation in Egypt, putting them at odds with Riyadh’s opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood government there.

There are concerns that Egypt will create religious police along the lines of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, as the Sharia-law enforcement police are called.

Thousands of police in Egypt went on strike to protest the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist efforts earlier this month. Riots broke out March 22 between pro- and anti-Muslim Brotherhood protesters. The police went back to work after the government said it would bring in contractors, raising fears of further Islamicization.

The Brotherhood announced it planned to form vigilante groups to prevent attacks on Islamists.

An Egyptian military adviser went public with concerns about Muslim Brotherhood activities in Egypt on March 11. Maj. Gen. Abd-al-Munim Katu, an adviser to the Egyptian Armed Forces Morale Affairs Department, told the Dubai news outlet Al Bayan Online that the military is resisting Morsi’s Islamicization efforts.

Specifically, Katu said the Muslim Brotherhood was pressuring Egypt’s Defense Minister Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi to ignore the Sinai tunneling into Gaza.

“I think that the current situation in Egypt is alarming and confused, in general,” Katu said.

Asked if Morsi will complete his term as president, Tatu said: “The vision is blurry. Indicators suggest that he may not be able to complete his term. The people have legitimate demands, but the Muslim Brothers are busy seizing control of the joints of the state. The gap between the two parties is widening.”

The Obama administration, whose religious outreach advisers include several Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, is not directly challenging the far-reaching campaign of Islamicization being carried out by the Morsi government in Egypt.

Instead the administration adopted conciliatory policies toward the current government in Egypt. The administration hopes to continue working with Egypt’s government but has not pressured Cairo into making needed democratic reforms, U.S. officials said.

Secretary of State John Kerry visited Cairo March 4 and mentioned U.S. hopes for democratic reform. He also announced the release of $250 million in U.S. aid out of $1 billion promised by President Barack Obama after Egypt’s revolution overthrew long-time ally Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak last year.

Kerry said he urged Morsi to initiate “homegrown reforms.”

Pro-democracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square carried banners during the visit that read “Kerry, member of the Brotherhood,” and “Kerry, you are not welcome here.”

Analysts have compared Obama’s policy toward Egypt to those of President Jimmy Carter who in the late 1970s tacitly supported Iran’s exiled radical cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. Carter eventually abandoned the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, and paved the way for 1978 revolution that brought the current hardline Islamist state in Tehran into power, a regime that is now on the verge of developing nuclear weapons for its large ballistic missile force.

Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, said Obama’s foreign policy has been accurately described as “Jimmy Carter’s policies on steroids.”

“What’s happening in Egypt today with the Muslim Brotherhood takeover and the ascendancy of Islamist throughout the Middle East and North Africa, makes Jimmy Carter’s debacle in Iran pale by comparison,” Gaffney said.

This taxpayer aid constitutes a “poll tax” that America must pay to placate the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Khaled Said, a cleric who serves as the official spokesman for the country’s Salafi Front, an extremist political party that has called for Islamic law in Egypt.

“They pay so that we will let them be,” Said stated in a recent interview on Egyptian television.

Said’s remarks come on the heels of Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement that the United States has allocated another $250 million in aid to Egypt.

“If the revolution declares a framework for dealing with the West and America – they will accept it, kiss our hands, and double the aid they give us,” Said said during his television appearance, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “We consider this aid to be jizya [poll tax], not regular aid.”

The United States is obligated to pay millions in aid, said Said, who frequently appears on Egyptian television toeing the radical Salafi line.

“The aid the Americans give us is the jizya tax they have to pay?” an interviewer asked.

“Yes, it is,” Said replied. “They pay it for the right of passage through our airspace and territorial waters.”

“Is this the rhetoric of the revolution?” the interviewer asked

“It certainly is,” Said responded.

Egypt has imposed this aid payment on America, Said said.

“We must strive to realize the goals of the revolution, and to establish a sovereign, Arab Islamic state in Egypt,” he said. “Then this state will impose payment of aid upon America as jizya, in exchange for allowing it to realize its interests—the ones that we approve, get it?

“They must pay reparations for destroying our country and the Islamic nation—them and others in the West—so that we will agree to cooperate with them,” Said added.

“It’s significant that this sheik is willing to say this publicly,” said David Reaboi, vice president for strategic communications at the Center for Security Policy. “Maybe he’s savvy enough to know US media, for the most part, is allergic to understanding or even presenting what’s said in Islamic societies in their shariah or Muslim contexts.”

The comments are important “because it’s incomprehensible divorced of its meaning in Islamic law,” Reaboi said. “In covering it at all, the media is forced to try to explain what he’s saying in Islamic legal terms—something they’ve gone through great pains to both avoid and obfuscate. The sheik, communicating this to both his followers and the wider Islamic world, is heard very clearly.”

The hackers claimed late Friday that they have obtained and released personal information relating to 35,000 Israeli government officials, including politicians, military leaders, and police officers, according to a Twitter feed associated with the hackers.

A comprehensive spreadsheet purporting to include the information of all 35,000 Israeli officials was published by the website Cryptome, though it did not independently verify the information.

The coalition of hackers appears to have ties to the Iranian government, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and the terror group Hezbollah, according to a report published by Cryptome.

The hackers have united under the banner of online movement called “OpIsrael.”

Their stated goal is to “remove the Israel from WWW (World Wide Web),” according to The Hackers Post, which has been following the group’s activities targeting Israel.

“It looks like hacker target [sic] different Israeli servers and hacked the websites,” Hackers Post reported.

The anti-Israel hackers say they perpetrated their attacks to protest treatment of the Palestinians.

“The reason for hacking Israeli websites was to raise voice of Palestine’s [sic] who are under hell created by Israel and left a deface page [on the hacked websites] displaying images of Palestinians affected by Israeli shelling,” the Hackers Post wrote.

Hackers left vitriolic and offensive messages on the websites they accessed, according to the Hackers Post.

“We Not Forgive [sic] What You Have Done To Our Family !!! Long Live Palestine!!” stated one hacker’s message.

A Turkish group may be responsible for publicly releasing the data associated with thousands of Israeli officials, according to the Kremlin-funded Russian propaganda outlet RT.

“The data was released by a hacker team going by the name of ‘The Red Hack,’ a Turkish group, while the direct denial-of-service attack targeted at Mossad was attributed to another group operating under the moniker ‘Sektor 404,’ RT reported.

It is believed that the loosely tied together hackers are gearing up to launch a major cyber strike against Israel on April 7.

Internet users that claim to be affiliated with Anonymous have carried out attacks against Israel in the past. A similar hack occurred in November of last year.

“The hacking teams have decided to unite against Israel as one entity and that Israel should be getting prepared to be ‘erased’ from the Internet,” an Anonymous member told the Hackers Post earlier this month.

Cryptome’s analysis of the hacking collective found that they have loosely united based on their distaste for Israel.

“Our analysis to the moment shows not much of coordination [sic] between these groups contrary to the popular belief and the sum of human resources all together to the best of our current analysis is not more than 50 individuals,” Crytome’s report stated.

“The collectives with Arab leanings are not much advanced,” the report said. “The teams with Pakistani, Syrians and Lebanese members are more advanced and reported to have ties with governments. Iranian teams are just using the situation to harm Israel and U.S interests and reported to be directly funded by IRGC and MOIS, the Iranian Intelligence.”