Headline of the Day: "The Purple Prose of Cairo"

Great wordplay with a movie title, not to mention all too fitting for the content. Here's a blurb from the substance:

In the battle of Gaza, Egypt is the fact-checker. Egypt is the referee. Egypt is the peacemaker.

That’s what Egypt says.  But Egypt is none of these things. What Egypt has done, at best, is to douse a fire that was ignited and fed by Egypt.

According to the New York Times, at a weekend briefing in Cairo, Egyptian officials “sought to blame Israel for the conflict while at the same time maintaining Egypt’s role as an intermediary pressing both sides for peace.” A senior Egyptian official, quoted by the Times, accused the West of “double standards” for embracing Israel’s, but not Gaza’s, right to self-defense. The official said “the blame should be directed toward the occupation,” and he chided Western media for reporting that Hamas had fired “rockets” when in fact Hamas was only launching crude “projectiles.” On Tuesday, Egypt’s state news agency boasted that thanks to the ceaseless diplomatic toil of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, “the farce of Israeli aggression” would soon end.

Oh, yes. Do tell us all about farces, projectiles, aggression, blame, and double standards.