Swimming Upstream

We’re back from a two-week plus trip to Egypt and Israel that was interesting and enlightening. First off, we want to thank and compliment the Egyptians for their success in making our visit so smooth. The tourist corridor of Egypt from the Abu Simbal monuments to the Cairo airport is a first world experience in competence and efficiency. We have had more travel confusion in Italy. The whole Nile corridor operates on money time, that zone where people come together to make a profit and put ideology aside. The airports are spotless, the customs’ bureaucrats efficient, the tourist sites organized and the myriad tourist personnel bright and professional. These tourism industry jobs are highly coveted and we were told, support entire Egyptian families.


"Sailing in the money zone"


For part of the trip we traveled in a self-formed group of Egyptians, Tunisians, Germans and Hungarians. These easy, casual ship-born friendships were very comfortable and useful. They culminated in a trip to the Aswan spice market led by two head covered Egyptians. That was an unforgettable reminder of how the cosmopolitan warmth of Egyptians can so easily resurface.

When we returned to Cairo however, there was menace in the air. The Egyptian and Algerian soccer teams were locked in a high stakes playoff for the World Cup. Like all soccer hooliganism, it spread its violence to Egypt, Algeria and in the Sudan where the final game was played. Ambassadors were summoned, we saw rioting against the Algerian embassy and a heavy Egyptian police response.

Our tourist idyll in the land of the Pharos came down to earth a bit when we read in an Egyptian newspaper that a learned cleric was sure that the “Zionists were behind the disorder and that the Egyptians and Algerians had better close ranks against this real threat.” Additionally, a blog was reprinted in the Egyptian newspaper that explained, “everyone knows that the Jews are behind the international soccer league and manipulate the world of soccer for their own purposes.” In other words, the Egyptian and Algerian youths had to suppress their youthful nationalism and home country team worship for the greater struggle of the Palestinians.

This of course is the constant daily insidious silliness that prevents the Muslim world from seeing and dealing with reality. Before we left there was a horrific bombing in the popular Meena market of Peshawar. Hundreds of women and children were killed and hundreds more wounded. The targets were merchants who sold “immodest” underwear to women. Pakistan had never seen such savagery. The country was reeling from the level of carnage and wonton cruelty. In interviews afterwards the inevitable occurred. Pakistanis told a reporter it could not have been the work of Muslim fundamentalists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban. No Muslim could do such a thing. It had to be Mossad or the work of India. Despite all evidence to the contrary, including leaflets beforehand from the Taliban warning the offending shopkeepers of the consequences, Pakistanis drew a different conclusion.

Salah Ezz el-Din is the Bernie Madoff of Hezbollah Lebanon. He evidently ran a Ponzi scheme that fleeced thousands of Shia in Southern Lebanon. They gave him their life savings to invest in the worldwide commodity markets that he could skillfully manipulate. When it all came crashing down and the newly impoverished villagers were asked about it, guess what, they blamed the Israelis and the Mossad. No Muslim could ever defraud his fellow religionists like that. Salah Ezz had to be controlled by the Jews. Were this belief system not so tragic it would be comical, but tragic it is because it will retard Muslim progress. The rage that is behind it will become more pressurized resulting in more dangerous explosions like 9/11 and the cartoon outbreak. When there is no connection to cause and effect, when a populous believes that its destiny is in unseen hands, an anger born of despair builds. Since in the Arab world there is no free election, this anger is purposefully deflected from the failed totalitarian regimes. In the non-Arab Muslim world of South East Asia it serves a different purpose: deflecting the failure to deliver a viable economic system to lift living standards.

How much longer this can go on is anyone’s guess. The world of the Internet and the blogsphere is a powerful one to the youth of the Muslim world. The effort to control and censor the web is not just a Chinese priority. The Iranians too are trying to wall off Facebook as well as satellite television. They also keep the drumbeat of blaming everything on the Jews and the Zionists at defining levels. Muslim regimes must make their citizens deaf to the present as well as the future. This is no easy task. The lure of the internet café and the internet itself where an entire kaleidoscopic of new world images and ideas opens up, is irrepressible.

"Looking past the sensors"


Thirty-eight years ago I stopped to get some gas in one of the most remote villages in the mountains of Morocco. There were at least fifty young men just milling around in the middle of the day, clearly they had no work. One of them came up to me an asked ever so politely how much an hour could he make in America. When I told him he seemed amazed. He wanted to go and get that wage, he wanted out of his Jalaiba and the stifling economy of his country.

On our boat and amongst our tour guides in Egypt, I experienced the same thing all these years later. The Egyptian youth wanted a better life. One of them asked me advice about how to advance and the skills and outlook he would need to “rise up.” Not in Jihad, but in the career ladder of the hospitality industry.

The greatest divide in the Arab/Muslim world now may not be between the Sunni or Shia, it may be between the governments and the governed. The repression of reality in which Israel and the Jews seem to play the central role of narcotic cannot end well for anyone. The longer this goes on, the greater the gulf will be between the free media, free expression west and the repressed Muslim world. The more information is withheld from them, the greater the anger and the more powerful the revolt when they realize they have been had.

Next up the trip to Israel.