We are to join in a chorus of condemnation. Jointly, Muslims and Christians, government and opposition, Church and Mosque, clerics and laypeople all of us are going to stand up and with a single voice declare unequivocal denunciation of al-Qaeda, Islamist militants, and Muslim fanatics of every shade, hue and color; some of us will even go the extra mile to denounce salafi Islam, Islamic fundamentalism as a whole, and the Wahabi Islam which, presumably, is a Saudi import wholly alien to our Egyptian national culture.
And once again were going to declare the eternal unity of the twin elements of the nation, and hearken back the Revolution of 1919, with its hoisted banner showing the crescent embracing the cross, and giving symbolic expression to that unbreakable bond.
Much of it will be sheer hypocrisy; a great deal of it will be variously nuanced so as keep, just below the surface, the heaps of narrow-minded prejudice, flagrant double standard and, indeed, bigotry that holds in its grip so many of the participants in the condemnations.
All of it will be to no avail. Weve been here before; weve done exactly that, yet the massacres continue, each more horrible than the one before it, and the bigotry and intolerance spread deeper and wider into every nook and cranny of our society. It is not easy to empty Egypt of its Christians; theyve been here for as long as there has been Christianity in the world. Close to a millennium and half of Muslim rule did not eradicate the nations Christian community, rather it maintained it sufficiently strong and sufficiently vigorous so as to play a crucial role in shaping the national, political and cultural identity of modern Egypt.
Yet now, two centuries after the birth of the modern Egyptian nation state, and as we embark on the second decade of the 21stcentury, the previously unheard of seems no longer beyond imagining: a Christian-free Egypt, one where the cross will have slipped out of the crescents embrace, and off the flag symbolizing our modern national identity. I hope that if and when that day comes I will have been long dead, but dead or alive, this will be an Egypt which I do not recognize and to which I have no desire to belong.
I am no Zola, but I too can accuse. And its not the blood thirsty criminals of al-Qaeda or whatever other gang of hoodlums involved in the horror of Alexandria that I am concerned with.
I accuse a government that seems to think that by outbidding the Islamists it will also outflank them.
I accuse the host of MPs and government officials who cannot help but take their own personal bigotries along to the parliament, or to the multitude of government bodies, national and local, from which they exercise unchecked, brutal yet at the same time hopelessly inept authority.
I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government.
But most of all, I accuse the millions of supposedly moderate Muslims among us; those whove been growing more and more prejudiced, inclusive and narrow minded with every passing year.
I accuse those among us who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Greater Cairo.
Ive been around, and I have heard you speak, in your offices, in your clubs, at your dinner parties: The Copts must be taught a lesson, the Copts are growing more arrogant, the Copts are holding secret conversions of Muslims, and in the same breath, the Copts are preventing Christian women from converting to Islam, kidnapping them, and locking them up in monasteries.
I accuse you all, because in your bigoted blindness you cannot even see the violence to logic and sheer common sense that you commit; that you dare accuse the whole world of using a double standard against us, and are, at the same time, wholly incapable of showing a minimum awareness of your own blatant double standard.
And finally, I accuse the liberal intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian who, whether complicit, afraid, or simply unwilling to do or say anything that may displease the masses, have stood aside, finding it sufficient to join in one futile chorus of denunciation following another, even as the massacres spread wider, and grow more horrifying.
A few years ago I wrote in the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, commenting on a columnist in one of the Egyptian papers. The columnist, whose name Ive since forgotten, wrote lauding the patriotism of an Egyptian Copt who had himself written saying that he would rather be killed at the hands of his Muslim brethren than seek American intervention to save him.
Addressing myself to the patriotic Copt, I simply asked him the question: where does his willingness for self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation stop. Giving his own life may be quite a noble, even laudable endeavor, but is he also willing to give up the lives of his children, wife, mother? How many Egyptian Christians, I asked him, are you willing to sacrifice before you call upon outside intervention, a million, two, three, all of them?
Our options, I said then and continue to say today are not so impoverished and lacking in imagination and resolve that we are obliged to choose between having Egyptian Copts killed, individually or en masse, or run to Uncle Sam. Is it really so difficult to conceive of ourselves as rational human beings with a minimum of backbone so as to act to determine our fate, the fate of our nation?
That, indeed, is the only option we have before us, and we better grasp it, before its too late.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
01/02/2011 07:15 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[4 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
HIS bodyguard rates just went through the roof.
The next stage in the world's CO2 emissions-trading scheme will begin in two years. Everyone agrees that the rulebook is complicated and that the costs for industry will be enormous. But nobody knows if the system will really help the environment -- or merely create a burdensome bureaucracy. A complex taxing scheme we here in the US can hopefully avoid.
Until recently, California's Central Valley was one of the nation's most productive agricultural regions. Not only did it feed itself, the state of California, and the entire country, it also produced exports to other nations. That kind of enterprise employed a lot of people in Central California, from farm hands to wholesalers, and created a high standard of living.
That continued right up to the moment that the federal government got more concerned over the Delta smelt, a small, inedible fish, than feeding people. A court order cut off water deliveries for seven months out of the year to the Central Valley at the same time a drought hit, and the combination turned a once-fertile breadbasket to the world into a Dust Bowl -- or as Investors Business Daily suggests, a government-initiated agricultural disaster on the same order as Zimbabwe today or Ukraine in the 1930s. Monica Showalter reports that the region that once fed the world now faces widespread hunger as a result:
#1
This is entirely the result of federal government intervention in agriculture, which might be understandable if it was intended to help agriculture.
Where in the US constitution is the Federal Government given power over agriculture?
Posted by: john frum ||
01/02/2011 7:10 Comments ||
Top||
#2
One man, and one man alone, bears full responsibility for this catastrophe. Federal judge Oliver Winston Wanger.
#5
And plus the extinction of that Delta Smelt a perfectly natural process - especially if the species is so specialized that it cannot adopt to changing conditions or is specific to one particular area or stream.
But then it's not about the environment for Environmentalists anymore (if it ever has been) - its about destroying industries.
#7
Monica Showalter reports that the region that once fed the world now faces widespread hunger as a result:
This being the US of A, the only hungry people around are those that missed their lunch hour during a hectic workday, or bums who sold their monthly food stamp allowance for drugs. The fact is that the indigent get $200 per person to spend on food every month. $200 does not buy a lot of filet mignon, but it does buy large amounts of chicken, pork, grains and spices for preparing cooked food.
#8
Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece over at National Review on the current state of central valley. It is becoming like the third world there. Nice work Sacramento!
#1
Superficially, it looks like a great idea. No way in hell we could do it just 9 years from now. Our government & politicians are expertly organized to block anything as good as this, and the financial resources are all going elsewhere. Perhaps the finances aren't even there to be redirected.
If the US experiences a real financial collapse, it could become 'energy independent' almost overnight. The US would be compelled to burn what it has on hand & stop importing any form of energy.
#4
Imagine if Obama / Congress had used the stimulus to build a 100 standard design nuclear plants and completed the Yucca mountain storage facility. We'd have 100 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel generating capacity coming online now instead of ... essentially nothing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
