Today being Wednesday, I am not sure which country — the US or Masr — wins the prize for the more grotesque news.
One thing for sure, though, is that you will not find a single mention in Al-Ahram of al-Naksah (an Arabic euphemism that means the “Setback”), during a week that marks the 71st anniversary of the catastrophic Six-Day war, whose disastrous consequences still affect the ME today (see Golan Heights, West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Lebanon).
Egypt of course is lately getting a shitload of bad press in America (such as this recent Washington Post Opinion piece) due to the vicious arrests of various women for speaking freely (bad idea: no one in Egypt is free, as Mona el-Mazboh has learned after posting this) or being accused of improbable crimes.
Definitely Egypt seems to have little compunction nowadays for slapping bracelets on Americans (and other Westerners, such as this clueless UK young woman, who at least wasn’t murdered and left to rot on a desert road outside Cairo) and subjecting them to its kangaroo courts on the slightest pretext, should the sissy regime feel threatened in any way, or need to the show the world how fuerte it is — something all tourists ought to keep in mind before being lured by images of sex-tape scandal Benzi cavorting in Hurghada and Marsa Alam, while fasting, to promote Red Sea tourism.
Meanwhile America is watching it’s very own little Hitler continue to make the sort of power grabs of which Der Führer would have been justly proud.
Speaking of Adolph, probably few remember today that much of Egypt (or at least, its educated, young, nationalistic class in Cairo) during WW2 was in favor of the Nazis, on the theory that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (This despicable love of brown-shirtism was of course recently echoed by the new US ambassador to Deutschland. as noted two days ago by the Beeb.)
For a while, it seemed like the Desert Fox and his Panzer Unit would be rolling down the Alexandria corniche and doing their gymnastik routines in Montazah Palace.
But of course Monty and his brave lads stood in his way (to this day, my favorite movie of that time remains Five Graves to Cairo, with the peerless Erich von Stroheim).
I have visited El Alamein many times, but not recently — the last being in the mid 90s (see top pic).
It was, then, a place of quiet reflection as to what happened in the desert, so many years ago now — the battlefields long silent, but the Tommies who gave their lives there still remembered, when I last went, by English families who continued to leave flowers every year on the floor by the Memorial Wall, which lists the names of the 12,000 servicemen who fought the advance of Fascism in the Middle East.
And now jolly Egypt has decided to build a Disney World not far from this former battlefield!
This undignified, dodgy project, which is being spearheaded by an opaque outfit called “Entertainment World Company” (try to Google it, and you will find nothing), is part of some US-Saudi investment project in Sidi Heneish (about 145 km west of El Alamein: okay, so not that close, but still part of the Western Desert theater of operations).
Then again, how did Carlsberg fare in filching footage from the immortal UK cinema classic Ice Cold in Alex for this advert?
Once this whole area, from Alex to the Libyan border, was a beautiful untouched Mediterranean coastline, populated mainly by Bedouin. It is now called the Sahel and is a favorite playground for the progeny of the grifter Princes of Vulgarity who are now maskeen el balad.
It’s called Progress, mon; just like the commercial flights, which are discreetly unlisted on CAI’s FIDS, that you can take nowadays from Cairo to Tel Aviv, despite the thousands of Egyptian soldiers who died in the turkey shoot that was Sinai and the millions of Palestinians who rot in Occupied Palestine today.
UPDATE: Karim leaves Egypt.
Leaving Amerika 