Never Did I Ever

Not two months ago a Lebanese friend—a woman who’s stood with fantastic bravery in opposition to the Syrian/Hezbollah puppets who have kidnapped her country over and over again—was speaking of Tahrir Square with tears in her eyes: “Never did I ever think the day would come that I would see people in the street of an Arab country demonstrating against their own government and never once burn an Israeli flag or even mention Israel.”

American Middle East “hands,” too, were disseminating that version of the Egyptian Spring as holy writ during months of celebrations over the triumph of freedom and democracy over tyranny. Doubtless many of them believed what they were saying—my Lebanese friend did so, absolutely and passionately. They certainly greeted any skepticism about the nature of the uprising with condescending dismissiveness: “This is their revolution. It has nothing to do with anything but their throwing off the shackles of a thirty-year dictatorship. No Israel, no Jews, no Palestinians. No Christians. Just Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t own this thing, either. They’re diversifying, seeking to enter the political fray, tempering their Islamism.”

Of course, revolution is perforce a messy thing, whose beauty is all in the eye of the beholder. The myth these people were peddling of enmitylessness in the Springy Cairene streets had already been debunked early in the proceedings for anyone who wished to see the truth, in meticulous reporting by John Rosenthal and others.  

But whatever. Today, at any rate, there’s no mistaking the Zionist/Jew-hatred simmering hot in the Islamist Arab heart of Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood’s insistence on abrogating the peace with Israel, the fatwa against Zionists, the death threat against the Israeli ambassador say it all. 

As for Free Egypt’s new democracy-loving leaders, they have issued a foul threat of their own (millennia of practice) to their neighbor and “peace partner”—and sole bulwark against Palestinian terror—Israel, to wit (and in rough translation): Velvet gloves, Jews, minus the iron fist, against Hamas; if not, if you go in strong and heavy and clean out the terrorists, we cannot be held responsible for the reaction of “the street.”  Now they’re bragging about Israel’s obedience. 

It remains to be seen just how long the Jewish State will tolerate the accelerating war against her by the murdering pigs who slaughter babies and turn out their mothers and their sisters to be blood whores in Gaza, ugly warnings from Pharaohland notwithstanding.

But never did I ever think the Cairene Spring would be otherwise.