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Will Egypt Be Too Busy to Hate?

(Ha'aretz) James Kirchick - "Give us weapons and we'll kill all the Jews." So chanted several hundred people outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo last Friday. The intense and academic debate in the West about where legitimate criticism of Israel ends and anti-Semitism begins doesn't resonate in Egypt, or anywhere in the Arab world. It would be a mistake to think that the views expressed at last week's protest are separate from the Egyptian mainstream. Anti-Semitism is the common political language in Egypt. It is the one thing on which all the major political factions can agree - from secular "liberals" to Islamists. "Anti-Semitism remains the glue holding Egypt's disparate political forces together," according to the young Egyptian writers Amr Bargisi and Samuel Tadros, whose prescient article two years ago, "Why are Egypt's 'Liberals' Anti-Semitic?," caused a stir back home. After talking to a cross section of people in Egypt, I have come to the conclusion that it is naive to think that Egyptians or, as polls indicate, the Arab world writ large will ever accept the presence of a Jewish state in their midst. Egypt has massive domestic problems on its hands, and one would think that a wrecked economy, rising Islamism, and increasing lawlessness as the result of a gutted police force would convince most Egyptians to turn inward rather than rattle for confrontation with the Zionist entity. But massive social and political dysfunctions are nothing new in the Arab world. Indeed, they are endemic. And far from convincing elites of the need to focus on self-improvement, the backwardness of Arab societies has made the appeal of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism - blame-shifting in general - all the more appealing.
2011-08-29 00:00:00
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