For reasons I barely understand, the mixing of metaphors is avoided in the English language more than any other language I am familiar with. But the mixing is done anyway even in English, and when it is done well, it can bring joy to the author and be informative as well as entertaining to the reader. Where things can go wrong, however, is when the metaphors which are used in the mix clash with each other rather than blend together; and this may be the reason why the practice is avoided in the first place. One such clash happened to Bret Stephens, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal who published a piece on October 11, 2011 under the title: “Egypt's Silhouette of Fire” and the subtitle: “Sectarian violence flares on the streets of Cairo.”
To be fair to Stephens, he did not create the situations that led him to do the wrong kind of mixing; they were there and he inherited them. Of course, he should have tried to fully internalize them before using them but he did not and the column went the way that it did. One of the metaphors he uses describes Egypt as a quiet place that nevertheless contains a few danger zones. The other metaphor describes Egypt as an apocalyptic hell that is ready to explode if it has not done so already. And this would be in line with the philosophy of ambiguity that the Jewish leaders have adopted a long time ago in their quest to have it both ways all the time. Thus, it was necessary for the young columnist to remain within the confines of a method that the Jewish propaganda machine had put together and began to use before his time.
What happened then was that the Jewish machine had secured a full and absolute monopoly on the media megaphones both in the print world and the audio-visuals. And there was no way for people like yours truly to push back as we were all blacklisted, a situation that lasted until the internet came along and began to change things. In the meantime, the Jewish media had a free hand to create exaggerated narratives for their side of the story; to create false narratives they attributed to the Arab side of the story and to create fantastic narratives they told the audience were the result of the dialogues they were having with the Arabs. But the whole thing was pure fiction from A to Z, and those of us who knew better were not allowed to communicate this reality to a public that didn't know we existed. And this was an experience that lasted forty years inside the intellectual toilet bowl that is the pride of Jewish democracy.
But where did the fiction come from? Well, the prototypes most favored by the Jewish media characters come out of their insatiable desire to believe that the people of world have nothing better to do than think of the Jews and of Israel all day long. They fantasize that the angels among these people think of the Jews as being models of perfection while the anti-Semites among them think of the Jews and Israel as being models of evil, a situation that results in everyone on earth being emotionally connected to the Jews by love or by hate. They further fantasize that the angels among these people seek ways to remain on the good side of the Jews by trying to please them at every turn while the anti-Semites seek ways to annihilate Israel and the Jews at every moment of their waking hours – and maybe during their sleep too.
An example of this sort of fiction and of thinking is encountered in the first paragraph of the Stephens column where he reports the following: “In the wake of Sunday's clashes … Egyptian Prime Minister ... wasted no time hinting at the culprit. 'What's happening is not sectarian tension,' he said. 'there are hidden hands involved and we will not leave them.'” This done, the writer hastens to explain the thing by adding his two cents worth. He says this: “Translation from the Absurdic: It's a Zio-American plot.” He makes this assertion even though there is nothing in the statement of the Egyptian Prime Minister -- as he reported it himself – about Zion or America. And this is typical of immature characters who cannot live without telling themselves that they are the center of attention whether they are or they are not.
But having falsely accused the Egyptians of seeing a Zio-American under every desk, he now feels the need to counter and to neutralize the implication of that picture. He does it by painting the image of an Egypt that is placid. Here is how he puts it in the form of a metaphor: “...picture Egypt as a vacant lot in which … combustible elements … sit in varying degrees of proximity to one another, while the boys who play in the lot light cigarettes. Chances are, something will catch fire … if something does, all of it will.” As to what the Egyptians really said about the disturbances, an official explanation was given that blamed the usual suspects.
Like everywhere else in the world, Egypt, which is a nation of 80 million people, has soccer hooligans, provocateurs, anarchists and what have you. When a disturbance occurs somewhere in the country for whatever reason, those characters see it as an opportunity to join the fray and to amplify the chaos. This happened on a number of occasions since the days when the textile workers staged a civil disobedience in the industrial city of Mahalla El Kobra and were joined by anarchists that turned the peaceful protest into violent clashes.
Still, Egypt remains an unusually peaceful place except for the road accidents that claim 120 people a week on average. And when you come right down to it, you find that Bret Stephens and those who make up the Jewish propaganda machine are aware of this. In fact, when a disturbance took place near the Israeli embassy in Cairo a few months ago, and when talk began to surface blaming the incident on Israel's shooting of Egyptian border guards in the Sinai, every Jew that wrote or said something about the incident played down the significance of the disturbance and attributed it to soccer hooligans.
If this is the reality of Egypt, if the Jewish propaganda machine is aware of it and if that machine is forced by circumstances to paint a true picture of the country once in a while, why did the columnist feel compelled to go on and paint the following apocalyptic picture: “The ... Copts … will have to … fight for themselves in a country that suspects their allegiance. It's a recipe for repression and murder on a mass scale. But even then it's only one of Egypt's several unfolding tragedies.” Why did he make a metaphoric flip that ended up clashing with the first metaphor? The answer to this question is simple as much as it has profound implications. It is that Bret Stephens is expressing a wishful thinking, one that also belongs to the Jewish leaders, most of whom are pessimistic about the future.
These people are paranoid about what will happen to the Jews and to Israel, and they look forward to the day when Egypt will again suffer as much as it did during the fictitious plagues mentioned in the Old Testament. And these were the events that supposedly made possible the Exodus of the Jews out of Egypt thus gave birth to the Jewish nation. And this is what makes hating Egypt the rock upon which the Jewish religion was fashioned, where it always stood and where it stands now. Those who cannot carry this hate in their hearts at all time are told they have ceased to be Jews and counseled to leave the faith. Simply put, a Jew is defined as someone who hates Egypt by religious decree and wishes to see it destroyed by religious dogma.
Stephens goes on to describe what happened during the worst few minutes of the Sunday disturbances in Cairo and uses the events as a springboard to jump to the following statements, all of which are exaggerated fiction with less than a scintilla of truth in them: “...the sequence of events captures the broader collapse of authority throughout Egypt … regional officials who will not stand up to … mobs. Furious Coptic Youth who no longer accept the cautious dictations of their elders. Conscript soldiers not afraid to disobey their orders. A … media that traffics in incitement...” But even if all of this were true, when you compare it to what happens everywhere else in the world, it would not amount to the apocalypse that the Jewish propaganda machine dreams to see befall Egypt. And so, to ratchet up the sense of doom and urgency, the author does more dreaming. He says this: “And that's not the half of it. The Sinai is becoming another version of Yemen … The economy has registered two ... quarters of ... negative growth … The ... democratic coalition ... consists of 27 separate parties … There are estimates that 100,000 Copts have fled Egypt since the ... revolution; the number is probably exaggerated, but the trend line is clear.” And so you ask if this is the apocalypse yet, and the answer is no; there is not enough here to constitute an apocalypse.
But what else is there for a Jewish columnist to say? Well, there is the sledge hammer approach to use and this is how he uses it: “Will the Middle East be emptied of its Christians, like the earlier pogroms emptied the Middle East of its Jews?” Pogrom and Holocaust are the two hammers they use when all else fails. But he posed a question in two parts and the question must be answered. To answer the first part, no this will not happen because no Arab country has asked the other countries to recognize it as a Muslim state the way that Israel, for example, has asked to be recognized as a Jewish state. And not one Arab foreign minister has advocated the kicking of non-Muslims out of the country the way that Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister of Israel has done with regard to the non-Jews who have lived there since the beginning of time. Israel is being emptied of its Christians and Muslims as a deliberate policy of the governing regime but nothing like this is happening in the Arab or Muslim countries and never will they happen.
As to the second part of the question, let me begin by relating what happened a few years ago. A clash took place somewhere in the world where 7 Jewish individuals were killed. Right away someone (probably a rabbi) jumped in front of the cameras and spoke of the 7 dead people that represent the 7 million Jews who were exterminated in the Holocaust. For a while after that, the media spoke of the 7 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Then someone realized that quoting this new figure was not going too well with the various audiences because the documentation of history had advanced so much, you could no longer run around and spew any number of dead Jews that came to mind just to suit the poetry of the moment. Thus, everyone went back to the 6 million figure where it has remained ever since.
What is significant about this story is that it warns about making false stories in the modern age. Thus, to claim that pogroms emptied the Middle East of Jews when the Jews themselves were saying until recently that they were eternally grateful to the Arab hospitality that protected them for centuries, is plain stupid. Stop for a moment and look at the consequences of making a claim like this. Most people know that the Holocaust happened and yet there are some who will deny it because they say they are tired of hearing about it and would rather say it did not happen and go on with their lives than dwell on something they are fed up getting in the face everywhere they turn. And this, my friend, says that there is nothing you can do to trivialize the Holocaust worse than talk about it incessantly, especially when you are seeking to monetize it.
With this in mind, imagine what people will do when you start telling about pogroms that never happened in an age where the veracity of every claim can easily be checked. But I shall not waste your time or mine speculating about this question; I ask this one instead: Why would someone like Bret Stephens want to reverse history with a flagrant lie like that? The answer is that he may not do it to suit the poetry of the moment but he would do it to suit the political developments of the moment. The reality is that an already bankrupt Israel which bankrupted America may soon be asked to compensate the Palestinians for what the Jewish hordes have looted from them. And so, the Jewish organizations came up with a plan to have someone else pay in their stead.
To understand how that plan was supposed to work, the reader should know that when the Jewish organizations plan something, they design it from top to bottom. That is, they ask themselves what ultimate goal (think of it as the penthouse) they wish to attain. Beginning there, they design the lower floors in a descending sequence till they reach the basement where they put down what they call the infrastructure. The aim on this occasion was to create a narrative that would show the Arab countries being indebted to the Jews who lived among them amounts of money that match what the Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe looted from the Palestinians. This would have given the Jewish leaders the basis upon which to argue for the swap of one debt with the other and call the thing even. Diabolic as the plan may have been, something funny happened to the Jewish organizations on their way to the basement of its construct.
They took their case to the United Nations where the truth started to come out; and they quickly decided to abandon the project. What came to light was that the Arabs should have done what the Russians later did which was to deny the Jews an exist visa till they paid the taxes they were owing and paid for the free education they had received. The truth had shown that the Arabs not only let the Jews go free to avoid seeing them chant: “Let my people go” as they did in front of the Russian embassies in most Western capitals, they even allowed the Jews to break the laws restricting the transfer of money out of the country. The Arabs turned a blind eye while the Jews were plundering the place, and they let them go free. A tally was then made as to who owes what to whom and the result was that Israel could never compensate the Arab countries for what the Jews had looted on their way out. It turned out that the Jews did in modern times what the ancient Jews did on their way out of Egypt; they robbed the places that nurtured them to go to the “land of milk and honey” then bragged about their exploits in biting the hands that literally fed them. What can be more Jewish than this?
With that plan shot down in flames before they could begin the construction of the infrastructure they had in mind, the Jewish leaders turned to the use of the sledge hammer in their attempt to construct another infrastructure. They began by advancing the false narrative of Jews being pogrommed in the Arab countries and they concluded that the Palestinians should do what good boys and good girls do which is to ethnic cleanse themselves out of Palestine without seeking compensation from Israel because this would be the responsibility of the Arabs. And you can see the pattern here; having bellyached for decades that the Arab countries should absorb the Palestinians who are kicked out of their homes, the Jewish leaders now say that the Arabs should compensate the Palestinians whose properties the Jews are looting. I don't know which one applies more aptly here; it may be chutzpah or it may be hubris but who cares anyway! I don't anymore.
And of course, a Jew would not be a Jew if in the end he did not tell someone what they need to do to solve all their problems, and Bret Stephens is no exception. Thus, after telling the Egyptians they are on their way to an assured apocalyptic hell, he tells them they need a savior to modernize them in the manner of the near ancient Muhammad Ali Pasha, not the more recent Gamal Abdel Nasser. Failing this, says the columnist at the Wall Street Journal, the Egyptians may end up with a messianic Ayatollah Khomeini who will be a calamity for the United States. The subtle advice here is that America should poke its nose in Egyptian affairs and see to it that these people follow his instructions.
As mentioned earlier, the mixing of metaphors can be fun for the author and be informative as well as entertaining for the audience but when you try to use the mix to have it both ways, you end up bringing together metaphors that clash. The effect will be to expose you as a practitioner of ambiguities, and the bad mix will kill your presentation. This is why the Bret Stephens column this week is worth no more than the rag in which it is published. And this is a metaphor to express the number zero.