Look at this passage: "I came to know Carmen Weinstein in the course of my trips to Cairo . She was far from warm and fuzzy, and I couldn't call her my friend. I found her tough, acerbic, abrasive and combative. I tried to woo her, citing my background as a fellow Cairene-Jew. But she had no use for journalists and regarded us with suspicion.”
Really? Did Carmen Weinstein regard all journalists with suspicion? Or was it only those American Jews – journalist and otherwise – who had a reputation of eating their own, and eat what they thought were their own? Time and again these people ate everyone they could lay their hands on, displaying no shame and showing no remorse. They ate them alive, ate them dead, and Carmen Weinstein was not going to be eaten alive.
That quote above was from an article authored by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, who wrote: “Almost the Last Jew of Egypt” published in the Journal on April 18, 2013. The article also came under the subtitle: “Carmen Weinstein died in Cairo , working and waiting for a time when Jews might thrive once again.”
Another passage, a little below the one I mentioned above says something about the relationship that did or did not exist between the two women. Lagnado writes this: “I once told her of the piece I longed to write about her under the headline, "The Last Jew of Egypt." What a sizzling story she could tell – how she outwitted each of the military regimes, starting with Nasser . What compromises had she made? What deals had she cut? No matter how I pleaded, she refused to cooperate.”
And this, my friend, is exactly the out-of-the-sewer mentality that Carmen Weinstein had no use for. She had no illusion that Lagnado longed to write a “sizzling” story about her, but nothing in her past or present sizzled in the way that the journalist from America wished it did. Nothing sizzled, that is, because the woman was too busy doing her job – never trying to outwit this one, cut deals with that one or make compromises with that other one.
So then, what exactly did Lucette Lagnado long to do? To guess what it might be, consider this passage: “She [Weinstein] had her enemies, including back in New York, where some in the expatriate Egyptian-Jewish community saw her as a traitor … To these expats, Carmen Weinstein was the enemy, as much as the Egyptian government that forced them into exile.” As you can see, the expats called her the enemy even though she did not merit that characterization, and they accused the Egyptian government of forcing them into exile which is a false accusation. You can be certain, my friend, that the Jewish woman from Egypt and her government were civil. And you can be certain that the expats in New York were the stuff that sewers are full of. And these were the people that Lagnado wished to entertain with a book of lies she longed to write about Carmen Weinstein.
But what was the excuse cited by the community of expats for calling the woman an enemy? It was this: “Its members attempted to retrieve religious books and Torah scrolls left behind in Egypt , where they withered. Weinstein fiercely opposed their efforts, insisting that the holy items should stay where they were and belonged to Egypt .” It is not clear from this passage whether it is the expats or the author of the article saying the scrolls withered in Egypt . But whoever it is, the author refutes the claim in several places. Here is one place: “She set out to rescue what she could, piece by piece, this old temple, that broken-down headstone.”
And there is this long passage: “Her passing comes ... as Egypt is starting to reckon with its Jewish past ... there is a surge of interest among young Egyptians in the Jews who once lived among them … Older Egyptians are nostalgic for the Egypt of their youth, they will tell you, when they enjoyed Jewish friends and co-workers. A documentary on Egypt 's Jews by filmmaker Amir Ramses premiered to acclaim in Egypt in March, and my own memoirs of my Egyptian-Jewish family sell more briskly in Cairo than in Jerusalem … Aaron Kiviat, an undergraduate in Cairo a decade ago, recalls how she had him clean abandoned synagogues and dust off gravestones.”
The author of the article piles up lie after lie, spin after spin, conjecture after conjecture then demolishes what she built up inadvertently by slipping this Freudian truth: "In the course of my interviews, I realized Weinstein harbored a fantastical dream that someday the Jews would return ... She told Mr. Kiviat, now married in Seattle, to come back with his family." Yes, the Jews could have returned to the Egypt they left on their own free will as did many others (including my family) to pursue more promising opportunities elsewhere.
People do that everywhere and they do it all the time. A few return to the place of their birth when things get better but that's only very few. In fact, when the late President Sadat adopted the policy of economic “infetah” which means economic opening, and thinking that Egypt was about to experience the sort of growth that China is now enjoying, he invited all Egyptians, including the Jews, to return to Egypt but very few did. No one in my family took up the offer, and neither did Mr. Kiviat despite the pleadings of his friend Carmen Weinstein. That was his choice as it was ours – and there is nothing wrong with that.
What remains undeniable, however, is that Lucette Lagnado could not eat Carmen Weinstein alive. And this is why she is now eating her dead. This is not ordinary cannibalism; it is ghoulish cannibalism.
These people ought to stop living like that.