If it is true what they say about Cleopatra, mainly that she
enjoyed the attention of the people who surrounded her; we must take it that
she would have enjoyed the attention that Egypt is receiving these days.
Don't get me wrong, Egypt was receiving attention before – even too much of it,
I would say – but it was the wrong kind of attention; the sort that would have
enervated Cleopatra.
Nothing has changed in the past half century to alter the
importance of Egypt .
The reality is that the country is no more and no less crucial today than it
was then, but something has changed in the way that it is now described by
members of the Anglophone chattering classes worldwide.
Half a century ago, the big stories did not come out of Egypt or even
the Middle Eastern region. They came out of America where some folks wanted to
keep people of a different skin color out of what they claimed were their
schools, and out of the front end of what they claimed were their buses. The
events surrounding that situation provided the world with moments of great
human drama until a few years later when Israel
launched a Pearl Harbor style attack on Egypt ,
and the Middle East became the center of
attention. Except for rare moments of calm, the region has featured prominently
on the world stage ever since, crowding even the Vietnam War, the murder of an
American President and the attempt on the lives of other prominent figures.
And so, having no presence to speak of in the English
speaking world, and no influence to make a difference, Egypt and the other Arab countries found
themselves outflanked in every way you can think of by the Jewish hordes that
were beginning to dominate the media and the various cultural vehicles in America
and the other English speaking jurisdictions. These hordes constructed a
formidable propaganda machine which they used to portray Egypt as the villain in the drama that was
unfolding in the Middle East .
That drama had a simple plot line in that it was a struggle
between good and evil. The good was an Israel
that was full of saintly Jews; the bad were an Arab World that contained Egypt
– the most villainous character on the stage. Week after week, year after year
and decade after decade, the never ending monotonous events unfolded to provide
the English speaking world with more of the same, and no promise that something
will ever change. At the same time, however, the rest of the world was seeing
things differently. It saw a situation seething with undercurrents that promised
to boil over, change the Middle East
profoundly and change it for ever.
That moment has come, which is why you see Clifford D. May –
one of the biggest wheels in the formidable Jewish propaganda machine – write a
different kind of story. It has the bland title: “Murder on the Democracy
Express” and the descriptive subtitle: “An Egyptian mystery with no easy
answers – and no heroes.” It was published on July 11, 2013 in National Review
Online.
Instead of taking the usual approach of expressing a
personal opinion on an event that is unfolding, Clifford May presents a rundown
in which he crams into one article what other members of the chattering class
have said about the events unfolding in Egypt at this time. Most of the
comments are not flattering by any stretch of the imagination, but they are
less scurrilous than what used to be – with the exception maybe of Mark Steyn
whose role is to provide the audience with monkey-like most absurd kind of
comic relief. And so, having developed a thick skin after years of arrows being
thrown at her, I am certain that Cleopatra would have enjoyed this development
more than anything she experienced in the past half century.
The following are the people that Clifford May has quoted in
his rundown: Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post; Jeffrey Goldberg of
Bloomberg News; Tony Blair, the former British prime minister; Mark Steyn and
Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review Online; David Brooks of the New York
Times; the columnist Eugene Robinson; Reuel Marc Gerecht of Clifford May's own
Foundation for Defense of Democracies and finally the editorial board of the
Wall Street Journal.
Cleopatra must be smiling in her grave. And in time, Egypt will find
out if this trend will continue, or if something will happen that will prompt the
Jewish propaganda machine to again start spewing venom in the same old style.