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| Africa North | |
| Jon Stewart, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Zionist Takeover of Egypt | |
| 2013-12-29 | |
| by Walter Russell Meade Anti-Semitism is the sign of profound mental and social failure -- and a harbinger of more failures and errors to come.
Nothing alarming, right? Well, earlier this month, Egyptian writer Amr Ammar, in a remarkable leap into the realm of tinfoil hatted hate thought, took the joke as an effort by American leaders like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stewart to conquer Egypt. The Middle East Media Research Institute translated Ammar's comments on Tahrir TV: If you recall, when Jon Stewart visited here in Egypt, he was a guest on Bassem Youssef's show. Note what Jon Stewart said as a joke. He said: 'I am sorry I am late. I wandered in the desert, but now I've found my homeland.' That's what he said word for word -- a Jew who wandered in the desert, but, thank God, found his homeland. This man says, in the heart of Egypt and on an Egyptian media outlet, that Egypt belongs to them, that it is his homeland. First of all, that's not what Stewart said, not even close. Second of all, it's worth underlining the point, as Jeff Goldberg hints at over at Bloomberg, that the most important thing to understand about the heated, over the top (or under the bottom) conspiracy rhetoric so prevalent in Egypt and elsewhere in the region isn't the evil and hatred behind it, sad as that is. Rather, what the prevalence of this kind of crazy thinking tells us is that Egypt isn't going to get better soon. Anti-Semitism, attributing global events to the machinations of an all-conquering Jewish conspiracy, is the sign of profound mental and social failure--and a harbinger of more failures and errors to come. The prevalence of delusional conspiracy thinking at all levels of Egyptian intellectual and political life is a "tell" that points to important limits on Egypt's potential for political, social and economic progress. Societies in thrall to this kind of darkness are unlikely to develop the vigorous, forward looking and competent civil societies that can promote true democracy. Societies whose intellectual leaders cannot understand how power works in the modern world are unlikely to adopt policies that bring rapid economic progress. Given the power of these ideas among prominent Moslem Brüderbund officials and leaders, it should have been clear to the B.O. regime that whatever it was observing in Egypt, it was unlikely to be a "transition to democracy." At best, the Egyptian revolution was always likely to be an interregnum between despotisms; at worst there is still a chance (hopefully small) that the country could fall into the kind of chaos and violence that has become much too common across the Middle East. | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |