The traditional Hilula to the tomb of Rabbi Abu Hatseira was cancelled this yearThe news that 75 percent of votes in the Egyptian parliamentary elections went to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood should be setting off alarm bells in the democratic West: yesterday's chants, intolerant of non-Muslim minorities, have become today's policy - argues Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal center on Fox News.
Some see the results of proof that the democratic process is alive and well in the Arab world's largest nation. Indeed, former President Jimmy Carter declared he was "pleased" by the orderliness of the process; yet he and other international figures are devastatingly silent about Islamists’ moves to curb the liberties of religious minorities, starting with the Jews.
Witness the broad-based protest spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that led the Foreign Ministry, on the day after the final election run-off to announce the cancellation of an annual religious pilgrimage to honor a saintly Jewish Scholar who died over 1,100 years ago.
Jews from North Africa have an age-old tradition (Hilula) of visiting the graves of the pious on the anniversary of their death. The Hilula combines prayers and songs. Each year hundreds of Jews, including Israelis, made a pilgrimage to a hilltop mausoleum Egyptian city Damanhour, to the Tomb of Rabbi Yaakov Abu Hatzeira, a renowned religious figure from Morocco, who fell ill and died there in 1880, enroute to the Holy Land.
Sometimes contemporary events, like Israel’s 2009 incursion into Gaza made such visits impossible. But as late as last year, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak allowed hundreds of Jewish pilgrims to visit the Abu Hatzeira’s Tomb, which is an official antiquity site protected by the government of Egypt.
Not this year.
According to, MENA, the state-run news agency reported that a number of political groups announced that they would form a human chain if necessary, to block any “Zionists” from reaching the mausoleum for the religious rite.
The groups signing on to the protest were led by Egypt's new power brokers-- the Muslim Brotherhood, the Freedom and JusticeParty, along with the Nasserist Trend, the April 6 Youth Movement, BloggersAgainst Abu Hasira and Mohamed ElBaradei's presidential campaign. The Hilula celebration, in the view of these groups “was unpopular, and unacceptable legally and politically.”
It is easy to see why a ‘Hilula’ taking place on an isolated hill in a small town would horrify so many Egyptians. After all, the celebration traditionally includes the consumption of dried fruit, butter and feteer, as the faithful sit alongside the mausoleum, cry, and the recitation of King David's Psalms.
Yesterday's intolerant chants have already become today's policy.
It is clear that the heroes of Tahrir Square and all the hopes that their struggle would lead their nation and the entire Middle East into a 21st century of change and freedom have been "democratically" defeated by fanatics seeking to drive their nation's value system back to the 12th century.
We got the message loud and clear: There is no room in the new Egypt for Jews, dead or alive.
Of course. The point I constantly make, which leftists and Arab apologists scream about is that the Arabs, in terms of the pure numbers and ratios put the Nazis to shame in terms of ethnic cleansing. With the possible exception of the complete extermination of the Jewish communities of Latvia and Lithuania, nowhere in the Holocaust were the Nazis ever able to achieve the 100% rate of ethnic cleansing of the Arab world.
ReplyDeleteI do not believe Jewish ethnic cleansing will take place in Egpyt,at least not in the short forseable future, because they are no more jewish communities as they used to be in the past. If they start messing around with Medinate Yisrael, they should get brunt of the IDF power, which I recommend and do it preemptively.
ReplyDeleteHowever I agree that ethnic cleansing could targeted against the defenseless Christian Copts. If I am a coptic Christian I would be greatly worried. I would also be worried about secular Egyptians but on the other hand, if these secular apologist are anti-semite or anti-Israel (which most of them are) I do not care about them.
Islam, the madman's religion. is in real disaray. Its destructive aspect is beginning to show its effect internally and particularly between its groups and adherents. Civil war will emerge in Egypt, because Islamists will most likely resort to totalitarian mesures to uphold the sharia law in all social institutions, starting with the most basic: "the family". I beleive that Egypt will have a lot of its plate to deal with, starting with mounting economic problems and an eventual economic collapse, which will usher in anarchy.
They will first have to cut each other throats, before they can manage to plan let alone carry out a grand scheme to ethnically cleased the middle east of Jews. As long as they do not touch or harm any Jewsih soul, they can kill each other, that will be fine with me.
Massacres that are occuring in Syria do not bother me a bit. I see two Islamic ideologies (sunni and chites) fighting it out, which by the way are both Anti-jewish to the core. And to this I can always be thankful that jews and Israel will be saved.
look at that man's picture for a second: do you see that bump on his forehead? Well as my israeli-Egyptian uncle used to say: he is a fanatic!!!I used to make me laugh but not anymore!. The Salafists are on the extreme left of the left so if they come to power, pauvre de nous!!!
ReplyDeletesuzy vidal