Caught Flat-Footed - THE POST-WESTERN MIDDLE EAST

SteynOnline - THE POST-WESTERN MIDDLE EAST

Steyn on the World

WEDNESDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2011 excerpts-

Listening to lifelong regime toadies belatedly call for the seizure of Mubarak's assets or calibrate the precise moment when it's safe to demand the overthrow of the strongman you've happily served all your life, I'm reminded of the Hakim of Bahrain's visit to London for the Queen's Coronation in 1953. Late in the evening, at the end of the banquet, the diminutive Sheikh Salman came upon the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sitting at the bottom of a staircase, and attempted to ingratiate himself with a view to winning support for some land claim Bahrain had against Qatar. It had been a bibulous night and Sir Winston was in no mood to discuss the fine points of Arabian territorial disputes. "Tell him," the PM instructed David Weir, Britain's Political Resident in Bahrain and "gentleman in attendance" to the non-English-speaking Hakim, "tell him that we never desert our friends." Pause. "Unless we have to." ... ... The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt's first full year as a sovereign state, the country's Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew. Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation's Finance Minister - or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened - and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario. ...The Egyptian royal house (descended from Albanians) was nobody's idea of a punctilious constitutional monarchy, and Jews there had a rough couple of years in the 1940s. But the Kingdom of Egypt was a better deal than anything that followed. The CIA thought so little of Farouk that their plan to depose him was codenamed "Operation Fat Fucker". Ha-ha. The fuckers they replaced him with had the last laugh. Nasser rounded up Jews for "Zionist activities", removed them from Parliament, confiscated their businesses, and closed down their newspapers. Do you think Imam Qaradawi's minded to see a Jewish Finance Minister back in Cairo? Alas, there are no Jews left now - but there are still plenty of Copts to stick it to. Colonel Gaddafi? On seizing power in 1969, he immediately canceled any debts owed to Libyan Jews and confiscated all their property. A postwar Jewish population of 40,000 fell on his watch to zero: The last Libyan Jew, Esmeralda Meghnagi, died in 2002, and with her one of the oldest Jewish communities on earth. And in much of the Middle East - including, disgracefully, the de facto American protectorate of Iraq - the Christian community is headed the same way. The Middle East got worse. The Anglo-French-installed monarchies of the mid-20th century were less bad than the Russo-American-backed dictators of the late 20th century. As for the early 21st, the new Middle East will be friendlier to the Muslim Brotherhood and friendlier to Iran - and less friendly to western interests than at any time since the discovery of oil. "We never desert our friends. Unless we have to." ... [Read the full article at the above link.]