…There was more in JPost on Sunday by their Oren Kessler interviewing Raymond Stock, translator of Egypt’s Nobel Prize laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz who passed away in 2006. We’ll put up the link. For my money it is as good a take on the situation in Egypt today as anything in the MSM and certainly better than anything written by the obnoxious and always ignorant Thomas L. Friedman, that jackass who reported from Tahrir Square last year on the glorious Arab Spring.

Raymond Stock spent 20 years in Egypt until deported two years ago – something Kessler did not mention in his last piece – for having written an article in Foreign Policy magazine about Farouk Hosni in 2009 when he was touted as a candidate to head up UNESCO; about his antisemitism really.

As I say this Kessler piece as good as any as analysis of Egypt’s last 12 months and the major players there: the army, Amr Moussa and Abol Fotouh, the two leading candidates in the upcoming presidential election. And as he reported three years ago in Foreign Policy, he focuses on the abysmal antisemitism in Egypt which seems to be the only thing that lights Egyptian passions. Not the miserable economy; not the corruption.

He also foresees the scenario I described some weeks back of the Egyptian army making no hostile moves toward Israel, but if and when the growing terrorist infestation in Sinai lad to something that forces a major Israeli counter-strike in self-defense, this will be enough to light that army’s fire.

It all sounds reminiscent of what my own many years of reading of Araby taught me and what I saw first-hand in traveling in Arab lands. For centuries visitors from the West have repeatedly used the word “fatalism” to describe Muslim life. In Turkish the word is kismet – the name of a famous Broadway musical based on the Arabian Nights. Broadly translated, it means “fate,” or one’s lot in life against which one can only shrug. It is an attitude that does not lead to a desire for revolutionary change. One traveler in centuries passed described seeing a father watch his son run over in the street by a runway horse and killed, which elicited from the man only a shrug.

In other words, for all the poverty and miserable relations between people in Egypt, there is this fatalism, this surrender to the way things are. In other words, don’t look for, as the moron LTF thought he saw, a fire in the belly among social reformers striving for a better tomorrow. The drive to depose Mubarak was not a drive for a revolutionary new system but just a common, generational rebellion against the current corrupt despot.

And if this Kessler piece on Raymond Stock has a subtext, it is that the only thing that incites the passions of the Egyptians is their hatred of Al-Yahud, the perennial agent of the Shaitan, of Satan.

I’ve said it before: Islam needs a reformation on the magnitude of the Protestant Reformation against Rome, though there is nothing on the horizon to hint that this is in the offering.

Which is why our best hope is praying as we do, three times daily, for Moshiach…