Egyptian Spring -- Essential Videos

By John Ballard

These two videos, Revolutionaries on the Rooftops, oddly tagged Parts One and Three, are linked via Twitter by Evan Hill, journalist with Al Jazeera, with English subtitles.  There is much to say about events and personalities, both Egyptian and foreign, over the last two weeks. And these two videos are totally essential viewing for anyone seeking to understand the backstory of events in Tahrir Square. I want to share here a couple of personal observations to explain why I feel the need to pass these videos along by blogging.

First, in my working and personal life I have been privileged too meet and know personally a small number of people from other countries, including one from Egypt as well as several from Pakistan and Bangladesh. It didn't take me long to figure out that in the same way that many good Americans I know, mostly from my parents' generation but a sad number among my peers as well, are prejudiced against Blacks, many everyday people from the Middle East and Asia are casually what Americans call antisemitic. This is not a criticism but an observation, one which would apply equally to many Americans as well, except that as a society we have learned to hide such proclivities as discretely as we do farting. I'm using a lot of words to say something simple, but working hard to make it clear that I regard Asian and Middle Eastern antisemitism with no more animosity than I do poor grammar, hard to understand accents or strange table manners, all of which also come with interacting with people of different cultures and backgrounds. 

I say all that by way of noting that a few times in the translation casual antisemitism on the part of the speakers is apparent.  When Israel and Gaza are mentioned it is an accepted reality that the evil of Israel and her treatment of Gaza is as real as gravity or rain. A few times in my life I have had to explain to newcomers to America that such language is not only unacceptable to me (for different reasons) but out of line in general, because in our country there are many people for whom Israel carries important religious meanings and many Christians will be offended by naked antisemitism. (I want to believe that the speakers' refernces to Israel and Gaza derive from the same intellectual understandings that I have, but I know better. Not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic, but this most certainly is.) This is a fragile subject and must be handled with care.

Second, thanks to my one Egyptian friend and his recommendation that I read a novel by Alaa Aswany I have a mental image of life in contemporary Egypt that comports exactly with descriptions of the speakers in these two videos.  As they describe the corruption, bribes, nepotism and influence-peddling that plague everyday Egyptian life, the plot line of The Yacoubian Building plays in my head like a musical theme from any well-known movie. When I mentioned these observations to my Egyptian friend, as I made my way slowly through the book, he blew them off with the same carelessness as differences of clothing or traffic signals. For him the attraction of the novel had more to do with the writing skills of the writer and his artistic gifts than those little cultural quirks. It was like the way most American academics appreciate the historic importance of Mark Twain and see the recent historical revisionism, sensoring the N-word from his writing, as the nutty distraction that it is.

For these reasons I find these videos totally credible, deserving of careful and sympathetic viewlng.

 

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