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June 7, 2009 | 11:04 pm

Egypt to strip citizenship from those who marry Israelis

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo

That photo is for an Egyptian-themed wedding, which I imagine is nothing like an authentic Egyptian wedding. But if you are actually Egyptian, don’t plan on marrying an Israeli—not unless you want to lose your Egyptian citizenship. The explainer:

After the verdict was read in the Cairo courtroom, Nabih al-Wahsh, an Egyptian attorney, jumped for joy and received an avalanche of telephone calls from friends congratulating him on his latest legal victory.

Al-Wahsh has managed to extract a ruling from Egypt’s Administrative Court — which rules in disputes between citizens and the state — that would force the Egyptian government to strip Egyptians married to Israelis of their Egyptian citizenship. The May 19 ruling was met with the cheers of millions in this populous Arab country.

“This is an historic ruling,” al-Wahsh said to reporters after the ruling. “Egyptians married to Israelis are dangerous to Egypt’s national security, acting in ways that contradict the constitution of their country and Islamic laws,” he said.

Calls flooded into TV talk shows discussing the verdict and readers posted comments on Web sites of newspapers that wrote about it.

Everyone appeared united in elation at the ruling, as well as in hatred of the Jewish state and everything that related to it, even if it was originally Egyptian.

“Israel clamors to become an integral part of the Arab world and to do so it lures Egyptians to get married to its women,” one reader wrote to a local newspaper, commenting on the ruling.

A second writer warned against Israeli plans to use Egyptians married to Israelis as spies, while a third said the sons and the daughters of these people would one day claim property in Egypt, something that would “ease Israel’s hegemony over Egypt yet again.”

Such sentiments among a large chunk of Egypt’s population of about 80 million underscores the wide chasm that distinguishes Egypt at the official level and the same country at the level of its public.

Although Egypt was the first country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, almost 30 years ago, its government and its people still walk two different paths.

Rabbi Reuven Firestone certainly experienced that when he visited Egypt two years ago. Read the rest of the story from this week’s Jewish Journal here. 

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Big scoop. And Egypt is supposedly the best of them. Treaty, peace, friend, ally. Like in Eastern Israel Jordan where there are no Jews at all and there is a death penalty for selling land to a Jew. Nobody ever asks modern, British-educated ‘King’ Abdullah and the lovely Queen Noor about that.

Egypt is a third-world country with no control of most of its territory and only armed control over its population, most of which is below 25 and inclined to the Muslim Brotherhood which arose from Nazi-inspired and funded radicals and which regularly televises learned documentaries on the Jews harvesting the blood of Arab children to bake matzohs for passover and cookies for Purim, and our relationship with them is propped up by gifts and bribes and ‘aid’.

And that they allow Israeli tourists but they do not allow Egyptians to enter Israel. And they have a closed border crossing with Gaza so that everyone can say that Israel is holding Gaza under ‘siege’.

And that Israel’s one-way relationship with Egypt is less than skin-deep and will fly out the window at the least ‘stress-test’. And that you can put on a brief irrelevant public show in the English language with a straw-man like Mubarak or Hussein or Arafat or Abbas but not change the grass-roots sentiment.

And pursuing the same strategy with the other Arabs will lead to the same and worse losses.

And when people like me point that out, it is hateful. And I am a hater. A hateful hater. Hate, hate hate. An enemy of peace. Right? All I ever say to peace-nerds is ‘prove the point’.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 6/08/09 at 3:16 am

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