Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • February 9, 2011 appalled by the killing on both sides during one of the later Crusades, he offered the Turks and Kurds who were running the defense of Egypt from the French, Germans, and Italians, a challenge. Francis told them to pile up embers in a trench, and he would walk over them barefoot. The Muslims would appoint their own firewalker, and the person who made it farthest along the trench of glowing embers would win. The Muslim ruler respectfully told Francis he didn’t think any man in his army would accept the challenge. Francis – “he is an honest man before God” -- was sent home loaded with gifts from the Muslims. The Crusaders eventually succumbed to endemic diseases rather than ferocious fanatics. Most of the Crusades, in fact, were fought by French and Germans with most of the Muslim fighters being Turkish and Kurdish horsemen and African foot soldiers from the Sudan, the same tribesmen – “bold men of Kush” -- who had sustained the armies of the pharaohs assisted by the Shardanas, who look Asian, but have never been traced to their point of origin. The Arabs were not key players, and the Egyptians weren’t players at all. The French author Regine Pernoud, in her elegant and vital book about the Crusades, quotes one Crusader noble, a Frenchman, inviting a Muslim emissary to his house by telling him that “my cook is an Egyptian and you can eat without fear.” Muslims, like Jews, eschew pork and shellfish, and won’t eat meat and milk from the same plate. Here is the man we should all remember in the context of what’s happening today: Colonel Ahmed Urabi, also Arabi and Orabi. (Arabic spelling is imprecisely translated by most experts.) If you can understand Urabi, you can understand why we should keep our men and women at home this time. Once upon a time there was an isthmus of Suez that separated the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the vast markets of India and China. In dynastic times, the pharaohs may have made a canal that allowed ships from the Mediterranean to sail into the Red Sea and reach the land of Punt – still conjectural – or the land of the Sheba – maybe the same place, maybe not. One of their ships was recently reconstructed. Despite initial comments that it was “a pig,” it handled pretty well with a steady breeze. The Suez Canal had been a great idea in 2000 B.C. and was a great idea again in the 1860s. Ferdinand de Lesseps, “Mister France” to his generation, had the idea to dig a new canal connecting the Mediterranean – known as “the middle sea” in German and “our sea” to Mussolini’s Italians – to the Red Sea and the markets of China and India. French engineering, Italian contractors, and Egyptian laborers got the Suez Canal built and opened in 1869. When the French got into economic trouble after the Franco-Prussian War, Benjamin Disraeli of Britain brokered a deal in which the British bought the canal from the French with money from the Rothschild Bank. Britain now owned the Suez Canal. Shortly, the rich new owners, Britain and France, started to loan the poor Egyptians money – and then moved in to collect the loans when the Egyptians predictably couldn’t pay back the money without “supervision.” Colonel Urabi entered the picture some years after the Suez Canal changed hands. He was an ethnic Egyptian who, in the later 1870s, objected to the fact that Egypt, recently broken away from the Ottoman Empire, was still dominated by an army controlled by Circassians and Albanians once favored by the Turks, rather than Egyptians. Britain, at this point, was more concerned with keeping the Suez Canal under British control by astute debt management. This is known as “peonage,” and is illegal. Colonel Urabi was not a “Muslim fanatic.” He was supported by a Jewish newspaper publisher, Yaqub Sanu, and at least some of the Coptic Christian community. He simply wanted Egypt to be run by the Egyptians. Jews and Coptic Christians were considered okay, British plutocrats absolutely not okay. The British mounted a full-fledged invasion that put him out of business in 1882 after the French broke their pledge and let the British use the Suez Canal, still a corporate (rather than a British) holding, to outflank Urabi’s army. The Egyptian troops fought rather badly. The Sudanese troops fought rather well. When the British hero Charles Gordon was overwhelmed and killed at Khartoum in 1885, after a Circassian deserter betrayed the route through the mine fields protecting the city, the Muslim leader, Mohammed Achmed, called the Mahdi, was asked what should be done with the prisoners. “The Sudanese are children; spare them and take them into our army,” he said. “What of the Circassians?” “Gordon Pasha was an honest man before God. If they betrayed him, they would do the same to me. Kill them.” The British pensioned off Colonel Urabi and kept the Suez Canal until 1954, when Egypt gained independence. The British tried to recapture the canal from Egypt in 1956 with the help of France and Israel, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Russians joined hands for once and told them enough was enough. Let’s cut ourselves some slack. We’re never going to understand these people, and spending money on them is a serious mistake. If we have drugs that can prevent epidemics, by all means drop them by parachute. If they need food, let’s send food. Keep any money allocated for control of their governments for tax relief. See the pyramids once it’s safe. We don’t need to send the Marines to protect people’s dream vacations. Let’s not buy anybody else’s used empires at inflated prices. The unrest in Egypt gives the United States a chance to try the diplomatic role mandated by our economic situation: Keep out of other people’s business. Egypt became a sort of client state when a former president of the United States brokered a deal in which the Egyptians dropped their previous support of the visibly faltering and widely hated Soviet Union and accepted a huge amount of American money to be our friend and lay off Israel. Since then, we have poured enough money into Egypt to rebuild our own crumbling bridges and highways – about $600 billion, according to one recent count – and very little of that money has percolated down to the Egyptian people. The Egyptians are ticked, just as the Chinese were ticked at Tiananmen Square, just as the East Germans were ticked in 1952, the Hungarians were ticked in 1956, the Czechs were ticked in 1968, and the Poles and East Germans and Baltic nations and the Ukrainians and even the Russians were ticked until the wall finally fell. These people loved our idea of free representative government – “democracy,” as they called it, though it is a republic with democratic elections – enough to risk getting run over by Russian-made tanks. With the fall of the wall, the United States lost most of the reason for the kind of military spending that prevented the kind of recession after World War II that we experienced after World War I. It’s good to have a nuclear force we hope we will never use in case Russia suddenly decides to take over Canada or Mexico. It’s good to have a few crack infantry or marine divisions with tanks and artillery in support just in case the hemisphere is ever threatened. Beyond that, it’s a big waste of money. Fourteen percent of the military forces are combat arms – pilots, riflemen, tank crews – and the rest are a siphon taking money out of federal taxes so state-level politicians can keep the bases open for the benefit of saloon owners. This is the biggest waste of money in America except for those schools where the kids won’t study and the teachers won’t teach. Give the real fighters a raise, offer a fair minimum wage based on the job rather than the degree of nominal education, and tell the support people and the teachers who cannot teach that they are back in the private sector. Then take the money you save on federal, state, and local taxes out to the local merchants and save what matters most beyond religion and the family: the hometown people who support our own communities. Egyptian history is so long – 6,000 years – that it can easily be turned into “strategic defense in depth.” You lure the other guy in and chew him up because he can’t achieve a quick breakthrough to take your supply dumps. Let’s skip the building of the pyramids, a pretty good argument for the idea that Egypt has always been a monolithic and authoritarian state. Let’s skip the biblical exodus that inspired Passover, except to note that even the writers of the Old Testament respected the knowledge of the Egyptians. Let’s skip the Crusades – except to note one revealing story. When Francis of Assisi arrived in Egypt and was Seeing the pyramids from a safe distance Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: I have never read a letter as idiotic as the one I read in the Feb. 2 letters column. Are we, as a society, so self indulged that now the motorists have their own domain? What a concept: I step in your domain and you just run me over. What are pedestrians to do when a motorist encroach the sidewalk domain? There is no question in my mind that New Jersey motorists ignore pedestrians, even at crosswalks. Other states, such as Nevada and Arizona (that I am aware of), have laws that once a pedestrian, regardless of whether he/she is at a crosswalk merely steps into the roadway, the motorists must stop. Period. I noticed here in Ridgewood, motorists need to be constantly flagged by pedestrians to stop before they can Motorists must respect pedestrians cross the road. Crossing from the Kings parking lot to the Ridgewood Library has been a daunting experience, as motorists just simply refuse to stop and give me the right of way. Excuse me if I am overstepping their domain. You bet I have made eye contact with drivers before attempting to cross the road, and guess what: They still do not stop. I am no fanatic about laws, but I can assure you that we either need more driver education, more respect for pedestrians than is shown in New Jersey -- particularly in Ridgewood, since that is where I reside, or more punitive measures for disobeying the law for not stopping for pedestrians, regardless where they happen to be. Harry Weissfisch Ridgewood