The Arab Street is Angry - Mass Sexual Assaults in Egypt and Mass Hatred of Jews in the Arab World

For the first two days of Eid, crowds swarmed through the streets of Cairo attacking and sexually assaulting hundreds of girls. Sandmonkey sums up the story.



"It was the first day of Eid, and a new film was opening downtown. Mobs of males gathered trying to get in, but when the show was sold out, they decided they will destroy the box office. After accomplishing that, they went on what can only be described as a sexual frenzy: They ran around grabbing any and every girl in sight, whether a niqabi, a Hijabi or uncovered. Whether egyptian or foreigner. Even pregnant ones. They grabbed them, molested them, tried to rip their cloths off and rape them, all in front of the police.

The ones who approached the police asking them to do something were told : "what do you want us to do? It's Eid. Happy Eid to you too!"

The following is an eyewitness account of the second day of the assaults.



"There was no police interference despite the presence of Central Security forces near the Arab League and near the American embassy, not more than 5 minutes away on foot from the site of the events.

While yesterday the attacks were just random, young men now formed human trains that approached a girl quickly and surrounded her completely and began groping parts of her body. We stopped at the cinema after we saw that the shattered ticket window, supposing that what the colleague had told us was just illusion or exaggeration at the most, but then after less than five minutes we found vast numbers of youth whistling and running towards Adly Street. We accompanied them to see what was going on.

We were surprised to find a girl in her early twenties who had fainted on the ground, surrounded by a large number of youth who were groping parts of her body and taking off her clothes...the girl got up quickly and tried to run in any direction until she saw a Syrian restaurant called "el Madyafa" or something, and ran into it. The young men surrounded the restaurant and did not leave till one of them shouted, "There's another girl in front of Miami!"

The crowd did not disperse until the appearance of two girls wearing the Khaliji ebaya (loose outer garment worn by women from the Gulf) walking alone down the street. The young men surrounded them completely and a large number of them pressed against the girls and removed the veils they were wearing, and attempted to remove their ebayas, while 10 and 11 year old boys slipped inside the ebayas from beneath.

After a short while another girl appeared who was also wearing the veil and the ebaya. She was also surrounded and they succeeded this time is removing the ebaya, but a security guard was able to draw her into a building and shut the gate and prevent the young men from reaching the girl.

Then young men did not distinguish when they undertook their assaults between veiled and unveiled girls. They did not distinguish on the basis of age. They were not all of one age, some were ten and under up to men in their forties."



Now incidents like this have happened around the world. They've happened during the Puerto Rican Day parade and at one of the Woodstocks. They're not unique to any part of the world. What is relevant is that they represent a chance to address Sheikh Hilaly's comments once more. The women attacked were not remotely uncovered meat, they were veiled, they wore loose robes done to Saudi standards. The women were not attacked based on immodest clothing. They were attacked because of who they were. Women.

Hilaly's view is not unique, it's commonplace among Muslim leaders but not unique to Muslims. In Hilaly's universe and the universe of religious leaders like him, women are always the ones who provoke sexual assaults. Tight clothing is blamed, loose mores, etc are blamed. Incidents like this reveal the fundamental reality that it has nothing to do with the women as individuals at all, with anything they do or don't do, just with the fact that they are women who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Let's take a step back to Hilaly's mentor and the founder of modern Islamic radicalism, the godfather of Al Queda, Hamas and nearly every radical Sunni Islamic organization that dates back to the Muslim Brotherhood; Sayyid Qutb.

Sayyid, like many radical Muslims, was well educated and had spent time in the West. He received his Master's Degree in Education at the Colorado State College. He returned full of deranged ramblings about the Jews controlling the world, Americans being obsessed with mowing lawns and sex. His attitude neatly captures the frustrated psychotic behavior of the mobs in Cairo as well as its flip side, the radical Islamists because in the end they are one and the same.

Sayyid Qutub attended a Church sock hop at Colorado's Greely Church and as the pastor put on, "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in the gramophone, Sayyid Qutb began to literally seethe inside. He wrote of the incident later.

"They danced to the tunes of the gramophone, and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire."

Of American women, Sayid Qutb wrote; "The American girl is well-acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face and in expressive eyes and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs, and she shows all this and does not hide it."

At least one reason for radical Muslims to hate Jews is for the invention of psychiatry. One that makes it quite clear that Sayyid Qutb was not writing about American women but himself, not about the sock hop but his physical reaction to it.

A reaction that he projected onto the objects of his desire. In this same way Qutb and his radical students who include Al Queda's Number 2, Ayman Al Zawahiri, project their own desires on America and Israel. When they talk about Jews wanting to run the world or America wanting to enslave Muslims, what they really mean is they want to run the world and they want to enslave all Muslims under a single caliphate.

That kind of projection is at the heart of Islamic rationalization which says the man isn't responsible for rape because the fact that he desires the women, proves she seduced him and the fact that he hates the West proves that the West is out to get him.

In an inverted moral universe the victims are the perpetrators not because of anything they did but because they have been victimized. The very fact that they were victimized, is used as proof of their culpability. This was the attitude taken through the 19th and 20th centuries towards the massacres and persecution of Jews well into the Holocaust. Indeed many Anti-semitic tracts used that and continue to use it as their argument, stating that the very persecution of the Jews proved that Jews had done something to enrage so many people.

Whenever liberals highlight the Arab Street argument telling us how much of the Muslim world is upset at America, they're playing into the same idea as Hilaly, using Muslim anger as proof that we are guilty. If they're angry at us, it must mean we're at fault for angering them. Well there are photos of the Arab Street above and below this post. There's frenzy and violence there but it's not remotely justified, though indeed it will be justified. The Muslim religious leadership in Egypt will blame illegal substances, a culture of irreligiosity, Lebanese TV, Western TV and so on and so forth. They may even by some convoluted route get to the Jews.

That too will make sense because over a half century ago, Zionists and Arab Nationalists in Egyptian were often allies against the British. The British successfully played 'Divide and Conquer' inciting Arab riots and working to turn the Mandate into a client state run by their pet kings\warlords. Every Arab movement since then from Arab Nationalism to Islamism seems to have raced down the street madly yelling, threatening and screaming only to find Israel standing there and promptly begin unleashing a torrent of abuse and violence.

The Arab-Israel conflict has nothing to do with the tiny strip of land that Israel's few million Jews are sitting on, a strip of land you could drop into Saudi Arabia or Iran and spend weeks trying to find again. It has nothing to do with the supposed oppression of the Palestinians, considering that what's labeled 'oppression' would be a day at the beach in most of the Arab world. (Checkpoints, checkpoints! They're actually delaying them at checkpoints!)

Underneath it has to do with that same frustrated mix of rage, desire, envy and misery that coats the entire region. The frenzy of men madly assaulting women is not fundamentally different from the frenzy of the lynchers of Israeli soldiers or the rock throwers or the suicide bombers or the car swarmers or the mob tearing at the Ayatollah Khameni's coffin. It is not a condition Israel creates in its territory, but a condition endemic to the region and one that helps explain why Iraq is tearing itself apart in an uncontrollable frenzy of murder and mayhem the moment Saddam's iron hand was lifted from the populace.

Those who sexualize all contact between men and women come to see all such contact as sexualized. Sayyid Qutb's frustrated desire became perversity and hatred. The flip side of his seething at the sock hop, is the mob of sexual predators. Sooner or later frustration explodes, it's only a question of the target for that explosion. Women, Jews, America, England. The Arab world has spent generations projecting its own madness on the West and is filled with ravening hatred for that mirror image of everything the Arab hates about himself. The West takes on a visage of secularism, sex, greed, drunkenness and every vice the Arab sees in himself but projects onto the Great Satan...a name well chosen because for weak corrupt men the 'Devil Made Do It' becomes the excuse for his crimes, the Satan to dualistic religions becomes the externalized projection of every evil in themselves.

The Arab Street is indeed angry and frustrated and bewildered and many other things. Fanatics find ways to tie it to various causes whether it's Islam or Arab Nationalism or Sunni\Shiite factionalism, Wahhabi fanaticism or just plain old fashioned Kill The Jews but on that street was the plain manifestation of it removed from any political rhetoric or causes or any justification.

Plainly to be seen.