Reparations and racism
: I’ve long dismissed the fringe calls for reparations payments for slavery for many reasons — because the sins of the fathers are not the sins of the gerat-great-grandchildren, because many (perhaps most) Americans today are descended from people who came here after the Civil War (how do you determine who should pay and who should be paid?), and mostly because this feeling of entitlement via suit has to end somewhere: The logical and absurd extension of this, I’ve always said, is that the Jews should sue the Egyptians for reparations for slavery under Pharoah.
Well now, Via Memri, the service that translated Middle Eastern media, here is an absurd and sick twist on that: The Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi interviewed Dr. Nabil Hilmi, dean of the faculty of law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq, who is working on a lawsuit on behalf of Egyptians in Switzerland against “all the Jews of the world” because, when they fled Egypt, they took with them gold and cooking utensils.
The theft was not limited to gold alone. The thieves stole everything imaginable. They emptied the Egyptian homes of cooking utensils. One of the women approached Pharaoh, her eyes downcast, and said that her Jewish neighbor [don’t you mean “slave?” -ed] who lived in the house on the right of her house had come to her and asked to borrow her gold items, claiming she had been invited to a wedding
