Best News of the Day

Egyptian police set fire to the hated hell hole called the Interior Ministry Building where I spent uncounted hours for a variety of reasons. But the scenes I observed included an illiterate woman who came while her husband stayed back to work the farm fields. They needed required government documents, she had sat all morning without food or water, waiting silently and then at 2pm was told she had to return tomorrow because the person who would handle her documents had left for the day. She began screaming and for her frustration the men in charge deemed her insane and insisted she and all her suitcases etc be removed from the huge waiting room to outside in the hot sun. Offices with empty file cabinets, men in front of desks with empty drawers except maybe a metal lock box holding cash received. Office ladies shelling peas or cutting vegetables while people wait outside in hallways to be summoned in for their files that contain a single sheet of paper that needed a stamp. And in Egypt there is no single place to obtain the necessary stamps to do anything. The government keeps its citizens busy sending them from one part of cairo to the other end to wait on lines with other people also waiting for stamps. No stamp, no can do nothig. Egypt was is world of petty tyrants, withholding, postponing and abusing their responsibilities because it is often the sole moment in their day when they can exercise control over making someone else's life sheer misery, thereby making their own, a bit easier to stomach. Hopefully the police had good motives in burning this hell hole and all its filthy secrets, its underground cells and finally silence those cellophane envelopes of meaningless stamps. Too bad Jews no longer exist in Egypt, despite any propaganda or minor tourism at Sharm, Jews cannot live there. This coming Passover is significant for both Jews and their former masters who themselves have thrown off their own slave masters and oppressor. What a tisch and tale that would have been...