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I'm an American currently sitting in a hotel room in Dahab - it's totally fine. North Sinai, around Arish/close to the Gaza Strip is the portion that is a bit dicey, but even that's pretty much under control. I flew from Cairo to Sharm El-Sheikh and then took an 45 minute taxi ride through the beautiful mountain desert. Dahab is a bit of a hippie beach town with lots of yoga and watersports (mainly windsurfing and scuba). It's a low enough crime town where the street vendors barely even cover up the souvenirs they sell overnight. Honestly, I feel about as safe in Dahab as I do in Cape Cod only more relaxed (and richer).

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Naguib Mahfouz is Egypt's most well known modern author. I love "Palace Walk" (I think he won his Nobel Prize for it) and his short stories. I also just started reading this book about Cairo, which is a super easy read and full of fun little tidbits about what a bonkers city Cairo is. Totally recommend it too. I don't recommend Cairo though. Terrible city. Fly in there with a long layover, go see the pyramids and get the fuck out of there.

Never read it, but my mom thinks Omaret Jacobian is the best modern Egyptian novel.

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Yacoubian-Building-Alaa-Al-Aswany/dp/0060878134

If you think it's about money and corporations, you are wrong. It's about keeping countries with a largesse debt to their populations stable, and it starts with Saudi Arabia. Until the last 10-15 years or so, nation states were far more cohesive. In arming Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, yes even Iraq et al, no power vacuum would erupt a destabilization of the oil supply or the canal. You remember that canal right? Pretty important. Egypt's military isn't a fantastic fighting force. They can't even hold the Sinai. In their own backyard. It's a conscript army with discipline and motivation problems that put it on par with some 3rd world nations. (I once saw a guard outside our hotel sitting on a folding chair with his loaded rifle, butt on the ground, forehead resting on the muzzle. I saw his officer in charge beat the shit out of him not for sitting in a suicide position but for sitting.) They can't afford the hardware, hence the free aid. The military aid relations that the US involves itself with isn't to make a penny for defense industry, it's to keep the oil flowing so the global economy doesn't outright collapse, a collapse that would certainly precipitate a global war. Not because gas would go up, but because the cost of everything that is shipped anywhere would go up or stop flowing. Things like all the food Egypt imports.

Now 20+ years ago, the US wanted Egypt secure after the routing the Israelis gave it. An unsecured Egypt is a power vacuum with a vital strategic asset, the canal. It's an insanely tempting target for Libya, Iraq, or Syria to pour into. Mostly Iraq. The genesis of the defense agreements goes back to the Camp David accords. From that point in History on, US policy has always been to seek an equilibrium of power in the region. With no one country getting uppity or feeling cornered, no one country would unilaterally attack another. With the exception of the always unpredictable Saddam Hussein, it worked. That's the theory anyway. I don't put much faith in statecraft outside of self-preservation.

It wasn't until the last 10-20 years that people started looking at countries differently. The globe is a shrinking place, with an even more interconnected economy and an even higher risk of a catastrophic cascade failure. Only now do people look at Egypt not as a country on a map, but as a collection of different peoples within a shared space and culture.

THAT'S why the US is giving Egypt aid. That's why they are getting Block 52 F-16's and Apaches. You are getting it for free because it's worth the billions (according to current policy) to keep the balance of power in play, even if Egypt can't afford the hardware to make it happen. People think it's about having a handle of power in the Egyptian government, or making a few million for Lockheed, but in the end it's just not that simple. In the end the US doesn't care who is in power in Egypt. That's for the Egyptian people to decide. So long as Egypt remains a nation state and that canal stays open, the region stays secure, and global war does not ensue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Partnership_Initiative#Foreign_policy

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=us_international_relations&us_international_relations_us_foreign_relations=us_international_relations_us_middle_east_relations

http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/minister-egypt-imports-40-its-food

I won't link some stuff, but you can find the bulk of the current assessment of Egypt's military power online if that's what you are looking for.

Suggested Reading - all have good things to take from them, though none is authoritative or without contradiction/error:

American Orientalism

Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror in the Middle East

State of Disrepair: Fixing the Culture and Practices of the State Department

The last book is more of a recreational read and an insight into this end of things. Just as Egypt is more complicated than Islamists and Pyramids, the US is more complicated than government and people, left and right, etc. etc. The government itself is usually contradictory or even stalemated within it's own power structures, and power bases exist in spectra rather than categories.

Far more chaotic than corporations want money -> corporations make policy -> policy makes money. It's far worse than that, because that implies that someone knows what is going on and controls it all. I don't think either is true. It's way worse. Nobody knows what is going on, and nobody is in control. Not for lack of trying, but because now the web is too complex to untangle or manage, so now we play patchwork.

Oh and Russia is in on the game too, I would guess. All I have are books and the news to go on. Russia, China, the US, and the EU are all working to keep things running. There's a lot of political show for the news cameras but the policies and actualities show that the leaders of the world are trying really, really hard right now to keep the peace globally. Egypt features because of the canal. Congrats!

I have faith in the Egyptian people though. Not that Egypt will pull it off, but that Egypt can pull it off.

Edit: punctuation

Edit 2: Holy cow. Thank you! If I had known ahead of time, I would have put a lot more effort into citations and support, and paid closer attention to proofreading.

alright thanks a lot for you reply, got one last question why do some graphics cards have import fees (1k plus) written next to them while other dont at all. do you think somehow i will pay for customs somehow later on?

like this gpu that i am trying to buy https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TV9CLL5/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

If anyone wants the science on this topic, a book was finally written by a professor of pharmacology at the U of Arizona.
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Misunderstood-Molecule-4-Dinitrophenol-Pharmacology/dp/1985234661/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1522800925&sr=8-2&keywords=schnellmann (Amazon book: Schnellmann is author)
She knows her &^it. Get all the info here before trying this out. I got the book. It is the best and most complete resource available. It is the only science-based resource in existence.

> It probably wasn't.

The more history I learn the more evidence I find that it was. Apparently Churchill created Iraq.

Arrakis
During the events of Dune, the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV grants Duke Leto Atreides I control of the lucrative spice harvesting operations of Arrakis, ousting the Atreides' longtime rivals, the Harkonnens.

Mandatory Iraq
Faisal ibn Husayn, who had been proclaimed King of Syria by a Syrian National Congress in Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July of the same year. Faisal was then granted by the British the territory of Iraq, to rule it as a kingdom, with the British RAF retaining certain military control, though de facto; the territory remained under British administration until 1932.

Britain’s Legacy in the Middle East: Iraq’s Oil
Lord Curzon famously observed that the Allied Powers of World War I had “floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” As far as the British Empire was concerned, the only problem was that the oil had come from the United States. For imperial strategists like Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill, the discovery of oil within the British Empire was a key aim.

This is so ignorant I don't even know where to begin addressing this.

First of all - Egyptians have never been a fixed ethnic group. They were descended from the Nilotic people and ethnically mixed and even the ancient Egyptians were aware of this. They were culturally and religiously conservative but did not equate the Egyptian identity with an ethnicity - which is why there were black Egyptians and white Egyptians. They were extraordinarily mixed ethnically with Influxes of Africans, Nubians, Levantines, bedouins, Berbers, and Greeks. You can verify what I've said in this book. The ethnicity of ancient Egyptians is covered early on. You can also verify what I've said in the Teaching Company lecture series by professor Bob Brier. So basically "our DNA is literally different" is a Mickey Mouse comment. Egyptians are extremely mixed genetically and highly related to other Arab and North African groups.

Secondly, whilst the descendants of those groups define themselves today as Egyptians, there are still ethnic minorities in Egypt. Have you ever heard of Beja, Nubians, Berbers in Siwa, or magyarabs? These groups together number 2 million people. The number of tribal people in the sa3eed who identify by a tribe, like Hilalians, Banu Sulaym, and others, aren't even counted statistically. People like Abdel Nasser who are distantly descended from tribes aren't counted either because it's impossible to distinguish who has tribal ancestry anymore and who doesn't.

Tl:dr: the Egyptian identity is based on culture and nationality and not ethnicity. It's not even easy to distinguish Egyptians from their neighbours. I did a DNA ancestry test with 23andme and they offered me Yemeni and Lebanese background even though my family's been in Egypt for a minimum of 500 years. Even if you counted all Egyptians as being ethnically Egyptian despite their wide variety of features, skin tones, and ancestries, you can't say "every human being belongs to one ethnic group" given that Egypt is full of Nubians, Berbers, bedouins who identify as such today.


Edit: and if you really think Egyptians are a single ethnic group who's Dna is "literally different" from others then I invite you to travel from Alexandria to Luxor. Ya3ni a7a when did Egyptians fall into this idiotic master race bullshit?? What is this, 1930??

Yeah, linked them down below. Some discuss ancient times while some discuss our lives before and after being displaced from our homes after the construction of the aswan dam.


https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Nubia-African-Kingdoms-Nile/dp/9774164784

https://www.amazon.com/Nubia-Ancient-Kingdoms-Joyce-Hayes/dp/0878463623

https://www.amazon.com/DONGOLA-NOVEL-NUBIA-IDRIS-ALI/dp/1557285314

https://www.amazon.com/DONGOLA-NOVEL-NUBIA-IDRIS-ALI/dp/1557285314

https://www.amazon.com/Nubians-Egypt-Peaceful-Robert-Fernea/dp/029275504X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483475944&sr=1-6&keywords=nubians+egypt

https://www.amazon.com/Nubian-Ethnographies-Robert-Fernea/dp/0881334804/ref=sr_1_11?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483475978&sr=1-11&keywords=nubians+egypt

There is so much wrong with this statement You should read a fucking science book about animal behaviour.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Empathy-Natures-Lessons/dp/0307407772

It looks like someone confused his Egyptian calendars

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The "year 6 of Al Sisi" was the calendar used in pre-Roman Egypt.

Ptolemny 3rd created what is now the Coptic Calendar, and it was only enforced by Augustus Ceaser. It's called the "Coptic Calendar" and not the "ancient Egyptian calendar" exactly because they are separate calendars, even if the Coptic Calendar borrowed heavily from the ancient Egyptian.

So this:

> The ancient Egyptians counted the years according to the ruler, not in a cumulative way like this. They had no idea how long ago something was in years, only in the number of rulers. So to an ancient Egyptian, we would now be in Year 6 of the rule of Al-Sisi.

Just doesn't apply to that. You seemed to be on the right track writing this:

> The Coptic calendar was established during the Roman period

But then somehow confused the two again.

Today, as of writing this comment, it is the 2nd of Thout in the year 1736 AM in the Coptic calendar.

>The priests kept king lists across Egypt that varied from one to the other. The older kings had mythological reigns of hundreds of years that led directly back in time to the primordial rule of gods. Some bad kings were simply excluded from the king lists altogether.

The Coptic calendar was synchornized to the Julian calendar:

> Year 1 in the Coptic calendar started on August 29, 284 in the Julian calendar. It was the year that Diocletian became Roman Emperor. In commemoration of the widespread prosecution of Christians during that era, years in the Coptic calendar are designated A.M., which is short for Anno Martyrum, Year of the Martyrs.

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> Every nationalist group in the region is doing this. There's now a Berber calendar, invented in France in the 1970s, that goes to like 6500 to a mythical date when they claim a Berber king invaded Egypt. Then there's the Assyrian calendar where in the 1950s they decided to set it at 6700. Now we have this random figure for us. It's all just patriotic dick measuring

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The Coptic calendar is 1736 years old, and there's evidence of the begninnings an ancient Egyptian calendar found from 3 thousand BC ( Clagetts Ancient Egyptian Science: A source book. Volume Two. Calendars, Cloks, and Astronomy )

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With all do respect, anything that doesn't fit the arab nationalist narrative you immediately dismiss as "patriotic dick measuring". What do you think Egyptians used before the Arab conquest to keep track of the date? We just lived in the dark and didn't have a calendar lmfao. This is not a "random figure" - ignorance about where something comes from does not mean it didn't exist, my good sir.

There are plenty of traditional Islamic scholars that have refuted Da'esh in theology. Right now off the top of my head I can link you this book (its one of the most famous)


Refuting ISIS by Sh. Muhammad Al Yaqoubi


"...penned this second edition to further elaborate on many important topics, such as the prohibition of burning human beings, the abolition of slavery, and Islam’s position towards minorities. New subjects are also tackled, such as the invalidity of excommunicating Muslim rulers for not applying certain aspects of Shari’ah, Islam’s position towards democracy, and the prohibition of destroying pre-Islamic monuments and sacred sites. Several other topics benefitted from more rigorous proofs, especially the section confirming that ISIS criminals have left the fold of Islam and are no longer Muslims."


Have a read on the review on Goodreads and tell me what you think.


Edit: Formatting

Convicted murderers would stay in prison for the rest of their lives, just like in every civilized country in the world.

The government should not be allowed to murder people outside of war, full stop. The government should not be allowed to torture people, or to imprison people with no charges or due process. We need to expect more and value life more.

The US has the death penalty, and it is completely corrupt. I recently read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Does-Shine-Freedom-Selection/dp/1250124719/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1569585926&sr=8-1 , about an innocent man who was on death row for 30 years. I will never be able to support the death penalty anywhere. Do you think that Egypt can do it better?