New hotness: Bite like an Egyptian

Courtesy: Ilana Kartysh’s Facebook page

Israeli wrestler Ilana Kartysh won a gold medal Saturday in the Golden Grand Prix tournament in Italy, but her historical achievement was marred by a very unpleasant incident, when she was attacked by her Egyptian rival during the semi-final.

Kartysh, 22, who competed in the 67-kilogram weight category, made it to the semi-final after beating opponents from Hungary and Kazakhstan. There, she experienced a violent incident she won’t be able forget for quite a long time.

In the semi-final, Kartysh met the African champion, Anas Mostafa of Egypt. At the beginning of the match, Mostafa refused to shake hands with her. During the fight, she broke two of the Israeli’s fingers and bit her in the back – causing her to bleed. At the end of the match, unsurprisingly, she refused to shake hands with her again.

” I can’t remember such dirty behavior in sports,” Kartysh told Ynet after the fight. “In wrestling you must shake hands at the beginning of a match and at the end of a match. But not only did she refuse to shake my hand, she even broke my fingers and bit me until I began bleeding.

“On the ground, when she was on top of me, she just bit me. I have her teeth marks on my back, and I began bleeding too,” the Israeli wrestler adds. “Because of her dirty behavior my desire to beat her grew stronger.”

Do you know why she did it?

“From the beginning of the match, when she didn’t come over to shake my hand – I knew something was wrong. I felt some kind of hatred towards me and I don’t know why, maybe it has to do with politics and maybe not, but it’s never happened to me before. She really attacked me.

“I can’t even describe how proud I felt hearing ‘Hatikva’ (Israel’s national anthem) playing in the end.”

Kartysh, who has been trained in recent months by a Canadian coach, one of the best in the field, made it all the way to the final, where she competed against a local participant. She won the last battle as well and stepped on the podium to receive the gold medal, Israel’s first ever in a Golden Grand Prix competition.

I can only surmise Anas hates Ilana as an Israeli and/or as a Jew. Alternatively, she’s frustrated with her name or the fact she’s not the most famous Egyptian Anas Mostafa.

In any event, this is just the latest in a long line of bad Arab/Muslim sportsmanship on the world stage.

[Update: the original YouTube video has "been removed". Good thing Vlad got a copy....]

While Booth and her daughter claim she was banned for being “modest and Muslim,” I find this hard to believe. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood rules the roost in Egypt. As a commenter to the video suggests:

It is not about Islam or being a Muslim. Most 5 starts hotels like these disallow swimming with clothes on, you must be wearing swimming suits to swim in the pool (like anywhere in the world) it will look weird if everyone is jumping with clothes and Tshirts on in the pool, so ya there are swimming suits being sold for people wearing Hijab. These are rules that should be respected by anyone.

It looks like Booth Jr. has learned from mommy how to twist the truth and cause controversy.

It also looks like she has come a long way since her first YouTube appearance.

Meanwhile, here’s how Lauren Booth titled the video.

Little English Muslimah Band? Don’t confuse with these guys.

And here I was thinking spelling was a prerequisite for being a journalist.

Egyptian security services have banned a film about the Jews of Egypt on the eve of its scheduled release, the director told Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

“The film was banned by National Security,” Amr Ramses said by telephone from New York.

The film, which documents the lives of members of the Egyptian Jewish community in the first half of the 20th century, exploring themes of identity and tolerance, was meant to be screened in three cinemas on Wednesday.

“The head of the censorship board said National Security wanted to see a copy and they refused” to have the film screened, Ramses said.

The documentary had already received approval from the censorship board, and Ramses said he planned to take legal action to have the decision reversed.

The trailer had already created a big buzz in Egypt, with so little locally produced material about the Jews of Egypt.

Much of the community left the country after the Suez Crisis in 1956 which saw then president Gamal Abdel Nasser expel Jews who were deemed disloyal to the nation.

Today Egypt’s Jewish population consists of just a few dozen. The community keeps a low profile for fear of being persecuted.

I guess for now we’ll have to be content being represented on Egyptian television.

Or at least parts of us.

Given that Egyptians still claim they won the Yom Kippur war, I wouldn’t readily accept this man’s claim.

Nevertheless, I have just the drink for him.

I’ll post a simple summary. In a piece about the torture of African migrants in Sinai by Egyptians, Mike Thomson wrote and broadcast the following line:

“Egyptian security forces do operate in this region but only in limited numbers because of a long-standing peace agreement with neighbouring Israel.”

He’s talking about the 1979 Camp David accords which gave Sinai back to Egypt in return for security guarantees.

It’s a complex agreement with zones, troop levels and so forth. I’ll make it very simple.

The Egyptians can’t put large numbers of tanks in Sinai next to Israel.

That’s it. They’ve got more than enough troops to stop the torture if they want to.

I’ll tell you a real story I heard first hand from an IDF reserve. About this time last year his unit fired into Egypt over the heads of Egyptian soldiers to stop African migrants getting shot in the back by Egyptian troops. I don’t think this is ever reported but it’s not a unique event.

If you want the details, read the BBC Watch post. But if you think that the only way Egypt could police the Sinai properly and stop the torture of Africans is with few thousand tanks, you must either be delusional or a BBC reporter.

Meanwhile, either there’s a bug with Google’s knowledge graph profile on Salem, or he’s aged terribly.

New hotness: Super Morsi

Think “Super Mario” is one of the few classic characters who have won over the gaming masses? Think again.

A new character has been introduced in a video expected to go viral among the online Egyptian community. It shows Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi swapping his suit for a cap and becoming “Super Mursi.”

In the spoof “Super Mursi” video game, we see a cut-out head of the president bopping up and down, attempting to hit his apparent enemies – members of the Egyptian opposition.

The video was reportedly posted and shared by Egyptian activists on video-sharing site YouTube and social networking sites, according to Egypt’s al-Masry al-Youm newspaper this week.

The spoof game’s “Mushroom Kingdom” includes opposition include cut-out heads of the National Salvation Front’s Amr Moussa and Hamdeen Sabahy, also former presidential candidates running in the election with Mursi last year.

Before the video ends, we see “Super Mursi” encountering a collision of a different kind with Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie.

“Super Mursi” appears to push Badie above his head, with a little nudge, rather than crushing him below – like he had done with the opposition figureheads.

The video ends with an alternative to the words “Game Over.” Instead “Thawra Over” appears on a black screen, with the word “Thawra” meaning revolution in Arabic – an indication that “Super Mursi’s” moves may have done more harm to the uprising than good.

No word on whether the game also includes a level where Morsi has to dodge a swarm of locusts.

Meanwhile, as impressive as this is, don’t forget Israel had its own version of Mario first.

Well, it looks like the Egyptians have seen our seder and raised us an 8th plague.

In Cairo, residents burned tires to create a black fog to keep the locusts from settling in the city. Swarms were also reported to have reached Egypt’s Red Sea city of Zafarana, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) from Cairo, and then the Upper Egyptian city of Qena where locusts appeared in at least three major villages.

The Al-Ahram daily reported that since January, swarms of the insects – originating from Sudan – have been spotted along the Red Sea coast in south-eastern Egypt, north-eastern Sudan, Eritrea and Saudi Arabia.

In 2004, Egypt witnessed one of the most serious locust infestations in recent history, when farmers in 15 out of the country’s 27 governorates suffered extensive crop damage. The Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture issued a statement saying it had set up task forces to deal with the locust plague.

A professor at Cairo University’s Faculty of Agriculture said the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned of the locust danger last November, but the Ministry of Agriculture dismissed the warnings as rumors and refused to examine the issue.

Professor Nader Nur al-Din claimed that over the past few months he had also warned the ministry of the locust threat

Apparently, this is not a sign of the End of Days, and it happens every year.

As if we hadn’t already seen enough Biblical events this year, a plague of over 30 million locusts swarmedover Egypt’s cities and farms just three weeks before Passover begins. But put your apocalyptic fears to rest. This happens every year as part of the locusts’ natural migration pattern, though this year’s swarm is especially large. That doesn’t mean Egyptians aren’t freaked the heck out by millions of nasty bugs buzzing through the air at all hours of day and night, possibly descending upon the agriculture fields where they’re known to destroy entire crops, just like in the actual Passover story.

Meanwhile, there’s talk of the locusts hitting Gaza, which means there will be something else to blame on the Jooooos.

In related news, according to this Times of Israel reporter, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may soon experience the second plague.

In Egypt however, thing didn’t go as planned:

Four arrested in Egypt for ‘Harlem Shake’

CAIRO: Egyptian police said Saturday they have arrested four students who filmed themselves publicly dancing in their underwear, as more people around the world emulate a viral dance craze called the “Harlem Shake.”

The four pharmaceutical students shocked residents of a middle class Cairo neighbourhood when they removed most of their clothes and videotaped themselves performing the pelvis-thrusting dance, a police official said.

The hostile audience tried to assault the students, who are accused of committing “a scandalous act,” the official added.

Egypt has strict public indecency laws.

Some Egyptians have posted videos of themselves on Youtube doing the “Harlem Shake” in front of the pyramids. One of them, dressed in white underwear and a bow tie, dances while riding a camel.

Here’s the above mentioned “Haram Shake”

Isn’t YouTube banned in Egypt?

AP

So this is pretty gross. Israel’s long struggled with ways to block a series of tunnels that bring some 30 percent of all goods, including guns, into Gaza so they got creative. They’re using raw sewage. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Israeli authorities had gone to new extremes to cut off the flow of illegal goods and “flooded” the tunnels that run under the border. It’s since been revealed that this was not a flood of water, but rather human excrement — hundreds, thousands, even millions of gallons of raw sewage pumped into the same tunnels that, to quote Reuters’ report, “has been a lifeline for some 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza.”

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It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going through those tunnels since there are about potentially hundreds of them. They are, however, an important part of the local economy. “Some 15,000 people worked in and around the tunnels at their peak,” National Geographic reported in December, “and they provided ancillary work for tens of thousands more, from engineers and truck drivers to shopkeepers.”

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Quite bravely, the hundreds of Palestinian workers who maintain the tunnels aren’t giving up. They’re simply scooping up the excrement with buckets and going on with their lives. “Awful,” one Palestinian told reporters from The New York Times.

What you may find weird is why anti-Israel sites and “human rights” organizations seem silent on this, especially given they have not been silent on other supposed Israeli sewerage infractions, as well as our use of the non-lethal skunk spray against protesters.

Here’s why: I modified the above report. Here’s the real version.

So this is pretty gross. Egypt’s long struggled with ways to block a series of tunnels that bring some 30 percent of all goods, including guns, into Gaza so they got creative. They’re using raw sewage. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Egyptian authorities had gone to new extremes to cut off the flow of illegal goods and “flooded” the tunnels that run under the border. It’s since been revealed that this was not a flood of water, but rather human excrement — hundreds, thousands, even millions of gallons of raw sewage pumped into the same tunnels that, to quote Reuters’ report, “has been a lifeline for some 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza.” It’s also been an increasingly popular way to smuggle arms across the border, a practice Egyptians say is on the rise since the Arab Spring.

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going through those tunnels since there are about potentially hundreds of them. They are, however, an important part of the local economy. “Some 15,000 people worked in and around the tunnels at their peak,” National Geographic reported in December, “and they provided ancillary work for tens of thousands more, from engineers and truck drivers to shopkeepers.” The politics of the situation are more complicated than that, and they have been at least since the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty of 1979 split the city of Rafah in two, one half on the Egyptian side and one half on the Gaza side. Hamas seized control over the area six years ago and is now speaking out about Egypt’s blocking the tunnels as a way of undermining the Palestinian cause. The AP describes the face-off as “a rare act of tension between the Hamas government and their ideological parent, the Muslim Brotherhood, which now dominates Egypt’s government.”

Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood’s true motives are unclear. They say that they’re trying to cut off the flow of guns and violence into their country. Egyptian authorities, for instance, believe that the attackers who killed 16 Egyptian soldiers in Sinai last August came through the tunnels. Egypt also insists that they’ve opened up the border so that smuggling peaceful goods through the tunnels is no longer necessary. Either way, flushing out perceived foreign invaders with raw sewage sends a nasty message. Quite bravely, the hundreds of Palestinian workers who maintain the tunnels aren’t giving up. They’re simply scooping up the excrement with buckets and going on with their lives. “Awful,” one Palestinian told reporters from The New York Times. “I don’t know why they did this.

Actually, Egypt’s been doing this for a while, which makes the hypocrisy of aforementioned sites and “human rights” organizations even more obvious. As does the fact that Israel specifically designed the skunk spray to be non-lethal, for which the same can’t be said for raw sewerage.

Israel Double Standard Time strikes again.