Egyptians cannot even be honest about the history of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
From 2003-2004 I attended Marine Corps Command and Staff College. We had about 40 Officers from various countries around the world, including about a dozen from the Middle East. I sat next to an Officer from the UAE throughout my time there. He loved America and even attended college in the U.S. Of course, he didn't understand some of our policies but, then again, acknowledged that many Middle Eastern countries are more culturally blind about how to sell their message than Americans are.
Anyhow, every Foreign Officer was required to give a country brief. It always consisted of the same elements: History, Geography, Economics, etc. They were usually pretty good and some were really funny. The Officer from Israel quipped that even though God gave them a land flowing with milk and honey, it would have been nice to get some oil in the bargain too.
The Saudi Officer's history was most interesting of all. He began the history of Saudi Arabia with Adam - or whatever Adam's name is in the Koran and then traced it generally through to Ibrahim (aka Abraham). He recounted how Ibrahim took his son Ishmael up to a mountain in Saudi Arabia at the command of God to sacrifice him but God stayed his hand at the last moment. Everyone found it interesting that he was recounting the Koran as real history. Part of me thought: "Too bad none of these guys would ever treat the Holy Scriptures with the same respect to trust them as real history." The funny thing is that one of the Officers afterward said: "Hey, that story is just like in the Bible...", to which I replied "Yeah, but it was
Isaac that God had commanded Abraham to sacrifice and it was not done in Saudi Arabia." Those details had been lost on him.
Anyway, it was really interesting having the Saudi Arabian and Egyptian Officers in my Terrorism seminar that I took for an elective. Listening to them politically rationalize a Palestinian strapping on a bomb vest while saying that the Koran condemns it at the same time was very confusing to me. I also got a kick out of the way the Egyptian Officer said the word "Terrorist". Whenever he pronounced it, it came out as "Tourist".
OK, so what's this got to do with anything? The Egyptian Officer's country brief was very interesting. That country, to its credit, is one of the very few countries that has maintained a national identity for thousands of years. Talk about a lot of history to recount. In fact, Egyptians are not quite like other Arabs in that regard. Egyptians derisively call other nations in the Middle East "Tribes with a flag", which is very apt. Arabs don't have a history of nation-states.
Well, he culminated his brief with none other than the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict. The way he presented it, though, was mind boggling. He presented basically the first 24 or so hours to the point of the furthest Egyptian advance and rapid military success. His brief basically ended up to the point where the Israelis handed their bottoms to them and threw them back beyond the Suez Canal. If you believed that guy, you would have thought that the Egyptians had won the war. The brief ended and all of us were sitting there with our mouths agape thinking: "Who does this guy think he's kidding?"
