Pharaoh's fear is no remedy for his fate

Pharaoh's fear comes at a very high price for oppressed people.

It sounds pleasant that Pharaoh is afraid, that is true; knowing that, despite his dazzling power and splendor, he is afraid gives consolation to the hearts of oppressed people. Indeed, for the oppressed, whose lives have become worse than death, knowing that Pharaoh is afraid is no small consolation.

Pharaoh's way of overcoming his fear begins with taking measures commensurate with all his power, with applying extraordinarily disproportionate force against the object of his fear.

The most famous Pharaoh's fear stems from the prophecy he heard that one of the slaves he ruled and oppressed would rise and dethrone him. According to one narration, this prophecy is based on the interpretation of a dream he had. Pharaoh did not brush the matter off by saying of that interpretation "it is, after all, only an interpretation"; relying on that interpretation, from that year on, for a long time, he began to mercilessly kill all newborn male children of the Children of Israel as soon as they were born. Thus he thought he could escape his final end. He thought he was securing the safety of his own seat over the massacre of babies.

Yet it was precisely these savage measures he took that would bring about Pharaoh's end. Perhaps, had he not given such an interpretation so much credit and set about taking measures of such severity, such great rancor against him would not have formed among the Children of Israel, and an expectation of a hero who would save them from this oppression would not have arisen among the Children of Israel.

What Pharaoh can stand before the sigh and rancor of a people whose male children are killed as soon as they are born? For a people subjected to such oppression, life has no meaning other than living to deal with the oppressor.

Today Pharaoh is not Sisi alone. It is not only Sisi who sees Pharaoh's nightmare. Today's world now appears to be a wholly Pharaonic world. Naturally, many people see Pharaoh's nightmare at the same time.

The petro-dollar-rich leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries see the dream Pharaoh saw, and see in the ill-fated oppressed of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and even Syria a threat to their own future. They feel that in the awakening of these oppressed countries their own end draws near, and, as far as their wits go, they take their measures. They think they can escape their inevitable end with the measures they take. They cannot escape.

While hunger, oppression, injustice and immorality have run wild all over the world, they think that the prosperity they have fallen into comes from themselves. They have not even understood that it is a harsh test for them.

Everyone now sees that they are merely exploiting even the Palestinian cause, on which they have built their legitimacy for years. They have not tried to take even one effective step for the Palestinian cause until now; in return, they saw very well that this cause offered them an official ideological material and exploited it to the end.

They have feared and hated nothing else as much as they have feared and hated a genuine Islamic call. Now, before the brave youth of Africa who have risen with the Arab Spring process, they are at a loss from fear what to do. By carrying out military coups, by having them carried out, by having their coup-making deputies carry out the most savage, most merciless, most inhuman massacres, they delude themselves that they can escape their own end.

They will not escape. All the measures they have taken will serve for nothing other than preparing their end further. After all, Pharaoh's end too had come because of the very measures he himself took.

Of course it is not only Sisi, and not only Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf leaders, who see Pharaoh's nightmare. Israel, which has had nightmares that with the Muslim Brothers' coming to power the Camp David order in the Middle East would collapse, and the US, and the EU too, see Pharaoh's nightmare, and reproduce his fear and his measures under today's conditions.

At the cost of consuming in one stroke all the values they have produced until now and all the gods they have worshipped, they cling to their nightmares with both hands. They are completing the cadre of their empire of fear with the soothsayers from the social scientists they have brought into play, the sorcerers from the media-men, and the Bal'ams from the clergy and ideologues. But their ends, which have become inevitable, repeat themselves as a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

It no longer matters at all, from this hour on, who calls what happened in Egypt a coup or does not. We can understand what kind of nightmare those who do not call it a coup, those who hesitate to call it so, have woken into. But the bad news for them now is this: Moses has set out, and the end of the Pharaonic order they have built is also inevitable.