Nothing of the old glory has remained in Egypt – contemporary Egypt claims the monuments of the previous culture, but it only destroys them

To this day, the Egyptian pyramids are among the most striking and admired structures created by humans. Ancient Egypt had an immense influence on the development of European science and culture. The ancient Greeks, including for example Pythagoras, drew on Egyptian knowledge. The hieroglyphs are still visible in our script: for example, an Egyptian sign that looked like  water ripples, meaning either  "water" or the  letter "n", passed  through the  Proto-Sinai  and  Greek scripts into both

Hebrew and today's Latin, where we can still see the ripples in the letters "m" and "n". Knowledge of the ancient traditions was maintained at least until the period of Greek rule, as evidenced by the Rosetta Tablet with a Greek translation of the hieroglyphic text dating from 196 BC, which at the beginning of the 19th century enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and thus the acquisition of most of our knowledge of ancient Egypt.

Other important cultures developed in contact with ancient Egypt, including Babylonian and later Greek and Jewish, of which there has always been awareness, but a surprise for modern science was the retroactive discovery of the Hittite empire, of which language was deciphered by the Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný in 1915. However, the ancient Egyptian culture, with its 3800-year long duration, from 3150 BC until the Arab conquest in 641 AD, was the most stable and monumental one. According to medieval traditions, Caliph Omar burned the famous Alexandrian library in 642 saying: "Either those books are in accordance with the Koran and then are superfluous, or they contradict it and then they are harmful".

Modern Egyptian governments claim the ancient glory, but the true descendants of the ancient Egyptians are not the Egyptian Muslims of today, but the Christian Copts. Muslims are the descendants of the conquerors who came after the death of Muhammad and of the later converts to Islam. Copts represent roughly 10% of Egypt's 100 million citizens. They are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who have not succumb to inhuman pressure even after 1400 years of Muslim rule. The Coptic Church is probably the oldest Christian denomination in the world, but their Christian brothers around the world are afraid to even mention them, lest they anger the Muslims. This fear is already apparent from the English Wikipedia, which states the number of Copts in Egypt as follows: "Copts in Egypt account for roughly 5-20 percent of the Egyptian population, although the exact percentage is unknown".

The Muslim government does not want to count the Copts because it does not want to recognize their existence at all. Copts have been second-class citizens throughout their history and, apart from a brief more liberal period in the 19th century, have had to suffer like animals. Pogroms and persecution, including the abduction and rape of girls and women, are still the order of the day. Although Pope Francis condemned the killing of Egyptian Copts by ISIS extremists in 2017, he never spoke out against Egyptian Muslims or the government, and I don't recall any other pope protesting the oppression of Copts in modern times, even though Western humanists and human rights advocates did not protest either.

However, the above does not mean that Muslims have an easy life in Egypt. More than 80% of women are subjected to so-called female circumcision, which is an excruciatingly painful cutting off parts of the female genital organs, mostly between the ages of 0 and 15, sometimes even without anesthetics, which usually leads to irreversible physical and mental mutilation of a person. Ordinary citizens have no rights, and politicians, including presidents, usually end up imprisoned or murdered.

Modern governments have succeeded in flooding many ancient Egyptian monuments with the construction of the Aswan Dam, and some monuments have been destroyed in other ways, such as in the event poetically called the "Arab Spring", during which Muslim protesters in righteous anger looted museums in 2011. Many women did not escape the anger and were group-raped during the demonstrations. Without any illusions, the Egyptian writer Farag Foda wrote about the Islamic history of Egypt: “There was no golden age. More of our people have been killed by our own people than by our enemies", and to confirm his words, he himself was killed in front of his children in 1992.

In its peace efforts, Israel has focused on Egypt, as the most populous Arab country. After defeating Egypt in the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel offered Egypt the Sinai and a peace agreement, with the understanding that Egypt would celebrate the Yom Kippur War as its great victory. Although the Arab honor (also called male honor or family honor) of Egypt was saved, the Egyptian governments continued to incite hatred even after the signing of the peace agreement; unable to overcome the anti-Semitism of their Hitler-admiring leaders, from Nasser to Mubarak, they chose the German eagle as their national emblem after World War II.

Egypt never fulfilled the 1978 peace accords. TV series in the anti-Semitic style of Julius Streicher continued to run on Egyptian television. Egypt did not allow the development of relations, refused to sell gas from Sinai to Israel, and even organized an attack against the Israeli embassy in Cairo in 2011, when the employees only miraculously managed to escape lynching at the last moment. Under the pretext that there are terrorists in Sinai, Egypt forced Israel to allow tanks to be placed there, despite the most important point of the peace agreement, which was the complete demilitarization of Sinai. When Israeli tourists were killed and wounded in Sinai this June, Egypt did not allow Israeli helicopters to land there and evacuate them.

Occasionally, Egyptian tanks from Sinai "accidentally" fire on Israeli towns near the border, but Israel, led by its doves, ignores this, as well as the smuggling of weapons, drugs, and illegals into Israel from Sinai, which is tolerated or even organized by the Egyptian military. In 2016, Egyptian soldiers shot and killed a 15-year-old Israeli boy. I know the details of the boy's killing because my daughter worked as a journalist for the daily Israel Hayom and as part of her work visited the murdered man's family several times. They are Bedouins who live in the Negev, a few kilometers from me, in a village called Lakiya. The boy's father worked as a laborer building a fence between the Negev and Sinai and took his son there. An Egyptian soldier approached them, hurled a few curses and shot the boy dead from a close range.

The father of the murdered child waited in vain for the Israeli authorities to announce the results of the "investigation" of that crime. Israel probably asked the Egyptian side if the shooter would be punished, and Egypt did not respond. Upon my daughter's repeated inquiries to the Israeli military, she was told by a spokesperson that the investigation was ongoing. In the last visit to Lakiya, the father of the murdered child was already evasive, and it appeared that the government had given him compensation in exchange for his silence. Even during the so-called peace negotiations with Hamas, the Israeli doves give the Egyptian negotiators a role just to flatter Egyptian vanity, of course Israel can negotiate a truce with the terrorists by its own force.

Egypt "mediates" peace by not only systematically slandering Israel in the UN, but also by organizing anti-Israel actions around the world and preventing other Islamic states from concluding peace agreements with Israel. In the recent conflict with Gaza, Egypt was the only country in the world that did not "believe" an Israeli video showing Palestinians killing their own children with their own rockets, declaring that it was another crime by Israel. Gaza strip borders only Israel and Egypt, so rockets and materials for their production can only flow into Gaza from Egypt.

I don't wish to state that Egypt is worse than other countries. Every African country, if we look at it in more detail, seems like hell to a European. However, it is useful to get a little familiar with life in those countries, and thus appreciate our civilization more, and not succumb to the delusions of naive idealists who seek to import as many immigrants as possible, including their colorful culture. Ancient Egypt was an island of advanced non-African culture in Africa, but Islam is an island of barbaric culture inside and outside of Africa.