Someone emailed me about this article and suggested I compare it to Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 91a, in which the sages - in their usual clear-eyed, unflinching way - discuss whether the Israelites did indeed steal the gold and utensils, and come up with various rationalizations and explanations.
I wonder if the Egyptian jurists are aware that a judgment was already made in this case?
On one occasion the Egyptians lodged a complaint against the people of Israel before Alexander the Great . They said to him : Is it not written: 'and the Lord gave the people favor in the eyes of Egypt' and they complied? Now give us back the silver and gold which you took from us ... He said to them: I too will bring you proof from the Torah, for it is written: 'And the sojourn of the Israelites who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years'. Give us compensation for the labor of 600,000 men whom you enslaved in Egypt for four hundred and thirty years ... They searched but could find no answer.Heh.
Not to mention that there isn't any solid proof the Exodus story happened (we don't have reliable archeological evidence of Hebrews until about 800 BCE). But we do have solid evidence of the Jews' treatment at the hands of Muslims from the Middle Ages to the expulsion of 800,000 Jews from Arab lands (and confiscation of their property) in the mid 20th c. (the "Golden Age of Spain" only lasted a couple of centuries), so I would say whatever gold we took from Egypt 4000 years ago is a drop in the bucket of what their descendants owe us, if we wanted to play that game.
So the Egyptians would be smart to drop the issue - if we took them seriously we could bankrupt them.
The LGF crowd is all over this.
. . . only Copts (app. 10% of Egypt's population) are real descendents of the ancient Egyptians.
Technically, if anything was stolen it wasn't from Muslims because at the time the Egyptian people were doing the Ra, Isis, jackle-headed god thing, right? So then what about all the people decended from Jews (Christians), are they gonna be sued also?
You can see the way they strain to acknowledge Moses and Aaron, while repudiating the Jews and "rabbis" (lol, rabbis before sinai). Their position makes no sense - they have to somehow allow Israel to retain theological significance via the OT w/o acknowledging the Jewish people as its rightful heirs, and they can't really get that to make theological sense.
So what's wrong with this suit besides res judicata (already decided by Alexander) and evidentiary problems (how to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the riches were stolen)? Well, there's always the statute of limitations. But more importantly, if the plaintiffs are accepting the Torah as having evidentiary value, then they must also concede that G-d promised the Holy Land to the descendants of Jacob. I think there may be a basis to strike a bargain here.
OK so don't the egyptians have to give an Itemized list of the allegedly stolen articles along with proof of ownership? Also wouldn't Islam be liable to return Mecca and Medina since the Quran goes into great detail how the Jews who owned it were driven out robbed raped and Murdered ?
Exodus 12:35-36 suggests that the ancient Egyptians gave the gold to the Israelites in order to get them to leave, presumably because of the killing of the first born children by the Israelites' "militant" ally. It is worth contemplating application of such a principle to a more modern situation in which "militants" are killing children in a conflict, the Arab - Israeli conflict. Running the numbers, each of the 600,000 Israelite adult males (Exodus 12:37) got 500 grams of gold, worth about $6,000 today. Under this "Gold for Peace" approach, the ancient Egyptians and Israelites agreed it was worth making such payments in exchange for the Israelites leaving the country. Applying this plan to the modern Arab - Israeli conflict, Israel would pay similar amounts of gold to Arabs to leave the Land of Israel. The total would be a few billion dollars, comparable to foreign aid to the frontline countries in one year. The plan is workable financially.
300 tons of gold is worth about 3.5 billion dollars today. I think that's about how much aid we give Egypt in two years. That oughta cover it.
The Farkites are also having a good time with this, and Jonah Goldberg points out
what about the Jews' cut of Egypt’s tourism industry? Since the Jews built a lot of that stuff – without compensation – shouldn’t they get a cut of all that too?You would think a group of lawyers would research their case a bit more thoroughly before making asses of themselves in public, especially if their culture is so driven by the avoidance of humiliation.
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