Egyptians Want To Process All Jews For Theft By Hebrews!!!

[Hyades]

Many have expressed doubts that America can influence the Middle East. But I submit that our cultural sway is already in evidence.

Just when you thought that no lawsuit could be more preposterous than the one filed by families who tried to sue McDonalds for making them fat, along comes evidence that lawsuit madness has taken hold in Egypt in a truly unique fashion.

Thanks to the Middle East Media Research Institute, we learn that the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi recently featured an interview with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, dean of the faculty of law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq.

Hilmi, in concert with a group of expatriate Egyptians in Switzerland, is preparing perhaps the largest lawsuit in the history of the world. Hilmi, et al., are going to sue "all the Jews of the world" for items stolen by the Biblical Hebrews from the Egyptians during the Exodus from Egypt.

Hilmi explained at length in Al-Ahram Al-Arabi: "Since the Jews make various demands of the Arabs and the world, and claim rights that they base on historical and religious sources, a group of Egyptians in Switzerland has opened the case of the so-called ‘great exodus of the Jews from Pharaonic Egypt.' At that time, they stole from the Pharaonic Egyptians gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing and more, leaving Egypt in the middle of the night with all this wealth, which today is priceless."

"Dr. Gamil Yaken, vice president of the Egyptian community in Switzerland, came to Egypt to collect information. We set up a legal team to prepare the necessary legal confrontation aimed at restoring what the Jews stole a long time ago, to which the statute of limitation cannot possibly apply. ... The theft was not limited to gold alone. The thieves stole everything imaginable. They emptied the Egyptian homes of cooking utensils. ... Taking possession of the gold was understandable. This is clear theft of a host country's resources and treasure, something that fits the morals and character of the Jews."

Hilmi was then asked by his respectful interviewer, "What do you think is the value of the gold, silver and clothing that was stolen, and how do you calculate their value today?"

"If we assume," Hilmi replied, "that the weight of what was stolen was one ton, its worth doubled every 20 years, even if the annual interest is only 5 percent. In one ton of gold is 700 kilograms of pure gold -- and we must remember that what was stolen was jewelry, that is, alloyed with copper. Hence, after 1,000 years, it would be worth 1,125,898,240 million tons, which equals 1,125,898 billion tons for 1,000 years. In other words, 1,125 trillion tons of gold, that is, a million multiplied by a million tons of gold. This is for one stolen ton. The stolen gold is estimated at 300 tons, and it was not stolen for 1,000 years, but for 5,758, by the Jewish reckoning. Therefore the debt is very large."

But these are reasonable men. The interviewer wondered whether a compromise might be possible. "There may be a compromise solution. The debt can be rescheduled over 1,000 years, with the addition of the cumulative interest during that period."

Well, let's see. If the Egyptians are willing to abide by the Biblical account of events for their lawsuit (which would make the discovery process interesting), they must prepare for a counterclaim for damages resulting from 400 years of bitter slavery. In Exodus, Chapter III, verse 7, God said to Moses, "I have surely seen the affliction of My people that are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their pains ..."

In verse 9, God continued, "And now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto Me; moreover I have seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them."

Details, details. As it happens, the Egyptians tried this once before, in Alexander the Great's time. Alexander had no trouble ruling that if anyone owed indemnity, it was the Egyptians to the Jews, not vice versa.

Do the Egyptians really want to pursue this line of argument? Before filing their request for discovery, they might want to read on, to Exodus, Chapter VII -- the Ten Plagues.   

http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2003/09/02/sue_the_jews?page=full&comments=true

[mord]

 

[Kahane-Was-Right BT]

LOL.   There is a story in Talmud where a couple of Egyptian clowns try to pull this on the Jews in Bavel or Eretz Yisrael (I forget where it takes place).   The mediator Jew (not a big scholar, but a modest and friendly Jew with good communication skills) is sent on behalf of the Jewish community, and he kindly points out how they owe us for 400 years of forced unpaid labor and oppression.   The Egyptians high-tail it and are never heard from again.   Muman if you can find which gemara this is and quote it here that would be great.

[Kahane-Was-Right BT]

Here it is.  Rabbi Berel Wein had an interesting reply to this issue.   I think it is actually from a few years ago.

http://www.torah.org/features/secondlook/oldclaims.html#

Old claims
By Rabbi Berel Wein

The recent publicity given to the intent of an Egyptian academic professor to file a lawsuit against the Jewish people and the State of Israel for the return of the gold, silver, precious items and clothing taken by the Israelites when they left Egyptian bondage over three millennia ago caused me to think how ancient scores and claims are never really settled, at least as far as those against the Jews are concerned. The learned academic who claims to be filing this class-action lawsuit is perhaps unaware that this tactic was attempted before in human history - in fact it was employed over twenty-three centuries ago during the reign of Alexander the Great over both Egypt and the Land of Israel.

The Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin relates that representatives of the Egyptian nation appeared before Alexander and asked that he demand from the Jews the return of all of the Egyptian wealth taken by the Jews when they left Egypt and slavery a millennium earlier. Alexander sent a notice to Jewish elders in Jerusalem to send a representative to him in order to present the Jewish side of the dispute. Of course after a thousand years, one would have imagined that some sort of statute of limitations would have taken effect and made the trial irrelevant. However, when dealing with claims against Jews as stated earlier, history has shown us that these claims are never quite put to rest but continue to fester down through the ages. The rabbis sent as their representative a man by the name of Gavha who was small in stature, a hunchback, but very clever in mind. His defense was that if one were to start down the slippery road of adjudicating ancient claims, then the Egyptians still owed the Jews enormous amounts of money as payment for the centuries of slave labor that they extracted from their millions of Jewish slaves over many centuries. Alexander, no fool himself, realized the morass that he had placed himself in by originally accepting, decided to dismiss the matter and let the status quo remain. So here we are again twenty-three centuries later with the same fatuous claim being advanced once more. Oh, for the wisdom and strength of an Alexander in today's world of moral equivalency.

A perusal of Talmudic, Midrashic and rabbinic literature over the many millennia of Jewish existence reveals that there has always been one constant claim advanced against the Jewish people by its many enemies and that is; "You have no right to have a Jewish state in the Land of Israel!" The Philistines, themselves then only a group of relatively recent immigrants to the land destroyed the wells that Isaac had dug to benefit the entire population of the land. The claim of the Philistines was that the "water is ours." The first comment by Rashi in his magisterial interpretation of the Torah, when discussing the necessity for the Torah to tell us the story of creation altogether, stresses the fact that there will always be nations and people that say to the Jews: "You have stolen the Land of Israel - it does not belong to you." We are painfully aware how that old false claim tragically has found so much resonance in our current world. It is ironic that the Jewish "old claim" to the Land of Israel is ignored while much more recent "old claims" are justified. Old claims are manipulated and often are used to justify current injustice. For example, in Zimbabwe, white farmers who have owned land there for almost two centuries are being dispossessed because of the claim that they “stole” the land.

If the Jewish people were to advance old claims against its oppressors throughout time, even Israel would not have sufficient lawyers to pursue the matter. Judaism therefore recognizes a logical and necessary self-imposed statute of limitations on ancient claims. That was the answer given to Alexander by Gavha - "If you open the long-settled past you will have truly opened the ultimate Pandora's box."

This Jewish attitude towards old claims from past, that they be allowed to rest, is based upon the Jewish belief that the Lord is an exquisite accountant, so to speak, and that His books eventually balance perfectly- always. Human judgment is always fallible and its value systems are ever changing. Judging matters thirty-three centuries old by current standards of civilization and societal mores is futile and wrong. Only God can balance claims, judge conflicting rights and make certain that eventual justice and fairness is accomplished. Our claim to the Land of Israel is based on God's will and His revelation of that will to us through the Torah. Eventually, that is the only "old claim" that can stand the test of time and history.

Reprinted with permission from rabbiwein.com




The talmud source is Sanhedrin but I'm not sure what daf (page).

[muman613]

KWRBT,

I found this interesting:

http://ohr.edu/yhiy/article.php/118


Stealing - What or Whom?
The Passages:
In two different places in the Torah we are warned against stealing: in the Ten Commandments (Shmos 20:13) and in Vayikra 19:11. One of them refers to theft of money and the other to kidnapping.

The Problem:
How can we deduce from the passages themselves what sort of theft they refer to?

The Resolution:
One of the thirteen rules of Torah interpretation is that we can deduce the nature of an unidentified subject by seeing the context in which it is found. The commandments preceding and following the one about theft in the Ten Commandments prohibit murder and adultery, both of them capital crimes. We
therefore conclude that the theft referred to there is kidnapping, which is also punishable by death if the kidnapper took his victim into his domain, exploited him for labor and consequently sold him into slavery. (While any form of kidnapping is forbidden by this commandment the death penalty
applies only when the circumstances of exploitation of labor are present for this was the principal objective of kidnapping throughout history, as opposed to the more modern ransom which is not mentioned in the Talmud as a capital punishment situation.) In Vayikra 19:11-13 the context is monetary injustice so we may conclude that the theft referred to is also one of a monetary nature.

Sanhedrin 86a

Whose Land is It?

During the period when Eretz Yisrael was under the control of Alexander the Great, a challenge was presented by the Canaanites to the Jewish claim on the land which is identified in the Torah as the land of Canaan - their grandfather. In the subsequent trial before Alexander their challenge was convincingly rejected by the Jewish representative.

But the question which arises in regard to this historical incident is how the Canaanites dared to base their challenge on a Torah passage when the Torah is so explicit that the Creator gave the land of Canaan to Avraham Avinu and his descendants?

The Maharsha points out that the challenge took place at a time when Jews had already suffered exile from their land and even upon their return were not sovereign but subservient first to the Persians and now to Alexander. The Canaanites argued that they were expelled from the land because of their sins and the righteous Jewish nation inherited it (as is pointed out in the first Rashi in Bereishis) so that our claim to the land is conditional on our being more deserving than them. Once we were expelled from the land because of our sins, they continued, we lost our claim based on merit. Everything then goes back to inheritance from ancestors and Canaan preceded Avraham.

(They were wrong, of course, but the issue they raised caused serious concern for the Sages of that period - and should today stir some thoughts about the rise of foreign claims to our land - Ed.)

Sanhedrin 91

http://www.jlaw.com/Commentary/as_historiclawsuit.html

The loud chortling sound you may have heard last week was the collective mirth of countless Talmud-conversant Jews as they read about a lawsuit being prepared by a group of Egyptian expatriates in Switzerland.

The news came in the form of an interview, published in the Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi, with Dr. Nabil Hilmi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq. The article was translated and made available by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Dr. Hilmi’s lawsuit is ostensibly being filed against “all the Jews of the world” for recovery of property allegedly stolen during the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt approximately 3300 years ago.

Citing the Torah, Dr. Hilmi is demanding, presumably on Egypt’s behalf, the return of “gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing and more,” not to mention interest thereon, taken by the ancestors of today’s Jews "in the middle of the night” – a "clear theft of a host country’s resources and treasure, something that fits the morals and character of the Jews."

According to Dr. Hilmi’s mathematical computations, which include an annual doubling in value of the material in question, 1,125 trillion tons of gold are owed by the Jews for each of the 300 tons he estimates was taken. And that doesn’t include interest, which he claims, without explanation, should be calculated for 5758 years.

The merriment that greeted the report was born of the fact that the Talmud tells of precisely such a claim lodged over 2000 years ago in a world court of sorts presided over by none other than Alexander the Great.

The story is recounted in Sanhedrin 91a, where it is recorded that one Geviha ben Pesisa responded on the Jews’ behalf. A paraphrase of the excerpt follows:

      "What is your source ?" Geviha asked the Egyptian representatives. "The Torah," they replied.
      "Very well," said Geviha, "I too will invoke the Torah, which says that the Jews spent 430 years laboring in Egypt. Please compensate us for 600,000 men’s work for that period of time."
      The Egyptians, the Talmud continues, then asked Alexander for three days during which to formulate a response. The recess was granted but the representatives, finding no counter-argument, never returned.

One supposes that Dr. Hilmi was unfamiliar with that page of Talmud, and perhaps with the underlying Biblical narrative on which it is based.

His gift to us, though, is more than a good laugh. For by sending us to Sanhedrin 91a, he provides us great consolation and hope in these trying times.

For the very next account on that page concerns yet another historic lawsuit – ancient and yet as timely as tomorrow’s headlines.

This suit was filed by "the children of Ishmael and Keturah [Abraham’s second wife, identified by the Midrash as Hagar]." Ishmael, of course, is claimed by many Arabs as their ancestor.

The plaintiffs in this suit claimed that Canaan, or the Land of Israel, was really theirs, as the Torah identifies their antecedents, no less than Isaac, to be progeny of Abraham.

Once again, Geviha responded on behalf of the Jews. "Your source?" he asked. "The Torah," they responded. "If so," he continued, "I too will invoke the Torah, which says that Abraham gave ‘all that was his to Isaac; and to the children of his concubines [other wives], he gave [only] gifts, and he sent them away from Isaac his son… eastward’" [Genesis, 25:5,6].

Intriguingly, the Talmud mentions no Ishmaelite or Keturite reaction in Alexander's court – not even a request for time to formulate a response. It 's almost as if those plaintiffs simply refused to acknowledge the unarguable case that had been presented, as if they were utterly unable to countenance the idea that the Holy Land was in fact bequeathed in its entirety by Abraham to Isaac, who in turn bequeathed it to Jacob; and he, to his children after him, the Jewish people.

According to the Jewish religious tradition, though, the entire world, including Ishmael's descendants, will one day come not only to countenance the idea but to fully embrace it. That day has not yet arrived, to be sure, and it will not be military or political actions in the end that will bring it, but rather our merits as a people.

It will arrive, though. As the prophet Jeremiah tells our Rachel, one of the mothers of the Jewish people: "Restrain your voice from crying and tears from your eyes… for there is hope for you in the end … the children will return to their borders."

Posted September 11, 2003