New English Review:
An Interview with Raymond Stock
by Jerry Gordon and Raymond Stock (November 2012)
In December 2010, after spending two decades in Egypt as an academic and translator of the works of Egyptian Nobel Laureate, the late Naguib Mahfouz, ex-pat Detroit native, Raymond Stock was denied entry and deported by the Mubarak regime. He had apparently crossed the line when in 2009, he authored a Foreign Policy article, “Very, Very Lost in Translation,” about the anti-Semitic rants of former Mubarak cultural minister, Farouk Hosni, who was jockeying to be nominated as head of UNESCO. Stock wrote of Hosni:
To say that Farouk Hosni doesn’t much like Israel is putting it lightly. According to the Anti-Defamation League, he has called it “inhuman,” and “an aggressive, racist, and arrogant culture, based on robbing other people’s rights and the denial of such rights.” He has accused Jews of “infiltrating” world media. And in May 2008, Hosni outdid even himself, telling the Egyptian parliament that he would “burn right in front of you” any Israeli books found in the country’s libraries.
Less surprising but also sadly true is that Hosni’s opinions about Israeli culture are par for the course among Egypt’s intelligentsia, for whom 30 years of official peace with the Jewish state, the longest of any Arab country, have done virtually nothing to moderate its rampant Judeophobia. If anything, the opposite might be true.
