When people in the West ask me how we Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Eastern folks feel about America, I sum it up like this: “We hate your guts, but we would kill to get your visa.”
America was cited as the reason for everything evil that happened during the revolution: The revolutionaries accused America of supporting Mubarak and not moving fast enough to get him out. And the media accused America of staging the whole Arab Spring to destabilize the region. When they produced “evidence” that some of the revolution’s leaders were paid operatives, there were calls pouring in on TV outing the fact that many of the so-called revolutionaries and the thousands of people taking to the streets were only protesting because they were paid $50 and given a bucket meal from KFC. It only makes sense that fake protestors were bolstered with food from a fake chicken colonel. How fingerlickin’ American!
What Western think tanks get wrong all the time is that they believe they can actually figure out how we feel about America through geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural bullshit. This will never work; their best bet is to hire a therapist to analyze us.
In the 1950s and 1960s under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, our first ever military dictator, Egypt was leaning toward the Soviet camp of communism, so of course we hated America. The U.S. had always supported Israel, vetoed every single Security Council resolution against them, and turned a blind eye every time they bombed the shit out of the Palestinians. Everyone had their reasons to hate America: Islamists, the military, leftists, liberals, and even poor taxi drivers. America is an easy target toward which to direct your hate in Egypt. If you are a leader and can’t run the country properly, just convince the people that America is ruining everything. America is the devil for the Islamists because it wants to defeat Islam. We are enormous hypocrites, though, because while America empowers and financially assists Israel—our biggest enemy—we, at the same time, receive some of the largest chunks of American military aid. Meanwhile, Egyptian leftists hate America because it represents everything ugly about capitalism and world domination, while secular elitists hate America because it has empowered the extreme religious monarchies in the gulf region (who ironically sponsor the extreme religious scholars who tell the people that America is fighting Islam). And . . . the poor taxi driver hates America because he gets denied a visa to get away from all these crazy people.
Nonetheless, this despised America is a dream destination for many of Egypt’s hypocrites. Some of the most outspoken opponents of America send their kids to American schools and universities. When these people get sick, they travel to get treated in America. Their vacation retreats are mostly in the U.S. and Europe—all paid for by the money they sucked from the poor people of Egypt while telling them that the reason they are poor is America.
America and Israel are the excuses for all failures and government incompetence. I wouldn’t really mind if Egypt actually manned up and had a serious hate-fueled relationship with them, but when it disses America and Israel while lying in bed with them for financial, security, and political arrangements, we really just come off like assholes.
It is an interesting relationship in a country where people illegally download the latest episodes of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and fill the movie theaters for the latest Avengers movie. If Americans only knew how lucky they are that their endless lines are at Disney World while ours are queues in front of the American embassy.