Farouq Hosni and UNESCO

Okay, I'm going to keep this one short because I've been deliberately ignoring it. It doesn't reflect well on anyone in the Middle East region and I'm glad it's going to now go away.

Egypt's Culture Minister, Farouq Hosni, was a major candidate to be the next head of UNESCO. A lot of Egyptians despise him, since he's the sort of Culture Minister who spends a fair amount of his time banning books rather than promoting them. When he was nominated as a major candidate for UNESCO, someone pointed out that as recently as a year ago he had publicly stated that he would like to burn every Israeli book in Egyptian libraries. Now, Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel and there actually are Israeli books in Egyptian libraries. But for some odd reason, some folks around the world got the idea that advocacy of book burning might not be a good quality in a head of UNESCO. I share that odd idea.

Well, Hosni of course did the old I mispoke/was misquoted/didn't mean it/can't recall thing and announced that of course he wouldn't actually burn books, ha, where did you get that crazy idea? And of course he'd treat Israel equally and all that.

Then the UNESCO balloting went through five ballots and, finally, Hosni lost narrowly to a Bulgarian scholar who will be the first woman to head UNESCO.

So what did Hosni do next? Claim that the UN was "politicized" (well, duh) and, oh this could be a problem, blamed the world's Jews for conspiring against him. Uh, you know, that let's burn Israeli books thing might have biased them a little, Farouq? And the whole Jewish conspiracy thing doesn't exactly open up new avenues for your future international reputation, either?

Okay, this saga's over and I ignored it till the end because I really had no dog in this fight. But now there comes another issue: during the campaign for the UNESCO job, Hosni supposedly said he was going to resign the Culture Ministry whether he won or lost. He lost. Will he resign?

There was already something of a cottage industry in predicting his successor. That link may be pure gossip but it includes some high-octane folks: Zahi Hawass, who at least may head a separate Ministry of Antiquities big enough for his ego and his Indiana Jones hat, and Muhammad Kamal, the National Democratic Party's education expert and the political scientist who's apparently Gamal Mubarak's equivalent of Karl Rove or David Axelrod. (Muhammad Kamal is also, by the way, a former Adjunct Scholar at MEI, so he's sort of extended family as well. If Gamal becomes President, we'll hear more of him.)

Of course, now that Farouq Hosni has lost the UNESCO post, these other changes depend on whether he actually does resign his Culture Ministry post. Since his opinion of Israel and world Jewry seems to have dramatically shifted at least twice in recent months, his commitment to his resolution to resign, win or lose, may be a bit different since the coin came up "lose".

Culture Ministers and UNESCO remind one, to some extent, of the old line about how academic politics is the nastiest form of politics because the stakes are so low. That's why I stayed out of this particular fight. But now that the international battle is over, there will be domestic Egyptian political repercussions, and that does interest me.