A few months before that, while I was working as a photographer for Newsweek’s Arnaud de Borchgrave who had managed to interview both Golda Meir and Nasser in the same week, the Cairo fuzz arrested me for taking pictures. “You Jew,” said one cop to me once inside the police station. “No, I’m not,” said yours truly, “speak for yourself.” It was not the smartest of remarks. An officer heard me and punched me in the mouth. I chose not to retaliate as there were about ten of them and they also carried canes. But what really pissed me off was my friend Borchgrave’s reaction when I got back to the hotel. “You mean you didn’t get a picture?”

When I lived in the Sudan during the late 50s I used to visit Egypt every weekend. I was in love with a Levantine lady, played tennis at the Gezira Sporting Club, and gambled at the Mohamed Ali Club. Only Egyptian beys and pashas were allowed in, and this was six years after King Farouk’s fall. Life was very sweet and Alexandria still a peach of a city. Now both places are dumps, ruined by overpopulation and poverty. As I write, there are some very nervous people near here, in Davos to be exact. They are so-called Arab elites, which in my book means successful thieves and knaves. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states should be tinderboxes but are not. Look at Qatar. It has only 300,000 natives; the rest are immigrant laborers. If you call that a country, I’m a giraffe. The Saudis have let young girls burn to death rather than permit them to flee a school fire while improperly dressed. If you call that a civilized country, I’m the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Saudis and the Gulf states are safe because they pay the people to sit quietly under the palm trees eating their dates. The conman who rules Kuwait smelled a rat before everyone else and pledged three thousand greenbacks to every citizen. It’s no big deal for him, as the place is full of underpaid foreign workers and some very fat Kuwaiti natives.

The only place I’m worried about is Jordan, a tiny country which Israel’s ghastly Likudists would like to hand over to the Palestinians. The majority of Jordanians are Palestinians, most of whom were dispossessed by those nice guys of Haganah and the Stern Gang back in 1948. Here’s my fearless prediction writing on Monday, January 31: Mubarak will resign because of ill health sometime in the future, Gamal Mubarak will end up in Eaton Square, no one will commit suicide after Mubarak croaks, and Netanyahu will demand more billions from Uncle Sam because of the Egyptian situation.