Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald does the work that the dhimmis in the State Department cannot or will not do:

A poster on this website recently asked, “Now how do we unload that $2 billion annual yoke to Egypt?"

The same way we unstick ourselves from the Iraq tarbaby -- just do it. Decide to do it, tell Egypt that we have Ten Good Reasons to End the Jizyah, and that it is hereby over. The American people simply will not stand for shelling out $2 billion a year (my, what could that do for solar energy and wind energy projects?), amounting to some $60 billion and counting, to a country that is not part of the West, and that does not share our beliefs or our assumptions -- and that does share beliefs and assumptions that, if they were somehow to prevail, would make our lives as Infidels much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous. At the very least, and at the most, they might pose a mortal threat.

Here are those Ten Good Reasons:

1) Egypt has failed to fulfill every single one of those intangible commitments it made to Israel under the Camp David Accords, all that stuff about ending hostile propaganda and so on. Instead, it has prevented Egyptians from visiting Israel, prevented Israelis from participating in film and book festivals in Cairo, and done everything it can in the press and on television (all of which are controlled completely by the government -- just try making noises about Mubarak's plans for his son) to make Egypt a hotbed of antisemitism. A multi-part television series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not exactly correspond to what Egypt committed itself to do in order to receive, for the second time, the entire Sinai, together with oilfields and $16 billion (in 1979 dollars) in infrastructure put in by the Israelis.

2) Egypt has failed to make the Egyptian population grateful for the nearly $60 billion it has so far received. In fact, we have come to understand that the American aid is a kind of slush fund for the Mubarak Family-and-Friends Plan, and so actually increases resentment by people in Egypt toward the Americans.

3) The discovery that many high officials in Egypt were receiving sums from Saddam Hussein cannot allow further sums to go to Egypt. There has been evidence of collaboration between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Egypt on certain kinds of weapons development. In other ways Egypt was meretricious in how it hid all these dealings from the American government.

4) The failure of the Egyptian government to stop all the weapons smuggling into Gaza, though it has been made well aware, for years, of the situation, is a further violation of Egypt's commitments and of what the American government has a right to expect of it. Arms sent to such terrorist groups as Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad) through Egypt can only be sent with the knowledge of some Egyptian authorities. The government should have found them. It did not.

5) The endless and sustained anti-American campaign in the press and television have led Egyptians to be among the most thoroughly anti-American in their views, even among Muslims. The government should have been moving heaven and earth to change these attitudes if it expected American taxpayers to keep shelling out money to a regime, a country, and a people (or at least the Muslim component of that people) who do not wish us, as Infidels, well -- and whom we, in turn, have no obligation in the slightest to support, and many good reasons not to support.

6) The behavior of Egypt in protecting the Sudan, in preventing U.N. troops or any troops except the ineffective African Union contingent, shows that the government of Egypt has no moral objections to the Jihad being conducted against non-Arab (and therefore inferior in every respect) Muslims in Darfur. Egypt has in every way been defending that government and throwing up obstacle after obstacle to attempts to end the continued mass murders in Darfur, as have other Arab and Muslim governments. Over the past 20 years Egypt has more or less successfully prevented Western powers from stopping the genocide against Christian and animist black Africans in the southern Sudan. This is not surprising. During the Biafra War it was Egyptian pilots who gleefully strafed Ibo and other Christian villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers (who had not a rifle among them). Egypt's role in suppressing the Christians during the Biafra War was promptly forgotten; it should not have been.

7) The stratokleptocracy (or rule by a thieving military caste) has led Egyptians to turn to Islam as the answer, as most Muslims inevitably will when assorted lords of misrule confront them. And they inevitably will be so confronted, because Islam itself encourages the habit of subservience to the ruler, and the habit of mental submission at every level, and the habit of discouraging free inquiry. All this leads to conspiracy theories, rumors, and sheer political craziness, preventing good government from being established.

Therefore the more money Americans and other Infidels supply those corrupt and odious Egyptian rulers, the more, not less, will be their obvious gain. That gain will be flaunted, leading to still more resentment by ordinary Egyptians not privy to the appropriation and divvying up of that aid. The more aid we give to Egypt, the more anti-Americanism will be encouraged.

8) The behavior of the Egyptian officials in reacting to the kidnapping and rape, or kidnapping and forced conversion of Coptic girls, and the attacks on Coptic schools and churches, and even murders of Coptic priests and villagers, has been intolerable. These have often been carried out with the full knowledge, and sometimes the participation, of local police. This will probably continue, but it should not continue with American aid money.

9) Egypt has made repeated threats, some official, and some unofficial, to the government of Ethiopia and to others involved in its agricultural development, warning that "the Nile belongs to Egypt" and that Ethiopia (a country which in recent decades has suffered from famine and drought) should not dare to divert some of the headwaters of the Nile without Egypt's explicit approval. It is clear that the Egyptian government backs the Sudanese Arabs in wiping out as many of the non-Arabs -- whether Muslim or non-Muslim -- as possible. Meanwhile, the Arab control of Sudan (which just a half-century ago had a black African majority) tightens. This, in turn, is part of a larger effort to extend Egyptian (i.e., Arab Muslim) control, so that Ethiopia, the old Christian kingdom that once was given a dispensation (because some of Muhammad's followers had been given temporary refuge in Ethiopia by the negus, thus earning a special exemption from the violent Jihad), will never dare to take decisions about the Nile waters or anything else without express permission of the Arab Muslim imperialists in Cairo.

10) Egypt is a corrupt country out of control. By permitting successive governments to count on American support, the viciousness and corruption are allowed to continue without any consequences. From 1882 to 1922, the British brought some semblance of efficiency and a reduction of corruption to the Egyptian Civil Service.) See Edward Cecil's classic "Memoirs of an Egyptian Official," with its famous epigraph: "Here lies one who tried to hustle the East." Even after that period, Egypt enjoyed a period of good government, of an expanding economy, and of semi-decency in public life. This was reflected in the vivacity of its European and Levantine populations. It came to an end when Nasser and the other colonels arrived on the scene. There was the famous rioting against Jews, Copts, and Europeans, in Alexandria. Almost overnight, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and many others who had lived there had their property stolen by the Egyptians, who called it "nationalization." The Egyptian Muslims who ran everything took billions of dollars in property, the fruit in some cases of family entrepreneurial activity that had gone on for a century or more. Following Nasser was Saint Sadat: the same Sadat imprisoned by the British for his pro-Nazi activities during World War II. Jimmy Carter, who incidentally has also managed to award himself the same title, of course, awarded him his sainthood. Carter was rewarding Saint Sadat for deigning to accept all of the Sinai -- territory that morally Egypt had no right to receive back yet again. Egypt, after all, had lost in a war of aggression started when Nasser demanded that U Thant pull out the U.N. peacekeepers, and then proceeded to block the Straits of Tiran in May 1967.

Yet Carter rewarded Sadat and Egypt with nearly $2 billion a year in American foreign aid -- which foreign aid became automatic, a tribute never to be interrupted, in other words, Jizyah. This Jizyah has bought us nothing, unless you think that the anti-Americanism in Egypt has been swell, that the threats to Ethiopia and the support for the Sudanese government are acceptable, that the complicity in arms-smuggling into Gaza is perfectly understandable, that the continued and even growing numbers of rapes and looting and murders of Copts is simply what one should expect of Muslims and that one should not get too upset about it.

I don't think any of those things. And I don't think other long-suffering American taxpayers, Infidels all, agree with The New Duranty Times, or those lazy officials or hangers-on in Washington who keep prating about the "need" to keep "our Egyptian ally" happy. Why? So they can torture, occasionally, the odd Al Qaeda suspect? But meanwhile, they can try to produce WMD, harass the Copts, plot diplomatically and with arms-smuggling against Israel, bully Ethiopia to endure further famine, and fill the press and television with the most disgusting and scandalous misrepresentations of the behavior of American soldiers, as they have done for decades in their misrepresentation of Israeli soldiers.

No, I have presented Ten Good Reasons For Stopping the Jizyah to Egypt.

I defy anyone in Washington to offer even One Good Reason for continuing the Jizyah to that meretricious and sinister regime, people, and country.

It took me precisely 22 minutes to compose this article at one go. Why cannot those thousands of bigshots in Washington, in their think-tanks or in their well-paid government jobs, or at their newspapers and magazines, come up with these Ten Reasons, and Ninety Reasons more? If they did, they would thereby save us money, and, when it comes to dealing with the menace of the Jihad everywhere, Start Making Sense.