Terry Firma

Egypt’s Prosecutor-General, the highest law-enforcement official in the land, wants to allow citizens to arrest anyone — tourists included — for religious “crimes” like blasphemy.

Moderates warn that this will do incalculable damage to Egypt’s tourism industry.

Foreign visitors, whether or not they did anything wrong, should reckon with the possibility that they’ll be mistreated or blackmailed by any Egyptian citizen with a bone to pick over anything at all.

Some warn of even more dire consequences: that an open season on people deemed insufficiently pious could lead to civil war.

Egypt has fallen to the lowest rank out of 140 nations in terms of safety and security — behind Pakistan, Chad and Yemen — in the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s most recent Travel and Tourism (T&T) competitiveness index.

[image via Arabian Business]