Today is a special, heartbreaking day for everybody who participated in the attempt to liberate Egypt from the yoke of oppression. We tried, and we failed. Our attempt was at first noble, then grew more pathetic, more desperate. We clung to the unworthy, put our hopes in the undeserving, and our dreams slipped through our fingers like so many grains of sand. Our friends got murdered, and we tried...
This brave young man went to Tahrir today, holding a sign that says ‘Leave, Sisi”, ‘ thus making him undoubtedly the bravest man in Egypt, if not the world. Sadly, I fear the worst outcome will follow. I don’t mean arrest (he’s already been arrested) or torture (that’s just a regular given) – I’m afraid that tomorrow morning we’ll see footage...
We’re the ones who lost. We’re the ones who took to the streets in the hope that if there were enough of us out there, things would change. We’re the ones you saw down from your balconies, the ones you were kind enough to throw water bottles to, and the ones you felt proud to see your son and daughter join. We’re the ones who chanted and got gassed, and we scattered, and...
This keeps happening, and I want to mention it. Every once in a while, as I am wont to do, I get into a bit of an argument or a conversational clash online. Often others get involved, people commenting, whether to attack what I’m saying or more stupidly, they go for an ad hominem attack, blissfully unaware that they’ve just dismissed themselves from any serious consideration. Often...
In 2011, as we walked past Agouza on our march from Mohandessein, people cheered to us from their balconies. Families looked out of their windows and they expressed both pride and joy, young men would stand with their mothers in balconies, and ask them if they could go down and join us in our march, and the mothers would proudly send their sons down to join us, walk with us, chant with us, march...
In 2011, as we walked past Agouza on our march from Mohandessein, people cheered us on from their balconies. Families looked out of their windows, and they expressed both pride and joy, young men would stand with their mothers in balconies and ask them if they could go down and join us in our march, and the mothers would proudly send their sons down to join us, walk with us, chant with us, march...
How long must we endure? It is difficult to take events in Egypt seriously right now. It has become normal to see legal and judicial travesties on a daily basis; a news story about two people being arrested for speaking English while on the subway, another story about a man getting arrested, or brought by a mob to a police station, for writing the frequency of satellite channels on a bathroom...
Excuse the title. I like the Camelot myths. I’ve never read the original Malory, though, and wasn’t quite so interested in it when I was a child. The whole knight in shining armor thing never quite caught my fancy. However, years later, I was lucky enough to run into The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White’s wonderful take on the Arthurian myths. In the first volume, we see a young Arthur slowly...
The Great Divide Recent events in Egypt have led to deep intellectual and moral fractures; Egyptians are both shocked and offended at the way the media is handling things, and the media is shocked, and by turns disgusted and dumbfounded by how Egyptians see things. The divides have been brutal, creating what appears to be vast moral and intellectual divides between people who, just two weeks ago...
You don’t need fake ballots to fake elections. You can fake everything else. Control the options, dismiss candidates since you control the law and the election committee, control the media, make your choices look good, and make the others look bad. You can fake the popular will and make the people think that they want somebody you’ve chosen. You can use religion and deceit to guide...
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