The Skeptic الشكاك

862 Bloggers Among Brotherhood Detainees

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information reports that three bloggers are among the dozens of people arrested for their alleged involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood’s dangerous plot to deliver medical supplies to Gaza.

They face charges of “taking advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of democracy to overthrow the regime.” Yes, breathe deeply. Even the Black Cloud can’t choke the “prevailing atmosphere of democracy.”

I’m not yet convinced that this is a free-expression case (will have to see whether the prosecutors adduce evidence from the detainees’ blogs in making their case), but the arrests are clearly political. The government’s apparent policy with regard to the Brotherhood is one of containment. So long as the Brothers limit themselves to encouraging women to wear the hijab, the security forces will arrest only a few dozen members from time to time, hold them for 15 or 30 days without trial, and release them. If the group challenges the government in the political arena, the government responds by arresting hundreds.

Anything involving Gaza and Sinai is sensitive, far past the bounds of what the government is apparently willing to tolerate. The argument that allowing a banned organization to undermine Egypt’s border with one of the world’s primary flash-points would harm national security might have convinced some. But charging Brothers with helping suffering Palestinians would play into the Brotherhood’s hand. Hence, perhaps, the standard charge of “attempting to overthrow the government.”

But I can think of no explanation for the prosecutor’s little “taking advantage advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of democracy” flourish. A pitch for promotion? Is he up for a judgeship? Or is he lodging a small, sarcastic protest?

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.
More…

855 Landmark Sexual Harassment Verdict

In what’s being described as the first criminal sentence for sexual harassment in Egypt, the Cairo Criminal Court yesterday sentenced Sherif Gabriel to three years in prison and an LE 501 fine for groping a woman’s breast. Al-Masry al-Youm reports:

Normally women do not report harassments so as to avoid scandal. This time, however, Noha Rushdi, a 27-year-old film director and victim of the above case, requested that the trial be public, which her family agreed with.

She told the press that Sherif Gabriel, the accused, was driving a pickup.

He slowed down and approached her. Suddenly he grabbed her by her breasts, so she fell on the ground. She screamed, but no one came to help her.

The driver tried to drive on but had to stop when there was another car coming from the other direction.

She said Egyptians lost their gallantry, as she fought with the driver for nearly two hours, while the pedestrians were simply watching. [Full story]

Good on you, Noha, and good on you, Judge.

Men, the next time you get what seems like an uncontrollable urge to grope a woman’s breasts or say something inappropriate, remember Sherif Gabriel and consider whether you yourself would like to be sexually harassed in prison for three years.

849 Journalist Badly Beaten

Speaking from the hospital in this video, Bilal Abd al-Rahman, a journalist with Al-Nass TV, accuses State Security officers of beating him and breaking one of his ribs. The interview ends abruptly when the cameraman is busted for filming. It’s not clear whether Abd al-Rahman was targeted for his activities as a journalist or his association with the Muslim Brotherhood, but it doesn’t really make a difference, does it?

YouTube video produced by Ikhwanonline.com:

Via Torture in Egypt and 3arabawy.

835 So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains

Many thanks to Ahmad Gharbeia for creating section-specific news feeds for Al-Masry al-Youm‘s Web site, which doesn’t offer the service. Ahmad notes that the feeds are created by scraping Al-Masry al-Youm‘s code and so could break at any time if the site’s design changes. So enjoy, and thank Ahmad, while you can!

As I’m going to be spending 36 of the next 48 hours in an airplane, here are a few items of interest in the meantime:

• “World Migrants Up To 200 Millions, 1.5 Million Arab Brains Overseas” World thanks Middle East for the brains, notes global increase in strange headlines…
• The good news is that the world financial crisis may put an end to the brain-drain. My barber, who has a great Arab brain, yesterday told me he used to want to move to the United States for work, but now considers himself better off in Cairo. As he snipped and trimmed, the crisis continued to batter Egypt’s stock market, lending emphasis to warnings that poor countries may suffer permanent damage from the current crisis. For the moment, though, shares on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange are rallying, following Asian markets’ response to European bail-out plans.
• Journalists Fined for Libeling Sheikh al-Azhar. Yesterday, a court fined Adil Hammuda and Mohammad al-Baz of Al-Fagr newspaper LE 80,000 each for comparing Sheikh Tantawi to the Pope. They were delighted they hadn’t been thrown in jail. A different court hearing Hammuda and three other editors’ appeal of another 2007 ruling against them yesterday said it would reconvene in December.
• Hundreds of thousands of U.S. voters from swing states may find themselves illegally disenfranchised in this election. In somewhat related news, absentee voters from a New York county were asked to choose between McCain and Osama for president.
• Dubai, “a failed video game in the desert”, from BLDGBLOG, one of my favorites:
  

  Atari had a stellar business plan and a first-rate marketing team—but, for all intents and purposes, it had nothing interesting to sell. Following the logic of this example, it is easy enough to see Dubai—or even Tucson, Arizona—as a failed videogame in the desert, ironically under-designed and over-promoted. […]

  One could even say that we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street.

• Abu Dhabi may do it better. I think I dismissed the press release on this as, well, PR when I first saw it, but this sounds very cool and I really hope it works: “The Masdar Initiative is a new 6 million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a zero carbon and zero waste community.”
• A travel journalist from Connecticut recently visited Egypt and came home shocked at the sexual harassment she experienced. “Welcome in Egypt,” Lynn.

833 Pregnant Woman Killed in Police Raid

BBC:

Crowds of Egyptians have attacked police with clubs and stones in a town south of Cairo after a pregnant woman died during a police raid on her home.

The woman was pushed to the ground by officers when she would not let them enter her home to look for her brother, a suspected thief, police said.

She was in the last stages of pregnancy and died of internal bleeding caused by the fall, police added.

Residents of the town, Samalout, rioted after hearing of the incident.

They threw stones at police officers, beat them with clubs and set fire to a police truck.

[Full story]

829 Mubarak Pardons Ibrahim Eissa

Excellent news!

CAIRO (AFP) — Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Monday pardoned an outspoken editor sentenced to two months in jail after his newspaper published rumours on Mubarak’s health, state-run MENA news agency reported.

An appeals court’s decision last month to jail Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of the independent daily Al-Dustour, provoked widespread criticism from media activists.

MENA said that Mubarak pardoned Eissa, who despite sentencing was not imprisoned, as part of the president’s efforts to foster freedom of the press in Egypt.

Eissa welcomed the pardon but said Egypt was one of a few countries whose laws allow for reporters to be jailed.

“While I welcome this ruling, I think the issue is larger than that between one reporter and the president,” he told AFP. “The issue is that of Egyptian journalism, which suffers from an arsenal of laws that negate freedoms.” [Full Story]

It’s too bad it had to come down to a presidential pardon. It creates the impression that freedom of expression is “a gift [from] the ruler to be offered or withdrawn whenever he likes”— which is precisely contrary to President Mubarak’s avowed beliefs.

826 This International Incident Has Been Brought to You by the Letter ‘H’

Thank you, France! Comic relief is rare in the Israeli-Iranian nuclear showdown:

JERUSALEM (AFP) – French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday he was misquoted by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper which reported him as saying Israel would “eat” Iran before Tehran developed a nuclear bomb.

“During the interview in English with journalists from Haaretz, (I) used the word “hit” and not “eat” about a possible Israeli response with regard to Iran,” the visiting minister said in a statement.

Kouchner however said he did “indeed evoke the possibility of Israeli strikes to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon”.

A spokeswoman for Haaretz would not immediately comment on the incident.

In its print edition, the Haaretz quoted Kouchner as saying in English: “I honestly don’t believe (a nuclear weapon) will give any immunity to Iran. First, because you will eat them before. And this is the danger.”

The statement from Kouchner, who is on a two-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories, said he regretted any “phonetic confusion”.

” ‘it them! I said, ‘ ‘it them!’ Not ‘ ‘it them!’ ”

Speaking of nukes in the Middle East, here is an Egyptian initiative at the international level I can support: a nuclear-free region, policed, by agreement of all the countries, by the IAEA. Al-Masry al-Youm has translated their article of a few days ago here. Scroll down to the bottom of the article for highlights from the scrapped draft.

819 ‘Gods Don’t Get Sick’

Here, via M, is a translation of the August 2007 article for which a Cairo court jailed Al-Dustur editor Ibrahim Issa last week:

Gods don’t get sick

The president in Egypt is a god and gods don’t get sick. Thus, President Mubarak, those surrounding him, and the hypocrites hide his illness and leave the country prey to rumors. It is not a serious illness. It’s just old age. But the Egyptian people are entitled to know if the president is down with something as minor as the flu.

Everybody has information about the president’s health situation: the White House, Tel Aviv, and Europe, where the president goes for treatment. The information is hidden only from Egyptians. Nobody would have known something was amiss had the president not lost consciousness on television during a speech a few years ago. Had he not stayed in Germany for a long time for treatment nobody would have said anything.

The state wants to present him as a sacred person who never errs, with whom nobody competes. So he definitely cannot fall ill. And nobody should even dare to think he can die like other human beings! The issue now, however, involves the country’s present and future. As everyone knows, the president’s family and Mrs. Mubarak have been pushing for the president to give up power—during his lifetime—and pass it to his son Gamal. The president is the only member of the family who resists this idea either because he wishes to stay in power or because he’s worried about antagonizing the Egyptian people and some important army generals.

The president fears his son’s life would be in danger if he transferred power to him. But with the president’s illness, and in a home ruled by fatherly sentiments and loyalty to the wife who has shared his life, the father’s heart may soften and overpower his mind. So Egypt’s future depends on sentimental decisions reached at a moment of illness.

The president’s temporary absence due to illness may allow people inside or outside the palace to do as they please. Mass Muslim Brotherhood arrests, rough security treatment of newspapers, hastening to hold NDP elections, and giving a push to Gamal Mubarak and Ahmed Ezz’s supporters against Safwat al-Sherif and Kamal al-Shazly’s men—all are steps the son uses to pressure state parties to render his move to the presidency a done deal. Rumors about the president’s health may even have stemmed from the son’s wish to impose a reality that nobody can refuse.

The president does suffer from circulation problems which, although not fatal, reduce circulation to the brain and may cause loss of consciousness for seconds or minutes. The question is, does this not affect the country? Does this not call for the president to rest? Gamal Mubarak thinks so. He believes the president should rest and leave ruling to him.

Other circles in the country are very tense. They fear silence, but they also fear taking action. Still others want everyone to shut up and achieve this by imprisoning or threatening them. My deepest fear is that the president’s illness will cause Egypt’s illness to deteriorate to the point of incapacity and bed sores that will paralyze and deform it.

Thank you, M. I’ll miss Issa’s articles while he’s in jail, but I’m gratified to see that this blog from “a loyal son of the NDP” has come online to entertain in the meantime.

814 Oil Struck

AP:

CAIRO, Egypt: Circle Oil and Premier Oil said Friday that they have struck oil in their onshore North West Gemsa Concession in Egypt.

Initial, sustained production was over 3,000 barrels per day of crude and 4 million standard cubic feet per day of natural gas, the United Kingdom-based oil and gas producers said. The concession lies southeast of Cairo in the Gulf of Suez Basin.

“This discovery is excellent news,” Circle Chief Executive Officer David Hough said in a statement. He noted that it comes on the heels of the company’s gas production start-up in Morocco. [Full Story]

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