776 Two and a Half Disasters

  • A car bomb killed 17 people near an important Shia shrine in Syria yesterday, putting a chink in the government’s reputation for keeping the country under lock and key and raising fears of sectarian spillover from Iraq.
  • Egypt’s National Theater caught fire last night. Three firefighters were killed. The damage looks bad. Considering the Shura Council fire was only a month ago, it’s easy to see why some see both disasters as symptoms of decay.
  • A disaster in the making? Al-Masry al-Youm reports that residents of Istable Antar, a slum in the shadows of Cairo’s Moqattam cliffs, are putting gas tanks and sulfuric acid on their roofs. According to the newspaper, they’re threatening to blow themselves up if the government proceeds with its plans to demolish the neighborhood and move the inhabitants out to the desert for fear of another Manshayat-Nasser-style disaster.
    But can we believe Al-Masry al-Youm anymore? The paper has become more and more unreliable over the past year or so, and this one in particular smacks of sensationalist rumor, or, more charitably, of loose talk from residents defiantly beating their chests in the face of the bulldozers. I’m particularly suspicious because I have heard at least one story of a government journalist spreading false rumors that residents of Manshayat Nasser had stabbed reporters, presumably so the rumor-monger wouldn’t be assigned to go back into the slum on security grounds. Along the same lines, see also Amnesiac‘s account of her middle-class colleague who feared Istable Antar’s poor as a terrifying mass just waiting to extract revenge on his hoity-toity, English-speaking ass.

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