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Month: September 2013

Egypt in Crisis

I was interviewed in this PBS Frontline documentary titled “Egypt in Crisis: The inside story of a revolution gone wrong“. Here is the press release of the documentary : Less than three years after the popular uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, and just one year after Egypt’s first free and fair elections, the democratically elected government has been overthrown and the Egyptian military is running the state. And the Muslim Brotherhood—the secretive, long-outlawed Islamist group that came out of the shadows to win the presidency in June 2012—is once again being driven underground, its members killed and…

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How the Muslim Brotherhood fell from power

An interview with Muslim  of the PBS flagship Frontline program conducted on July 18, 2013, and published on September 17, 2013, to coincide with the broadcast of the documentary “Egypt in Crisis”. Khaled Fahmy is professor and chair of the American University in Cairo’s Department of History. A liberal supporter of the revolution, Fahmy worried about human-rights abuses under President Mohammed Morsi, and now a return to the military state under Gen. Sisi. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on July 18, 2013 in New York. Help me understand the context of the Muslim Brotherhood and how they…

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September 11: The grave costs of fear

Published in Ahram Online on September 14, 2013 Following the 9/11 events, a discourse of fear proliferated in America, shutting down rational thought. Wars abroad and attacks on rights at home followed, with dear ethical and legal consequences. The sound of the two explosions rocked the entire city. The smell of smoke wafted all the way north to Houston St, while the sound of the sirens of ambulances, fire trucks and police cars was deafening. People’s gazes were unfocused and confused, unable to grasp the tragic events their city was witnessing. Drivers stopped their cars in the middle of the…

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The Muslim Brotherhood and the West

Published in Ahram Online on September 3, 2013 Western media misunderstood the Brotherhood and underestimated Egyptians’ desire for democracy and social justice One of the signs of the crisis that Egypt is currently going through is the gap between the vision of a large portion of Egyptians that revolted against Mohamed Morsi on 30 June and that of Western media coverage of Egyptian events. Despite the fact that this dissonance initially revolved around the term “coup,” I believe the core of the problem is not related to how the army’s move was characterised, as much as to how the Muslim…

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