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Tag: Sisi

Political Repression in Egypt: Courts Under Military Dictatorship

Streamed live on Feb 25, 2022 This event is sponsored by the US Committee to End Political Repression in Egypt and Haymarket Books, the Committee for Justice, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), the Freedom Initiative, Internationalism from Below, Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), and St. John’s Center for International and Comparative Law *** Arabic interpretation of this event can be accessed here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1En5C… The modern Egyptian judiciary was established in the middle of the 19th century and is one of the oldest in the Middle East. Throughout the 20th century and the first decade of this…

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The war of attrition against revolutionaries

Published in Al Jazeera on January 25, 2017 By Khaled Diab Khaled Diab is an award-winning Egyptian-Belgian journalist, writer and blogger. He is the author of Intimate Enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land. He blogs at www.chronikler.com With the world’s attention on Washington and the new administration’s open assault on the media and journalists, whom Donald Trump described as “among the most dishonest human beings on earth“, few eyes are turned to Egypt, where “alternative facts” have been a reality for some time, and its continued clampdown on the press and civil society. Among the recent…

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Egypt and North Korea

A few days ago when I was writing the CNN Op-Ed piece on Egypt’s referendum, I had a sentence that compared the propaganda campaign and the Sisi mania with North Korea’s sick regime. Then at the last minute, I removed it thinking this is an unnecessary and unrealistic comparison. Today with preliminary results of the vote indicating that the yes vote may be close to 98%, I realize how right I was to remove the sentence comparing Egypt to North Korea. I was being unfair to North Korea. I then received some remarks criticizing me for making the comparison between…

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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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General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a profile

“General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi“: a profile by BBC Radio 4’s Edward Stourton in which I am interviewed, August 25, 2013 (at 1:24, 9:22, 12:10, 13:18). Edward Stourton profiles the Commander of Egypt’s Armed Forces, General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, now the most powerful man in Egypt. General al-Sisi was appointed Defence Minister and Head of the Army by President Morsi in August 2012, and he was thought by many to be sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood. But he was instrumental in Morsi’s downfall in July and oversaw the subsequent violent suppression of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. His former teacher from the US Army…

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Samira’s honor, the army’s shame

Published in Egypt Independent on March 23, 2012 On 11 March, a military court acquitted a former military doctor accused of conducting the infamous “virginity tests” on a number of women who had been detained by the military in March of last year. The case was brought by a 25-year old woman, Samira Ibrahim, who was among those on whom these degrading and humiliating tests had been conducted. Immediately after hearing the verdict, Ibrahim collapsed in tears, considering it a travesty of justice. Soon thereafter, however, she decided to take her case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’…

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Women, revolution, and army

Published in Egypt Independent on January 9, 2012 The human body has been front and center of this revolution since the early days of its outbreak last January.  Even though the  leading slogan of the revolution,  Bread, Freedom and Human Dignity is abstract and does not make explicit reference to the human body, it is the 30 dark years of torture, hunger and ill-health inflicted on the bodies of Egyptian men and women under Mubarak’s rule that give this slogan meaning and resonance. In the last weeks of 2011, women’s bodies have emerged as a nexus for many of the principles…

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