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Al-sha’b yurid isquat al-nizam
“The people demand the fall of the regime.” Yesterday was the first anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution’s beginning. Mass protests, meant not only to commemorate but to voice anger at the...
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Why gay Middle Easterners can’t stand GayMiddleEast.com
In June 2011, 15 Arab sexual rights and human rights organizations, and more than a dozen individual activists, signed a statement condemning the website Gaymiddleeast.com for lying about itself, its...
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Egypt and the aid backlash: Lessons for the rest of the world
"Really, our aggression is just aid we offer poor countries that are always complaining about overpopulation!" 1970s cartoon by Ahmed Hegazi Here at Harvard Law School, eleven out of ten students will...
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Egypt: Aid and outsourcing
It's big business: US dominance in global arms sales A bit more on the Egypt aid-and-repression quandary. Shana Marshall in Foreign Policy explains one reason the junta seems so confident that their...
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Dying young: The trauma of revolution
Corpse at the Coptic Hospital Morgue after the Maspero massacre, Cairo, October 10, 2011: © Scott Nelson The official media cliche on Egypt’s revolution is now that it’s “unfinished.” What this means...
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Marshal Tantawi, tear down that wall!
Back in December, as a move to stop insistent demonstrations around Midan Tahrir, the ruling Egyptian junta tried to wall off access points to the square. Above, you can see them building a wall...
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Poem of the day
Painting on the junta's Qasr al-Aini wall, Cairo, via @GSquare86 Auden wrote this in 1945 after serving in occupied Germany. It’s a useful reminder for wall-builders and wall-destroyers alike. From...
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Human Rights Watch on women’s sexuality: Nice women don’t have one (1)
Still hazy after all these years This is Part 1 of a three-part post Missed connections; or, how not to find lesbians Here’s some of what a friend of mine, an Egyptian lesbian, 33 and butch, told me...
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Then there were elections, and the fun started: Egypt’s vote
Beard vs. bullets: the Brotherhood’s Morsi and the army’s Shafiq There’s no such thing as “freedom.” There are only freedoms of various sorts, and nearly all of them are freedoms to. Freedom to speak;...
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Cairo diary, December 2012: Walls, women, rape, fear
Tenting tonight in the old campground: In Midan Tahrir, November 27 © Scott Long I was detained at the airport coming into Cairo this time. When the woman at the control desk swiped my passport through...
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Hillel Neuer: Liar. Mona Seif: Hero.
Mona Seif, Tahrir Square: © Matthew Cassel, justimage.org I know Mona Seif only slightly. She’s one of the few human rights activists in Egypt (or anywhere) whom almost everybody likes. She’s utterly...
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Some more terrorists for Hillel Neuer to hand over to the authorities: Myself...
I’ll start with this tweet. This was one of the first things Maikel Nabil Sanad tweeted after release from almost a year in military jails. Maikel Nabil is a heroic campaigner against the Egyptian...
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A clarification: What international human rights activists really do
International human rights activists as they see themselves In my first post on Mona Seif, I objected to an e-mail that Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, sent to the New York Times....
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The killing days
August 16: Old woman, wounded by birdshot at Rabaa El-Adawiya, collapsed on hospital floor. From @SharifKaddous We took a walk after the first massacre. This was August 14, Wednesday, and they had...
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Orwell on the Nile: Citizens and lepers
Sawt el-Umma, August 18: “Egypt is all Sisi” Cairo lurched to life Sunday, looking ghastly, like Dick Cheney rising up cadaverous and pale each time the Secret Service shocks his heart back into...
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The flight into Egypt
Joseph Tissot, The Flight into Egypt, ca. 1886-1894 None of this will make sense. You can’t make things make sense in Cairo these days. The curfew and the stir-craziness prevent it. If you speak...
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In Dream Park: A day without Adorno
Spill Water ride at Dream Park: This was really fun (self not in picture) Yesterday, with four good friends, I went to Dream Park. Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress? If you...
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The Russian issue(s)
Right-wing demonstrators attack participant (center) in a “Day of Kisses” protest against anti-propaganda bill, in front of the Russian State Duma in January: © Anton Belitsky / Ridus.ru A few good...
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New arrests for “homosexuality” in Egypt
Down these mean streets: El Marg district in northeastern Cairo I wish some Egyptian Joan Didion could visit El-Marg. She might turn this dry outcropping of Cairo into a fear-saturated landscape like...
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General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as you have never seen him before
The General is a man of destiny: Sisi (R, played by Romy Schneider) comforts the nation in its hour of distress Moving to Hungary not long after the revolutions of 1989, I spent my first few days in...
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