Saturday, September 21, 2019

Two Days after Friday the 20th in Egypt “Updated”

At least 200 protesters were arrested on Friday according to the latest statements of human rights lawyers in Egypt on Sunday, mostly in Cairo.

Sunday marks the start of the academic year officially in schools and universities. There is a lot of anxiety among people, I can tell.

On Saturday, unsurprisingly the protests were completely ignored in the front pages of the Egyptian newspapers whether state-owned or privately owned.
Egyptian newspapers
Saturday press: Privately owned Al-Shorouk and Al Masry Al Youm and State-owned Ahram
Front pages by Farid Farid 
On the same day and for the second night in a row, a group of young protests chanted for freedom at the iconic Al-Arabin square in Suez city demanding the Egyptian president to leave in a scene that reminded many including myself was the early days of the 25 January revolution.

Those three days between the 25th and 28th of January 2011, Al-Arabin square witnessed violent and deadly protests and clashes between the Egyptian security forces and the protesters so you can imagine how many Egyptians followed the news of Suez on Saturday online.


With the lack of proper and unbiased media coverage on the ground, many including myself followed social media networks once again whether on Twitter or Facebook. Example of those whom I followed on Twitter earlier was Mr. Alaa El-Din from Suez.

The protest in the Suez was dispersed by security forces then the young protesters assembled themselves then the security forces dispersed their protest and so forth for a  couple of hours in a long night.

The protest’s dispersal was broadcasted by a Facebook user called Mohamed Saeid who originally lives at Al-Arabin square in Suez for more than an hour and thousands followed it.
Unfortunately, Saeid’s live stream was sadly ended by him announcing that he was allegedly being arrested.

Saeid’s live stream was among the most-watched Facebook Live stream Daily race on Saturday.
I think his videos were the most-watched in those evening late hours because they were shared everywhere including Twitter.

Anyhow, I believe the most-watched live Facebook stream goes to the man of the past two weeks: Mohamed Ali Abdel Aal or as commonly known in Egypt nowadays Mohamed Ali.

Egypt’s one of kind whistleblower Mohamed Ali went on a live stream where He declared on his official and only Facebook page on Saturday for another one-million-protests in the public squares next Friday to force Sisi to resign.

Interestingly, the man who did not complete his education and insists that he did not have any political affiliation from any kind discussed his political vision for Egypt post-El-Sisi and it is a vision based on decentralization and separation of state and religion.
Ali needs a separate post for sure. But a little teaser, he is more of a centrist liberal populist for me !!

Meanwhile, his nemesis President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and his office have not issued anything regarding what happened back home while he is currently in New York City.
He is supposed to address the UNGA tomorrow in a speech I expect to be about the environment, Africa and fighting terrorism.
Egypt is currently chairing the African Union for this year FYI.

The only reaction that came from the other side of the world was the media statements of Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry to Pro-regime and Prominent TV host Amr Adeeb on MBC Misr TV channel Saturday evening where he accused “enemy TV channels to Egypt like Al-Jazeera” of spreading lies about the situation in Egypt.
According to Shoukry who left to New York from four days ago, the situation is calm and stable and the videos of protests were fabrication and fiction.

The State Information service which regulates, authorizes and monitors the work of foreign correspondents and channels in Egypt sent them a letter earlier stating that it was monitoring their coverage of the events on Friday.
It is no surprise because actually, foreign media was the one that truly covered the protests fairly unlike Egyptian local media and here I am not speaking to Al-Jazeera which returned back to Egyptian satellite receivers whether the Egyptian administration likes it or not.

It seems that the lessons about the Egyptian media and its creditability that learned hard in 1967 “Six days war” and the January 2011 revolution have been forgotten or rather have been completely ignored.

Anyhow some TV hosts on Saturday admitted that there were small protests on Saturday but even those took the current administration’s side.
TV hosts like Amr Adeeb and Ahmed Moussa kept speaking about this global conspiracy against Egypt.
A veteran correspondent working for the ministry of interior Ahmed Moussa spoke about how the security authorities would arrest all those who protested in Tahrir square on Friday because of the CCTV. “If you are not arrested yesterday, you will be arrest today,” the Pro-regime extremist TV host Moussa said on Saturday despite he was denying having any protests earlier in his show in Tahrir square.


Adeeb showed faked tweets of Turkish journalist close to the ruling AKP party in Turkey as evidence that Turkey behind the protests in Egypt because of that fight over gas in the East Mediterranean.
The tweet was soon debunked online.

Needless to say, I think this kind of talk shows that the Egyptian security authorities are too weak to stop foreign countries from meddling in Egypt and if this is true then those authorities should be held accountable for their failure. Logic says this.

The Pro-regime camp was not the only one using old videos and fabricated tweets and Facebook posts, the Pro-Muslim Brotherhood came also used the same trick and it was hard 24 hours to authenticate videos mostly and photos as well as Facebook posts and Tweets.

I am going to post another blog post with the original videos I have been able to authenticate.

Now for more tech and geek news and because it is so-January-2011 nowadays the Egyptians like me woke up on Sunday to find Facebook Messanger, BBC News and Al-Hurra do not work and are blocked on most of the ISPs and networks for many hours.

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