Ramy Fahim's case: Chapter Two "Ramy”

Despite putting up a brave face in the past two days, Minister Nabila Makram of Immigration and Egyptian Expatriates teared up when she found herself in front of a standing ovation on Wednesday at the conclusion of the “Egypt Can ... with Industry” Conference.

There was nothing significant for real in the sixth edition of the “Egypt Can” in nutshell but the annual conference which was held at the New Administrative Capital on the outskirts of Cairo and organized by her ministry was the first public event attended by Makram after announcing that her eldest son Ramy was standing trial for murder facing a death penalty in the United States.

تصفيق حاد .. وزيرة الهجرة تبكي أثناء كلمتها بمؤتمر مصر تستطيع بالصناعة pic.twitter.com/uYr1KHJ3cU

— صدى البلد (@ElBaladOfficial) June 1, 2022

Nabila Makram co-inaugurated the conference which aims to benefit from Egyptians abroad’ s expertise with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Tuesday trying to show for real that the matter did not affect her responsibilities as a stateswoman especially after the huge support she received online and from mainstream media. 

Ramy Mounir Fahim 

We got the President of Egypt’s National Council for Woman (NCW) Maya Morsi posting a solidarity post on Facebook to her friend Makram telling her “Fear Not nor grieve” in a direct quotation from the story of Prophet Moses “Peace upon him” in the Holy Quran”

“So, we sent this inspiration to the mother of Moses: "Suckle (thy child), but when thou hast fears about him, cast him into the river, but fear not nor grieve for We shall restore him to thee, and We shall make him one of Our apostles." [28-7]

We also got Nabila Makram featured on the cover of Akher Saa Magazine while praying in a Church with the headline ‘Nabila’s tears’ which can also be read in Arabic as “Noble tears” as Nabila is translated means noble in Arabic. “Seriously, that coverage in that way always fire backs”

Akher Saa's latest weekly issue 

On the other hand, there were few things about Ramy himself, the true hero or anti-hero of that Egyptian tragedy that took place in April in California and resulted in the death of two young men who did not reach the age of 25 years.

There is no mention of those two young men whom I cannot imagine how their families are coping with the matter now.

Now I read something this week that the Egyptian mainstream media deals with the matter as if Ramy was the true victim and not the victimizer and that created a usual opposite reaction for many on social media. 

For them it is yet again, a son of a ruling and Upper Class who is going to get away with murder even abroad in a time of economic crisis and the fresh memory of businessmen’s sons killing people in DUI car accidents and getting away with it running is in the back of the people’s mind. You cannot blame them. 

But Ramy Fahim does not seem that he is your average ruling and upper-class boy, on the contrary, he seemed to suffer a lot in silence and in public Nabila Makram is being asked now on social media why she let her son suffer like that in a foreign county when she spearheads the efforts to connect the younger generations of Egyptians abroad with their motherland.

It is possible that is why the mainstream media ignores the other dark part of Ramy’s story for that reason.

There was not much shared about Ramy Fahim online in the US outlets despite the horrible crime and that’s why some believe that the Egyptian administration attempted to cover the latest scandal a minister in Mostafa Madbouly’s cabinet faces.

I do not know about the American press but maybe they decided to leave it to the trial to reveal more about this brown murderer who killed two bright white young men. The American press has long glamourized murderers and maybe they learned their lesson.

Back in Cairo, we do not glamourize murderers but since the case was kept under wraps for nearly a month, internet sleuths including yours truly spent the weekend searching every bit and piece first to get a confirmation that this is Ramy Fahim, the son of Nabila Makram.

On Friday, I got a visual confirmation from the photos shared and from his father’s name. Then on the same day, I stumbled on his Twitter account, and it was like a very sad trip in the mind of a young man who seems to be a bookroom who reads Nietzsche and nerd but at the same time who survived a very bad experience as a child.

I told you it is a pure multi-layered Egyptian tragedy. This post is not in defense of anyone.

** Trigger content**

On 4 March 2021, Ramy wrote a Twitter thread with those words

Thread about trauma I experienced. I want to cover everything for my own sake. I have found the courage to write about it publicly. This thread covers the period between 6th grade and 10th grade because those were very influential for me.

Ramy was born in 1996, three years after Nabila Makram had joined the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. According to Makram’s past interviews, she married her husband, Hany Fahim before joining the diplomatic service and the civil engineer was supportive of her career.

We do not know much about Hany Fahim and his work, and some sources only say that he worked in the United States.

Following Ramy’s birth in 1997, she moved to Brazil to work as the Egyptian embassy’s third secretary then in the early 2000s Nabila Makram moved to the United States to become the embassy’s second secretary at the Egyptian consulate in Chicago.

In the sixth grade, when Ramy was ten years old, he returned to Egypt from the United States as his mom Nabila Makram is a diplomat and aside from the language barrier and that hard transition for any child, he underwent a huge trauma

Unsurprisingly I was made fun of after spending however long it took to sit down and recite 160 digits of pi.

It was also in this year that I was sexually molested by a family member. I won’t give details but that also traumatized me in every way.

— Ramy Fahim (@OceanBorne3) March 4, 2021

I do not know if he told anyone about this experience, but this breaks any parent if we are realistically speaking. I do not know if Makram or her husband knew about that experience or if he shared it for the first time on this Twitter account.

Not to mention I think that a relative who sexually molested a 10-years-old boy surely did it before and did it again “I pray that this relative did not prey on another kid, and he died in some horrible accident” or that Makram uses her minister’s influence to make him pay.

I do not think that the mainstream media or official or quasi-official media will mention that a son of an incumbent minister was a victim of sexual molestation in his childhood. It is truly still taboo, and I see comments blaming Makram for being a neglect mom who cares only for her career at the expense of her son.

Ramy went to Italy with his mom during her diplomatic service where she had a successful career, but he was a victim of constant bullying and without doubt, his molestation played a role.

In four years in that thread as you see him, Ramy was subjected to trauma and in the same threat he stated that it left him with “major short-term and long-term negative effects that are depression symptoms, anxiety disorders and affecting his self-image”.

All of this bad stuff that happened had major short-term and long-term negative effects. These are: depression symptoms, anxiety disorders, affecting my self-image, the trauma felt like curses and made it hard to break patterns I did not want or did not serve me.

— Ramy Fahim (@OceanBorne3) March 4, 2021

He concluded the threat with that he decided to forgive because it was the key to moving forward.

Is what happened to me wrong, intolerable, and unacceptable? Yes. But my response is to forgive. Forgive, not for them, but for me, because forgiveness is the key to moving forward. Because as Hannah Arendt says, “Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”

— Ramy Fahim (@OceanBorne3) March 4, 2021

Ramy Fahim seemed to move forward and leave that dark period behind.

According to Fahim’s profile on LinkedIn, Fahim got a bachelor’s degree in science and Mathematics from the University of South California in 2017. He got a master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Columbia in New York in 2018. So yes, his parents spent a lot of money on his education abroad.

On his LinkedIn profile, it seems that his last public activity was two months ago.

He worked as an intern in Moore Capital Management for four months in New York City from May to August 2008.

Then he started working in Florida as an Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Engineer at Accelirate Inc for two years and one month.

It was the best time of his life according to his Twitter account

He said the following about his time in Florida on 28 October 2021

The past 2 years in Florida have been the best years of my life. I was *WHO* I wanted to be, I tried new things and branched out, I achieved diverse goals, I was close to people who enriched me and my life. It's hard to believe how much I did. Here's to more in the next chapter

— Ramy Fahim (@OceanBorne3) October 28, 2021

“I was *WHO* wanted to be”

During that period between New York and Miami, he was active on his Instagram account where he ran a small business as an Egyptian Jeweler selling ancient-Egyptian-inspired accessories for a price between $40 - $20.

We also meet Ramy who sings from time to time and speaks and sings in Arabic with an accent as someone who has not spoken Arabic for a very long time. You can find a couple of photos with friends there too. 

The last time he posted something on his Instagram account was on 30 January 2021 and it was a photo from Egypt’s the White Desert by another photographer. His project selling accessories seemed to be operating till 20 January 2021. It seems that his project ended as he removed the link to his online shop from his Instagram account.

Fahim in April 2021

Here is a video for him on Instagram and YouTube where he speaks in Arabic with an accent about IM Mastery Academy which seems to be a pyramid scheme and uses forex trading service as a disguise with my all-due respect.

Here Ramy was no different from any other young Egyptian who fell into the trap of those companies over and over. 

Ramy Fahim’s Facebook account was deactivated interestingly shortly and unfortunately, I did not know about it until too late.

During those years, he joined the “Interintellect” online platform which is a portal of intellectual and cultural online forums.

He seems that he was truly a bookworm and into philosophy, and he even retweeted a tweet about book censorship in Egypt.

On his YouTube Channel aside from his geek videos and dancing videos also in the Miami period, he spoke about apatheia from Greek philosophy, which is a state of mind in which one is free of passion and pain according to Wikipedia, but it is different from apathy.

It was the last video on his channel that he launched in February 2020.

It is worth mentioning that that phase was during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in the world and in the States. I do not know if he returned to Egypt in that period but interestingly aside from his Jewelry ship, he did not mention the country or his mother or his family directly.

On 25 March 2021, he stated that he is a leftist and would fellow only leftist. He already identified himself as a liberal left in his Twitter bio. 

Then comes the beginning of the deadly nightmarish chapter in the life of that young man when he announced was going to be working for a financial wealth management company in September 2021.

I hope that you reached the end of this post, and that you have not been bored.

Till next the third chapter inshallah.