Egyptian Military Gets Its Stalin On
Judith Levy ·
Nov 3, 2011 at 12:55am
A young Egyptian blogger, Maikel Nabil, has been tossed into a psychiatric institution by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egypt's "interim" government. Nabil was arrested last March and sentenced to three years in prison for writing a post on his blog, Son of Ra, entitled, "The people and the military were never one hand" (a reference to a slogan that was chanted during the revolution).
Nabil has been on a hunger strike for seventy days, and the suspicion of many -- including Basma Abdel Aziz, director of media for Egypt’s General Secretariat of Mental Health -- is that the military wants to avoid responsibility for his death, if it occurs, by transferring him out of prison.
There are three points of particular note in this story.
- Nabil is a Coptic Christian, which accounts in part for the relative lack of interest the activist community in Egypt took in his case up to this latest development.
- It is Nabil's pro-Israeli position, more than his religion, that accounts primarily for the relative passivity of other Egyptian bloggers and activists toward his incarceration. He is said to support normalization with Israel, although his motivation is based more in pacifism than love for Israel (not that there's anything wrong with that). He wrote on his blog: "I don’t want to point a weapon at a young Israeli, recruited into obligatory service, defending his state’s right to exist. I think obligatory service is a form of slavery." In keeping with this position, Nabil refused to be conscripted into the Egyptian army.
- Nabil's transfer to a mental hospital has mobilized his reluctant blogger/activist brethren to overlook his problematic stance on Israel. They are now rallying around him, labeling him a prisoner of conscience held in violation of the law and demanding his immediate release. "We all learned from Nabil," said Amr Adel Radwan, identified by the Jerusalem Post as a leading activist and protester. "We made mistakes in not supporting him because of Israel, but now we know he must be released. We are all Maikel Nabil and let us pray the people know this."
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Comments :
Oct '11
Re: Egyptian Military Gets Its Stalin On
The Muslim Brotherhood must be laughing at how easy it is going to be.
Edited on Nov 3, 2011 at 4:05amFeb '11
Re: Egyptian Military Gets Its Stalin On
This isn't Stalinist treatment, but post-Stalinist (Brezhnev) treatment. If it were Stalinist treatment, there would have been a show trial with signed statements of plots to help Israel poison the water supply of Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities, followed by summary execution.