Gates visiting Cairo
Revolution at Maspero - the headquarters
of the Egyptian state-owned television network*
This article is not dealing with
the Egyptian protesters and the rallies in front of the building of the
state-owned Egyptian television in Cairo, but with the live interview of
one of the female candidates in the forthcoming presidential elections
in Egypt, Bothaina Kamel, who is herself a media person and TV presenter.
She was being interviewed by yet another TV-presenter, Mahmud Sharaf, of
the Cultural Channel of the official Egyptian television network. This
live TV interview with Ms. Kamel dealt with the election programme she
put forward as a candidate running for president. She was very critical
of the double standards being applied to Egyptian revolutionary women who
were forced to undergo a virginity test by the interim military 'superior
council' when being arrested on Tahrir (Liberation) Square after the Mubarak
regime had already been overthrown on February 11, 2011. The only thing
these women were accused of was the fact that they were taking part in
the national revolution of Jan. 25, insisting that the demands of the revolution
should be fulfilled before they would leave Tahrir Sqare and go home.
They were subjected in the post-revolutionary phase to such humiliating
and gender-discriminatory treatment, whereas Mubarak, the overthrown dictator,
was enjoying an accommodation comparable to that of a five star hotel,
in a super luxury hospital at the Sharm El-Sheich resort – a striking
contradiction, indeed, as Ms. Kamel stressed in her live interview on TV.
Leading figures of the old, corrupt regime that has been overthrown are
receiving such a privileged treatment, and they are entitled to stand trial
in an ordinary court, facing judges who are civilians, while the revolutionaries
are tried summarily by military courts which have sentenced some of them
to 20 or 25 years in jail! Such outraging post-revolutionary human rights
offences were addressed by Ms. Kamel during the live emission, thus placing
the state power in a strong, critical spotlight. These things were reason
enough for her to ask the interim military council, appointed by Mubarak
himself when he was resigning from office, to step down and let the state-administrative
duties be run by an interim presidential council that should be composed
of civil representatives of the revolutionary population that accomplished
the overthrow of Mubarak and his corrupt regime.
Ms. Kamel also criticized the
unjustified patriarchal attitudes which are still persisting in Egyptian
society and which let many Egyptians shy back from electing a woman for
a leading office like that of the president. She questioned this by asking,
“Who is the most influential person in a family, with regard to the upbringing
and education of children and who is in charge of the most crucial 'administration'
of everyday life in a family – the father or the mother?” As the
obvious answer that most would give suggests that the mother's function
leaves its crucial mark on the next generation, why shouldn't she,
just like a man and his true equal, be able to exercise the duties
of a head of state?! However, in the course of this critique of the dominant
official and non-official standards in post-revolutionary Egypt, the live
emission of the interview was cut off.
TV-presenter Sharaf was ordered
by the board to abruptly end an interview that I, and in fact many other
viewers I talked to, thought to be most intriguing. Ms. Kamel had been
giving a much needed example, by doing away with the artificial barrier
between official, state-dependant television discourse and the thoughts
of real contester, as expressed, for instance, by the words of those camping
just outside the door of the State TV building! That’s why the live interview
has been abruptly cut off. It lifted the ideological veil that is separating
the TV studios from what the ordinary people really think and say quite
plainly out there in the street – all those ordinary people who produced
the liberating revolution of Jan. 25 in Egypt while courageously putting
their health and their lives at risk.
*First published in the daily Nahdat
Misr (Egypt's Renaissance), on May 14, 2011, p.9.
Check...:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
Check: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
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LINKS
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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg
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"The
Arab Spring and the crisis of the elite"
backup
copy
Al MasryAlyoum.com
http://www.almasryalyoum.com
Mohamed
Azouz, Egypt govt mulls
raising workers' incentives
in bid to thwart labor strikes
N.N.,"After
the carrot, Egypt's rulers show the stick"
(Himalayan Times, Feb.
19,1011)
backup
copy
N.N.,
"Workers in Suez join battle too" (in: Socialist
Worker online, July 12,2011)
backup
copy
Perry Anderson,
"On
the
Concenation in the Arab World"
(in: New
Left Review)
backup
copy
W.G.
Tarpley, "Behind the Orgy of Destabilizations"
backup
copy
Christian Frings,
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und Ägypten" (in:
AK analyse & kritik)
N.N.,"After
the carrot, Egypt's rulers show the stick"
(Himalayan Times, Feb.
19,1011)
backup
copy
Samir
Amin: "2011: An
Arab Springtime?"
(in: Monthly
Review)
backup
copy
Ahmad
Fouad Najem, "Forbidden"
backup
copy
*
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