(By Jillian C. York)
Civil Society to Egypt: Release Alaa Abd El Fattah And All Unjustly Detained In Egypt (via EFF)
The military “interim government” in Egypt is cracking down on virtually all meaningful form of assembly, association, or opposition. Following the passage of a November 2013 law banning peaceful protest, dozens of activists and organizers have…
This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: https://www.juancole.com/2014/01/bloggers-tahrir-revolution.html
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On some articles in which you see loads of reader comments defending the hunting down of Egyptian democrats and attacking anyone criticizing it, one gets the sense that some of these comments were posted by elements associated with the Egyptian Ministry of Interior. There are some that even try to make contorted and tortured defenses of Mostafa Bakry’s lunacy.
It would not be a first; other governments are known to employ similar tactics.
The escalating quantity of police resources spent on the crackdown against journalists, dissidents, intellectuals, political scientists, bloggers, satirists, and sports fans is clearly damaging the government’s ability to detect and stop car bombs or other such attacks. It would seem that knowledge is more dangerous to primitive militaristic ideologies than is physical violence.
The random-idiot violence mostly kills and maims ordinary people and sometimes “the troops,” not the kleptocrats with the chests full of self-awarded ribbons and their hands in everyone else’s pockets…