A popular blogger in Egypt named Kareem was sentenced to four years in jail last week for expressing his opinions online. He was one of several bloggers arrested in that country last year. The others were released after being beaten (one was raped) by police, but Kareem was prosecuted, tried in a kangaroo court, then hauled off to jail this past week.
His imprisonment and America’s diplomatic ties with Egypt — they’re one of the largest recipients of US aid, about $2 billion a year — are the subject of an editorial in today’s Washington Post. Snip:
The Bush administration has tolerated Egypt’s brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and the broader reversal of its democratic spring of 2005 in part because President Hosni Mubarak argues that his adversaries are dangerous Islamic extremists. It’s true that the largest opposition movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood; how dangerous it is can be debated. But what is overlooked is that Mr. Mubarak reserves his most relentless repression not for the Islamists — who hold a fifth of the seats in parliament — but for the secular democrats who fight for free elections, a free press, rights for women and religious tolerance.
The latest case in point is a blogger named Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, who was sentenced to four years in prison last week on charges of religious incitement, disrupting public order and “insulting the president.” A brave and provocative 22-year-old student, Mr. Soliman first achieved notice with postings that denounced riots in Alexandria directed at Egypt’s Christian Copt minority. He said the brutality he witnessed was the result of extremist Islamic teachings, in part by his own university, Al-Azhar, which he called “the other face of al-Qaeda.” He compared the prophet Muhammad to Israel’s Ariel Sharon. And he said Mr. Mubarak was a “symbol of tyranny.”
Link to “Blogger on Ice.”
Channel 4 News did a video segment on Kareem and other jailed Egyptian bloggers last week — and the American government’s apparent blind eye to human rights abuses by Mubarak’s regime: Link (contains graphic images of torture — YouTube video clips from Egypt ).
Previously on BB: