Tag: mubarak

The Daily Star Egypt covered the talk I moderated at the Center for Socialist Studies last Sunday.  I thought however I’d clarify more what Maram was referring to in the following paragraph in her report:

The same sentiments were echoed by journalist and blogger Hossam El Hamalawy, who said that young people from the late teens to the twenties are able to do and say things his generation couldn’t do and say because they were seen as taboos. He says the reason is that they did not experience real cruelty by the government before, so they don’t have red lines.

What I meant was that people like myself who joined the activist circles in the late 1990s, before the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, had always been aware of the “red lines” that existed in the Draconian 1990s, when you could not write any criticism of Mubarak and his family, when you knew you would definitely get assaulted by the troops if you dared mobilizing a demo outside university campus, when you felt content if you just managed to organize one sit-in a year over whatever issue…

The outbreak of the 2000 Palestinian intifada was a shot in the arm for street politics in Egypt, pushing thousands of fresh participants, who were not necessarily bound by the taboos someone like me might have had. The same generational shift happened following Black Wednesday, May 2005, when bloggers like Alaa and others–who were not necessarily aware of or concerned about the red lines that had existed before and had not been subject yet to police brutality–flocked to the movement, raising the ceiling of freedom of expression by more vocal criticism against the president, with more daring and unconventional street action.