Mere Rhetoric: Egyptian Persecution of Bloggers Must Be Uncompromisingly Fought - What Happens Right After That, However, Is Not So Simple

Instapundit has posted on a BBC story about the Egyptian government's persecution of bloggers that as near as we can tell got its start yesterday evening on Slashdot:

Police in Cairo have detained a blogger whose posts have been critical of the Egyptian government. Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention. The other friends were released after being questioned. Human rights groups have accused Egypt of eroding freedom of speech by arresting several bloggers recently... In recent weeks, bloggers have been exposing what they say was the sexual harassment of women at night in downtown Cairo in full view of police who did not intervene.

This follows Tom Palmer's call from a couple days ago to help free another jailed Egyptian blogger, Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman.

The controversy, however, goes far deeper than just government repression - and it has been going on longer than a couple of weeks. The first thing people should know is that the stakes involve freedom of speech and the right of women to basic physical security - two issues that we must be absolutely unwilling to compromise on. The second thing that people should know is that it's nowhere close to clear what side to choose in the medium-term to achieve those goals.

Political and religious repression in Egypt is nothing new: last month they very quietly arrested a former Sheikh for converting to Christianty. Political intimidation of bloggers is also nothing new - last summer they arrested and tortured Alaa Abdel-Fatah for his political blogging. We posted on that incident in a Winds of Change.NET HateWatch post:

Egyptian authorities arrested dissident blogger Alaa Abdel-Fatah. Not only did this act have something less than the publicity-dampening effects they had hoped, but by the time they released him all they had managed to do was dramatically demonstrate their impotence. Governments need to understand that arresting bloggers doesn't work. Bloggers have blogger friends, who tend to be energetic, politically active, and computer literate. Very few things unite and energize bloggers across the political spectrum, but that's one of them.

Given that last time the police bought themselves a lot of trouble and not much intimidation, it might seem surprising to see them try persecuting bloggers again. But that's because the current controversy is a unique and dangerous combination for them: Egyptian bloggers have been mounting sustained protests against the disgusting sexism rotting Egyptian society, but they've been mounting them against the backdrop of more general and unspoken criticisms on the government. So these are protests that have the effect of political protests, but they're wrapped in something so undeniably true that the Egyptian government really can't oppose them. It's the same kind of perfect storm that has consistently brought down former Soviet clients (which, it bears remembering, Egypt is among) in the last half-century. A movement is not openly against the government - so no defense can be mounted and no opponent can be demonized - but it is nonetheless obviously targeted at the ruling regime. The regime is being attacked, but it has no justifiable reason or grounds for counterattack - and so the only available recourse is to arrest the protest leaders.

But it looks like these protests might not be containable. The specific controversy began in late October, when news started leaking about riots that had happened over a couple of nights in downtown Cairo. On the first two days of Eid, Muslim men - hopped up on religious fervor - had apparently gone on massive rampages, literally assaulting and raping scores of women as police looked on:

Obligatory theoretical psycho-social background: Phyllis Chesler's 2004 Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Terrorism, on how a culture that fetishizes submission ends with outbursts of repressed frustration aimed at debasing Muslim women and murdering non-Muslim enemies (the book she was reviewing, by Dr. Nancy Kobrin, was later pulled by the publisher because of post-Muhammad Cartoons fear of violence). You should also see this intimidatingly extensive analysis on links between violence against women and Islamic communities in the hearts of Old Europe.

Soon after Eid this year, the Egyptian blogosphere erupted. Early eyewitness reports quickly turned into a flood of outrage. At least as early as mid-November, Lynn-B of In Context had introduced the issue into the J-Blogosphere. But here's the thing - the main focus of the protesters' anger was not religion in general, Islam in particular, or even cultural dynamics. Rather - and this is the source of the perfect storm facing Egyptian authorities - protesters picked out the police for specific blame:

Who to blame? I'll go with law enforcement. I was assigned an article once that said that a rape takes place every three minutes in North America alone; God knows what the number is worldwide. Many rapes are not reported. It is safe to say that is it futile to rail against dangerous male misconceptions of sex, and women, and consent. The only thing that can prevent sexual assault is fear of consequences, a fear that is entirely absent in Egypt. Socially, people don't give a shit – it's the woman's fault, somehow, and apparently hormones serve as a complete defense to any crime. Egypt's criminal code provides for numerous avenues of protection against assault, sexual harassment, and even unpleasant language. However, these felonies are rarely prosecuted and even more rarely reported.

And so anti-sexism protests, so obviously justified and necessary, have taken this anti-government edge. And as the protests have been growing - first getting domestic coverage and then hitting the international wires by mid-November - the government had no choice but to begin cracking down.

But Mubarak is between two opposing forces, both of which are taking aim at him. On one side, he's being undermined by growing Islamist power - movements that are destroying whatever thin secular tradition the virulently anti-Israel pan-Arab movement built up during the Cold War. On the other side, Mubarak's being attacked by secularists because he can't control the cultural pathologies being introduced by this growing fundamentalist movement. So the government will do what they always do - arrest as many people as they can, and look for a way to get everyone to agree that social unrest is being caused by the West or by Jews.

This time, however, that tactic might not work. There are no Jews in those YouTube videos - and the Egyptian government is facing a mobilized blogging community that is quite pissed off about the arrest of fellow bloggers. And it was already pissed off about the Egyptian government's role in the original outrages - which is what got them arrested in the first place. The essence of political repression is control over information - which is literally impossible in a society that is simultaneously as advanced and as decentralized as Egypt is. These bloggers will eventually be freed, if only because Western bloggers - and then activists - and then government officials - will bring pressure to bear on Egyptian officials. And every day that they're in jail is another day that this issue spreads - and with it spreads awareness of the Egyptian government's incompetence.

Nonetheless, choosing a political side in this disgusting debacle is not trivial. The situation places advocates in almost the worst of all worlds. It's undeniable that our sympathies lie first and foremost, at least in the abstract, with the forces of political liberation. Even more so, in this concrete situation we should - as the Left used to say - demonstrate solidarity in every way with the Egyptian women being raped and the Egyptian bloggers being tortured. But the political considerations are difficult to weigh. If Mubarak is overthrown because of his regime's insipid inability to protect the physical well-being of women, what will replace him will be worse for those women. We honestly have no idea what concrete outcome we prefer to see after the short-term goals of liberating these bloggers are met. We just kind of wish there wasn't this massive fundamentalist movement of extremists who think that women exist to be domestic and sexual slaves to men, and that it wasn't sweeping large parts of the globe. Everywhere political Islam takes over, women become interpersonal and cultural punching bags for increasingly repressed fundamentalist societies. On the other hand, short-term political calculations that end by propping up strongmen are what got us into this situation in the first place.

It's almost like views on women might be particularly salient examples of more fundamental differences in civilizational sensibilities.

UPDATE: Via Tom:

Just to let you know, neither of the two video's that you posted are actually video's of the Eid sexual harassment incident. The first video of the huge crowds on the street was shot in January 2006, and the second video was shot at the entrance gates to Cairo Stadium, where the football games are played (and no-one has said when it was shot).

It looks like there are videos on the incident are here and here, but they're Arabic language news reports and not eyewitness videos.

Previously: Egyptian Women's Magazines Are Ironic, Israeli-Egyptian Peace Not Really Working Out "Peacefully", WaPo Discovers Egyptian Anti-Israel Movements, Gets Story Wrong Anyway