The Egyptian Sandmonkey has written a post about the demonstration against planned amendments to the Egyptian constitution that he attended yesterday. The scenes he describes are absolutely chilling, and certainly not reminiscent of any accepted “democracy”. One of the things that scares me the most about this whole episode is that I haven’t been able to find any mention of what happened in Cairo yesterday on any of the mainstream media (MSM) websites, and once again, the Egyptian government will probably deny that these events even took place. This is what happened when rioting broke out in November on the first day of Eid ul Fitr, and it took the MSM several days to start covering the story, which, incidentally, they initially picked up from the Egyptian blogosphere. I’m blogging this and linking to the Sandmonkey’s post because the world needs to be made aware of Egypt’s crumbling democracy.
I am awed by the Sandmonkey’s courage to jump into the fray, knowing that the outcome would inevitably be violent, and knowing that he could get into some serious trouble. It is one thing for those of us living in a democracy to criticize our government, but quite another to knowingly put one’s self in harm’s way in order to fight for that democracy. Please take a moment to read his post.
Chilling is right. I can’t find an MSM mention either…
Thanks to bloggers in Egypt and the use of camera phones with the internet, clips like this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc5gxnZX428) can get out and help make the world aware of what is happening in Egypt.
I couldn’t find any mention on the BBC of the demonstration either, though a lot on the rights abuses in Egypt.
Great courage described in his account of the event. It is all such a foreign concept to me, having only read about that type of struggle for democracy in history books, really… Thanks for spreading the word