Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  We set the release date for Searching for a God for New Year’s Eve 2011. But that night, a bombing occurred outside a Coptic Christian church in the heart of Cairo. Yup, that’s how we celebrate Christmas in my part of the world. That’s why when I see Bill O’Reilly ranting for hours on end about a “war on Christmas” or the sacrilege of no red cups at Starbucks, all I can say is “Bitch, please!”

  Following that explosion we decided not to release the videos on YouTube, and postponed the whole thing for a few weeks. But twenty-five days later, all of a sudden we just happened to have a revolution—you know, that little thing I started telling you about—and we lost sight of the project. There was nothing else for the next few weeks other than the events of the uprising.

  A week after Mubarak stepped down, Tarek called me. “Hey, forget about Searching for a God for now. We need a new project. Let’s do something humorous and political. This is the best time for that kind of content.”

  “Great!” I said. “Then I want to do something like Jon Stewart.” (Who, I should inform you, is my biggest inspiration.)

  “What?” Tarek replied. “No one will get it. It won’t work. Whatever, dude, just give me some content to put up there.”

  I started collecting available online material from the Egyptian mainstream media. The widespread backlash against the media rose with the release of each new YouTube video. Now that Mubarak had stepped down and the revolution had “won,” those who had originally insinuated the revolution was a conspiracy, opposed it from the beginning, or instigated hate against it found themselves on a sort of public blacklist. The hypocrisy and deception we found in those videos was unmatched. They were full of paranoia, hate, lies . . . and lots of sex!

  THE SEX ORGY REVOLUTION

  With one camera, one desk, and one banner that cost a hundred dollars, we filmed in the laundry room of my apartment.

  On March 8, 2011, we released the first five-minute episode on the Internet. It satirized how the media and celebrities tried to tarnish the protests in Tahrir Square.

  “We should get rid of those protestors in Tahrir!” shouted a celebrity actor in the episode. “Why doesn’t the army order a tank to advance in the square and shoot one shot? Just one shot in the air. The traitors will flee and only the good people of Egypt will stay.”

  A shot from a tank in the middle of Cairo? What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure a tank blast in the middle of Times Square would probably have a similar effect of separating the muggers from the good people of New York, right?

  “I have been in Tahrir myself,” added the same actor. “I was there in disguise. I saw everything. This is not a revolution. People were dancing, singing, using drugs, and engaging in complete sexual relations.” Someone had actually used the phrase complete sexual relations.

  Damn! Who knew the revolution was just a glorified frat party? Yet, for a nation with horny, sexually deprived youth, that image was the best motivation for more people to support the insurgence in Tahrir. If not for freedom, then at least for the hope of getting laid. And I couldn’t help but ask the question: If there are complete sexual relations, what are incomplete sexual relations? Is the man halfway in? Does the couple stop halfway through the act and smoke a joint? Do men who do not receive the whole “complete sexual relations” end up having blue balls?

  You see, sex is a great talking point in our region. If you want to discredit a person, a cause, or a whole movement, you can just drop accusations related to sex. It is the ultimate taboo, but that doesn’t stop us from topping most countries when it comes to PornHub.com searches. Maybe the next time Americans want to deal with a problem in the Middle East, they should send us strippers instead of troops. Middle East problem solved!

  For my first episode I was hoping for about ten thousand views on YouTube, which would’ve been considered viral in Egypt. But in two days the video hit 100,000 views. In two months, the show’s views increased to 5 million. This was truly unprecedented in the Arab world. (I know what you are thinking . . . 5 million? That is what my cat videos get now. 2011, people, 2011.)

  People shared my videos on Facebook and on Twitter. They started to recognize me in the street and stop me for photos. I was living a bizarre double life: working in the hospital during the week, and on the weekends editing and shooting the episodes.

  The first videos were amateurish, but, still, they were a huge hit. People enjoyed seeing me taking the piss out of the celebrities and TV personalities who lied to them and betrayed the revolution. But it was not just the celebrities. The media narrative was worthy of Orwellian fiction. Big Brother was in control. And how does Big Brother drive masses? Simple.

  Step 1: Create an enemy.

  Step 2: Make sure it speaks English.

  Step 3: Rinse and repeat.

  ENGLISH AS A CRIMINAL LANGUAGE

  A second language is usually a great addition to your résumé wherever you are. It improves your chances of getting hired and might take you to unforeseeable places. The same more or less applies in Egypt: speaking English in Egypt can improve your chances of getting arrested and visiting an Egyptian jail.

  Egyptians are welcoming people when it comes to foreigners. After all, our habit of supplying tourist attractions is not just second nature, it is also important to the economy. Egypt needs your money (and not just in the form of military and economic aid!). But how does a foreign language change from being a way to communicate with tourists to a national security crisis?

  Well, leave it up to Big Brother. Or as we call it, “our father in the intelligence.” For more than six decades, Egypt was controlled by the military apparatus. They controlled everything—from security to the economy to the media. The Soviet Union might have died in the eighties, but it still lived in our region. Whenever the military intelligence felt threatened, foreigners were always an easy target to blame.

  We were first aware of the dangers of the English language by way of a video that I had used in one of my earliest online episodes. It became an iconic landmark, showing the way state-run propaganda operates.

  Referred to as “Weeping Tamer,” this video shows a young man named “Tamer” calling in to one of the TV news bulletins on the government channel. In a teary voice he describes how he joined the masses in the streets in good faith, but now he wants to repent because he has discovered the evil plots behind this so-called revolution.

  “Can you please tell us what you saw that made you reach this conclusion?” asks the anchor.

  “These people are not Egyptians, they are not from here. They want to destroy the country,” explains Tamer, his crying taking up most of his conversation.

  “Yes, but can you please tell us what you saw?” asks the anchor again.

  “These people are weird and they speak English very, very well.”

  (I remember translating that video for an American friend of mine, and his response was: “Where the fuck were those people when I was asking directions to the pyramids?”)

  That was enough to plant the first seeds of doubt in the hearts of people watching the revolution from home.

  Many calls from other alleged “Weeping Tamers” came flooding in. The story was more or less the same. Young men drawn into the revolution now saw the light. They claimed they were tricked by external powers and their operatives, who could speak perfect English.

  After Mubarak stepped down we learned that the original “Weeping Tamer” was actually a network employee who was patching in from the control room as part of a staged phone call.

  These phone calls were now a comical yet disheartening reminder of how media manipulated people at the time. During the uprising in those eighteen days, people who didn’t understand or support the revolution also didn’t realize that behind the scenes a covert operation was taking place to further implicate foreigners. Egyptian television was busy interviewing proud Egyptians who had captured and turned in foreigners of all nationalities.

  “We found two people walking on
the bridge,” said one citizen to a mainstream media source. “When they didn’t give a good answer for why they were just walking around like that we turned them in to the army. They turned out to be Irish.”

  Actually, I could believe that. Only the Irish would be drunk enough to walk around in the middle of the night in a Middle Eastern country while the largest unrest in its history was occurring!

  A celebrity singer called in and claimed that he and some of his neighbors had just captured two “Swiss Islamists.” Now, this is a scenario that’s very hard to imagine. Were they yodeling about their radical neutrality? Was Switzerland invading us with scrumptious chocolates? But these were not mere rumors. To many citizens of Egypt, this was strong evidence that foreigners were involved in the revolution. State-run media showed videos and photos of foreigners in the middle of Tahrir dancing with the protestors. Of course, it may be worth mentioning that one of the biggest tourist spots, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, is just two hundred yards away from the square. Imagine retired, senile tourists walking out of the museum to find themselves in the middle of a revolution that was not exactly a part of their predetermined travel tour. But why not get a free treat and take in some of the local fare? Or you could believe that these dim-witted white folks who just happened to be in Egypt checking off an item on their bucket list were highly trained coverts. I mean, it’s your choice.

  Egypt is a tourist destination, and the authorities were shooting themselves in the foot by denying this. As a matter of fact, in the next few years the government would move from capturing tourists to killing them with fighter jets in the desert; stick around, more of that to come. To them, national security was of the upmost priority. It didn’t matter if you alienated foreigners or Egyptians themselves, the country came first, even at the country’s expense. It didn’t matter how ridiculous the claims were. Like when the nine o’clock news proudly announced the arrest of fifty Eritreans and thirty-five Ethiopians for espionage!!! Even our African brothers were on to us!

  The bottom line is, the state-run media were doing a great job of making it appear that everybody was against the revolution. And they had no better weapon than the source of all evil—the one we love to hate and hate for loving—the Satan we all admire. The mighty US of A.

  AMERICA: WE LOVE TO HATE YOU

  When people in the West ask me how we Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Eastern folks feel about America, I sum it up like this: “We hate your guts, but we would kill to get your visa.”

  America was cited as the reason for everything evil that happened during the revolution: The revolutionaries accused America of supporting Mubarak and not moving fast enough to get him out. And the media accused America of staging the whole Arab Spring to destabilize the region. When they produced “evidence” that some of the revolution’s leaders were paid operatives, there were calls pouring in on TV outing the fact that many of the so-called revolutionaries and the thousands of people taking to the streets were only protesting because they were paid $50 and given a bucket meal from KFC. It only makes sense that fake protestors were bolstered with food from a fake chicken colonel. How fingerlickin’ American!

  What Western think tanks get wrong all the time is that they believe they can actually figure out how we feel about America through geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural bullshit. This will never work; their best bet is to hire a therapist to analyze us.

  In the 1950s and 1960s under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, our first ever military dictator, Egypt was leaning toward the Soviet camp of communism, so of course we hated America. The U.S. had always supported Israel, vetoed every single Security Council resolution against them, and turned a blind eye every time they bombed the shit out of the Palestinians. Everyone had their reasons to hate America: Islamists, the military, leftists, liberals, and even poor taxi drivers. America is an easy target toward which to direct your hate in Egypt. If you are a leader and can’t run the country properly, just convince the people that America is ruining everything. America is the devil for the Islamists because it wants to defeat Islam. We are enormous hypocrites, though, because while America empowers and financially assists Israel—our biggest enemy—we, at the same time, receive some of the largest chunks of American military aid. Meanwhile, Egyptian leftists hate America because it represents everything ugly about capitalism and world domination, while secular elitists hate America because it has empowered the extreme religious monarchies in the gulf region (who ironically sponsor the extreme religious scholars who tell the people that America is fighting Islam). And . . . the poor taxi driver hates America because he gets denied a visa to get away from all these crazy people.

  Nonetheless, this despised America is a dream destination for many of Egypt’s hypocrites. Some of the most outspoken opponents of America send their kids to American schools and universities. When these people get sick, they travel to get treated in America. Their vacation retreats are mostly in the U.S. and Europe—all paid for by the money they sucked from the poor people of Egypt while telling them that the reason they are poor is America.

  America and Israel are the excuses for all failures and government incompetence. I wouldn’t really mind if Egypt actually manned up and had a serious hate-fueled relationship with them, but when it disses America and Israel while lying in bed with them for financial, security, and political arrangements, we really just come off like assholes.

  It is an interesting relationship in a country where people illegally download the latest episodes of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and fill the movie theaters for the latest Avengers movie. If Americans only knew how lucky they are that their endless lines are at Disney World while ours are queues in front of the American embassy.

  THE DAY THE REVOLUTION ENDED

  (PART 1)

  Many think the revolution ended in 2013, when the military took over (yeah, we will come to that). Some think that it ended before that, when Islamists got hold of the country in 2012 (I promise we will get to that too!). In my opinion, the revolution ended only nine weeks after Mubarak stepped down.

  Mubarak’s rule was centered on one principal message: “Either me or absolute chaos.” He made everyone believe that if he stepped down Islamist extremists would win over Egypt and create another Afghanistan. This wasn’t new; throughout the Arab world military dictators used this message as a tool to stay in power. This is why Western powers had no problem with Mubarak or other military leaders or dictators in the Middle East. For them, the likes of Mubarak represented “stability,” which is another word for taking care of America’s interests in a discreet way without having to deal with public outcry. It’s similar to the way America supported many dictators in Latin America to protect its interests from communists. That’s why Castro was a real mind fucker: he was both a dictator and a communist.

  For Mubarak to maintain his position as the “only” option, he had to destroy any liberal or moderate opposition while keeping Islamic political power on a tight leash, and, as such, there was no other alternative in case of his departure than bringing in Islamists.

  Mubarak officially stepped down on February 11, 2011, at which point the army took over for an interim rule and promised to hold elections the next year. But the army decided to quickly push a referendum vote on March 19. On the surface, they made it look like the people were being given an opportunity to choose how the presidential office and constitution would operate moving forward. Quite simply, though, the referendum fucked up the beautiful mosaic that was the revolution. It showed the ugly face of political Islam and alienated many people from the idea of democracy.

  However, I really can’t go on explaining why Egypt is such a clusterfuck without explaining what the hell Sharia Law is or who makes up the various Islamist parties. So get ready for the worst explanation of political Islam and Sharia you may ever encounter. It may not be good enough to help you pass your Middle Eastern politics class, but it’ll do just fine for telling off your ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving. />
  LESSON ONE: SHARIA LAW

  In my futile attempt to explain political Islam I will have to use the word Sharia a lot. Now, if you think you know what the hell it is, think again. We Muslims—all one and a half billion of us—have yet to really agree on what this word means.

  A very stripped-down explanation is that Sharia is a collection of rules and laws that are inspired by the Quran. It includes the stories and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, in addition to many rulings on Islamic law and interpretations from what theologists concluded after the Prophet.

  For most people, their daily lives are dictated by Sharia and how it outlines the honorable way to approach issues like marriage, inheritance, charity donations, prayer, dietary rules such as abstaining from drinking or eating pork and making sure that the meat you eat is halal (kosher), and how not to be an asshole. Other followers extend Sharia to mandate how women should dress, the length of a man’s beard, and how to be a real asshole to other “followers” whom they deem less religious.

  Many take it even further and consider Sharia to be the undisputed law of God—including every single literal order and mandate of Sharia that has been in place for hundreds of years. They have taken ahold of Sharia’s dogma by denying any attempts or interpretations to modernize the traditions. This is akin to applying the Bible’s Old Testament as it was written. Could you imagine if your current boss forced all female employees to work in a completely separate office while they were menstruating because they were too “unclean” to mingle with men? How about stoning to death or beheading kids who cursed at their parents?