Revolution for Dummies

by Bassem Youssef

  That scene was priceless. The Islamist members around him converged on the poor guy and tried to snatch the bullets from his hand, as if they had seen their parents having sex and wanted to unsee this horrific image.

  The same people who had basically been fucked by the state for decades had now become whips for the state. In eighteen months’ time, many of those Islamist members would either be jailed or killed in the streets by the same minister they were protecting. And that parliament member who stood with the bullets in his hand? He would be on every television screen justifying the need to kill them.

  One day you’re down, the next you’re up. Life’s really a bitch, huh?

  GIVE US YOUR MONEY AND GET THE HELL OUT

  As an Egyptian citizen, I have no idea how I should feel about America. On a daily basis outside the American embassy you can find lines for visas longer than the ones outside of Best Buy on Black Friday. The cinemas in my country are full of American movies. The television channels are loaded with American sitcoms. Every time an Egyptian president visits America, the state-run media cover the visits with more attention than TMZ would do for another Kardashian wedding. When Barack Obama visited Egypt in 2009, everyone was charmed by his “Al salamo alikom” greetings and were elated that Obama might have actually owned up and returned to his Muslim roots. A headline in one of the biggest Egyptian newspapers announced that Obama enjoyed his Egyptian breakfast and fell in love with our falafel. With all the money the American government funnels into our military, the least we could do was give him a good meal.

  We receive $1.3 billion in military aid each year from America, plus more money to “support democracy.” Big mistake! In order for Egypt to get the $1.3 billion in deadly weapons, we needed to appear as if we were financially supporting free speech and democratic organizations. In turn, these outspoken organizations would come right back and object to the American money used to grow the military. It was a vicious, vicious cycle.

  A big chunk of that money to support democracy went to human rights organizations and institutions to train individuals in different aspects of the democratic process: how to manage candidates and voters, and even how to organize your potluck events. For years, the American government had been financing these activities right there under the nose of Mubarak, the army, and intelligence agencies.

  And then one day, in a beautifully orchestrated manner, the state-run media and Islamist media decided that Egypt wasn’t going to support those organizations anymore. Weird characters started becoming regular guests on television shows, and they talked about their experiences with these “shady” organizations. A short, fat guy who looked exactly like Megamind (even I have seen that movie), minus the blue skin, came on many TV shows to expose the “American plot against Egypt.” This guy gave more or less the same story each time but tweaked it according to each show’s audience. For Islamic channels he would emphasize the grave danger these organizations posed to Islam, while for state-run media he’d explain how America was conspiring against the Egyptian army. You know—that same army that willingly accepted $1.3 billion each year from the U.S. He would show his membership cards for these organizations and say, “There is no honor for me to stay a part of these heinous establishments,” before ripping them up. He did that on four different shows. How many membership cards did this guy have? And if he tore up all of his membership cards how was he going to get his tenth smoothie for free?

  This guy is what we call in Arabic amnag y, which is a derogatory term for being a dog to different branches of the secret police. There are many of these amnagy-type characters to be found—whether they are working for newspapers or television channels, or even as university faculty members. When needed, they will write articles or appear on television spouting whatever is dictated by the secret police.

  Two of my dear friends were working in one of these organizations with Americans who were helping different political parties manage their elections. They called to tell me that the police and the Egyptian NSA had already cracked down on their headquarters and that they might be pressing charges.

  Again I decided to go and expose this problem for what it really was while every other television program waged war on international human rights and American aid organizations. For the most part, I am not a fan of American aid. I personally think a lot of it is a big scam aimed to line the pockets of many American contractors. But the hysteria that was building just meant that everyone would be accused sooner or later of supporting human rights.

  “Human rights” became an infamous phrase. In the state-run media, they accused anyone supporting human rights of using it as an excuse to create chaos to destroy the country from within. On religious channels, human rights were synonymous with unchecked freedom that would lead to every single person in the country having promiscuous sex or being gay or both! Oh brother, here we go again with the sex shaming!

  Now, I should give my American readers some context here. Not since the French came to your aid during the Revolutionary War have you had an entire country assist in fighting a common enemy on your soil. South Africans don’t come tell you how to run your government elections. Japanese don’t donate money to support your homeless. Norwegians don’t call you out for your treatment of minorities. And Brazilians don’t give you over a billion dollars to help you purchase tanks and fighter jets with the caveat that you’d better support free speech too. So it may be difficult for you to understand the mentality other countries have about America when it deals with the rest of the world’s “human rights.” There is a certain amount of suspicion about what kind of closed-door trade-off must be occurring for the aid to be provided. Considering America is the biggest supporter of Israel, which has fought four wars with Egypt, Egyptians can’t help but throw some side-eye at your “good intentions.” Now, we all know that a lot of people have been positively impacted by this kind of work, but our state-run media have twisted it into another reason we shouldn’t trust the Western world.

  So against the advice of my own team, I hosted a friend of mine who worked with Human Rights Watch on the program. They didn’t want me being associated with an entity that was perceived as on its way down in society. However, it astounded me that many of the Islamists parties went to these organizations to get training in election management and campaigning. Many of those made it into the parliament because of the training they received.

  As predicted by the earlier arrival of the amnagy, paid public service announcements by the state’s intelligence agency suddenly started hitting the airwaves. They showed a foreign man sitting in a coffee shop among the locals. The camera showed his evil hawkish eyes scanning the perimeter for vulnerable Egyptians to extract information from. A close-up of his ear insinuated he was eavesdropping on their conversation. I don’t know what kind of important information some foreigner would get from sitting in a local coffee shop, since Egyptian men usually go to these shops to get away from their wives, bitch about their wives, or brag about imaginary sexual adventures not involving their wives. In the PSA the alleged “spy” tries to get friendly with the locals and starts speaking in broken Arabic. The gullible Egyptians start to pour their souls out, supposedly giving him valuable information. Finally, a dude tells him something that is supposedly very important, and after hearing it he sits with a sinister smile on his face while saying in a horrible English accent, “Really?”

  How they couldn’t get a guy to pronounce that right is beyond me! It was one fucking word, people! The screen abruptly freezes and a voice-over states, “Every word has a price, a word can save a nation.” This was kind of a throwback video version of the WWII posters warning you that “loose lips can cost lives.”

  This particular PSA caused the guy who played the foreign spy to get into some real trouble. He was actually a struggling Egyptian actor trying to make his way, when he was recognized at a coffee shop and drew suspicion from some locals. They actually beat this guy up, and he had to come out to the newspapers swea
ring he was a real, red-blooded Egyptian.

  This backlash caused the Egyptian government to decide to shut down those American centers and detain many of their employees. My friends were among the detained.

  All the media hailed the decision as a move to restore Egypt’s sovereignty. Pundits came out on television declaring the end of American dominance and of American attempts to affect Egyptian political decisions. Media campaigns were launched to free Egypt from the “humiliating chains” of American aid. Celebrities and Islamic leaders were on magazine covers leading donation campaigns to collect money from Egyptians to compensate for American dollars. Officers vowed to punish all the American operatives who had played parts in sabotaging Egypt from the inside. Photos of them standing trial were all over the news.

  Then out of nowhere, all the Americans who were on a no-fly list were driven to the airport in the middle of the night and sent back home; the army moved in on the various organizations and NGOs for some cheap local publicity, but eventually let those “spies and operatives” go because you can’t really piss on your sugar daddy when he’s giving you $1.3 billion every year.

  After collecting millions from the pockets of hardworking Egyptians, the donation campaign disappeared as fast as it appeared. To this day, no one knows where the money went.

  A GOOD CHRISTIAN DOESN’T REVOLT

  To many fanatics in our country, Christians are seen as the secret ingredient in every conspiracy being cooked against Islam.

  We weren’t always like this. In the 1940s, before the military coup of Nasser, Egypt was one of the most diverse nations in the region, a true melting pot of religions and ethnicities, but something happened along the line. Was it the huge infusion of Saudi money into Egypt? Or maybe it was when military authorities thought it easier to use religion to mass-control people with shitty lives? What’s better than looking forward to a second life with a heaven full of booze and women, both of which you can’t get in your current life? Or maybe it is the very nature of military rule: they hate diversity and they don’t know how to deal with it, so the best thing is to make everyone as homogeneous as the uniforms in their training camps.

  The truth is, we pretend to be tolerant until we are really not.

  Life was not that fair for Christians even before the Islamists acquired majority rule in the parliament. Under Mubarak they had their own share of inequality, which included official unequal representation in the government and not being able to build their own churches without going through a convoluted mess of bureaucratic red tape.

  It was normal for Christians to hear hateful speeches against them during Friday prayer sermons blasted through the microphones from mosques near their homes. The Wahhabi sheikhs indoctrinated generations with myths about Christians, ranging from what they put in their food to how they fornicate. Discrimination against Christians is a common practice across the Arab and Islamic worlds, and to some extent is not necessarily a religious thing. It is more of an authority thing. You see, the more open and inclusive a society is, the more free and expressive their citizens. An authoritarian regime, whether military or religious, doesn’t want diversity. Having masses of people who think the same, talk the same, and hate the same is much easier for maintaining control.

  So when Muslims worry about Trump becoming president and how he will deal with Muslims, they are just worried they will be treated the same way they treat non-Muslims in their countries. Like shit.

  Again, like Muslims in America, Egyptian Christians are told from a very young age to keep to themselves. Even their grand priests have that mind-set of avoiding anything that might piss off the government. But after the revolution many people changed, and many of the Christian youth became more involved in politics and protests.

  In October 2011, Christians took to the streets on their own, which is stupid if you are a Christian living in Egypt. They were out to demand more equality and better political reform. It was a huge, peaceful march, the first of its kind in Egypt.

  It was also the last.

  After their long march the Christians stopped and assembled around the state television building. In the Arab world television buildings are even more secure than the presidential palace. This dates to a long tradition in which Arab coups could simply take control of the television and radio stations, announcing the new leader as president, and people could go on with their merry lives.

  On that day twenty-six Christians were killed by the army’s soldiers and tanks.

  The tragedy was not limited to the huge death toll. Another tragedy was in how the media covered it. “Copts were attacking military units,” said the anchor on the state-run television news. “We implore the honorable citizens to protect its army against the vile attack.”

  But this was actually a turning point in the course of the revolution, both because the death toll at this march was the largest number of civilians to die in one day since the beginning of the revolution and because the killing took place in front of the cameras and at the hands of the ruling authorities. Unfortunately, from here on out, death turned into a daily statistic. A week after this incident I was interviewed by a reporter who asked me what I thought about what had happened. I told him that an entire revolution had erupted because one kid was tortured to death in a police station. One death. Now death had become very easy to swallow. What was a couple more? When the military turned people into discarded commodities, there was no telling how high the death toll could climb.

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER THIS INCIDENT, SEVENTY-FOUR FOOTBALL fans were killed during a riot at a football game. This appeared to be premeditated murder, chaos initiated by unknown thugs while the fans were caged in and left to die.

  There were many speculations about how and why it happened. One theory was that the fans of this club (Al Ahly, the biggest club in Egypt and Africa) were the most vocal against authority. They chanted against police in their matches and had an active part in the demonstrations against the police and army.

  The true explanation still remains a mystery, but the way the police managed the crisis, the fact that “shady” known criminals were allowed into the stadium, and how the fans were trapped there and left to die hardly made it appear like a “normal” sports riot. Nothing was adding up.

  I didn’t comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy until the next day when I looked outside the window of my office. Right across from our building stood one of the biggest mosques in Cairo with more than three thousand people standing outside it. These were the friends and family of some of the deceased waiting for the bodies to come out after the funeral prayers.

  I found myself going downstairs and walking toward the crowd. As I was in the middle of it, deafening silence overcame me. This felt like a scene from a black-and-white avant-garde French movie where everything was in slow motion. One kid raised his head and recognized me, then another and another. No one rushed to ask me for a photo or a selfie as per usual. One man silently walked toward me and put his hand on my shoulder. “We need you to avenge us,” he said somberly. “You are the only one that speaks in our voice.”

  I had no idea what to do. I was a satirist, for crying out loud, and now I was called upon for help? What had I gotten myself into?

  The sad thing was, this was not the last horrific incident that made satire and laughter inappropriate. For the next couple of years, I was repeatedly called insensitive and rude for trying to make people laugh while there was blood in the streets.

  When we broadcast the following week, people were still in mourning and none of the media outlets rose to the occasion. I decided to change my attire. Instead of wearing a suit I wore a black T-shirt that was designed for the victims of the football game massacre. We aired the episode in black-and-white and featured a video by the minister of defense at that time, who instead of accepting responsibility went out and insinuated that there were evil agents against the “Egyptian people.” The same way Trump insinuated that the “Second Amendment people” could consider as
sassinating Hillary Clinton, the minister of defense asked the “honorable Egyptians” to go after activists and “traitors living amongst us.” I mocked his comments and even used a logo that said “Lying Soldiers,” which became popular after all the atrocities committed by the army. By using this logo I was basically putting the blame on the military, who were hiding behind an interim government. They were the ones running the show. They were the ones who killed the Christians directly, they were the ones who killed the football fans, and they took on the people in Tahrir Square indirectly through the police.

  This episode stirred huge controversy. My mom called me screaming, “How dare you call them liars!”

  “Mom, I didn’t say that,” I replied.

  “I am not stupid, you used the logo,” she answered.

  “Well, I—”

  “The army is the only standing institution in this country. We would be lost without it. Show some respect.”

  She’d already had a fight with me because I had indirectly attacked the army a few weeks earlier when they crushed the Christians under their tanks. My mom believed the army’s story that the soldiers were defending themselves against those “Christian criminals.” To my mom and her generation, the army could do no wrong.

  And that was the core of the problem. The army was indeed much more sacred than religion, and was not allowed to be slandered in any way. Islam might have entered Egypt fifteen hundred years ago, but for seven thousand years before that Egypt was owned by an army.

  BRA AND THE CITY

  DECEMBER 2011

  Despite the fact that almost a year had passed since the revolution ended, sit-ins in the streets of Cairo were as ubiquitous as Starbucks. It didn’t matter that they became counterproductive; they were symbolic of the frustration that hadn’t ceased since the revolution began. Well, we thought we removed a regime once, why not do it again the same exact way?