When you ask Egyptians about why they hated the Muslim Brotherhood enough to turn a blind eye to all the injustice and killing that happened to the Brotherhood after they were removed from power (more on that coming up), many would tell you that the Brotherhood would have done the same to us. It was more of a feeling of those people are coming to dominate us and use relgion to enslave us. Many women will tell you about how they were walking in the streets and bearded men or veiled women would shout at them, “It’s our country now and all of you will be covered soon.” It’s like when Trump supporters started cursing at people and telling them they will be deported after Trump won the election. It’s like when that guy got up on a Delta flight and shouted at everybody, “Trump is your president, all of you Hillary bitches.”
It doesn’t matter that these were isolated incidents or that the president didn’t officially endorse them. A certain atmosphere was created, and people can see the direct link to authority.
The Brotherhood had a talent of finding more and more ways to make themselves unlikable. They were like that younger obnoxious sibling who, when you tell him to leave you alone, sticks his finger as close as humanly possible to your face and proclaims, “I’m not touching you!” The Brotherhood was hated, and the worst thing they could possibly do would be to go further to the right to spite everyone. Yet that’s exactly what Morsi did. He called for a huge rally, where he gathered his supporters in the biggest sports arena in Cairo. The context for the rally was supporting people in war-torn Syria, but what we saw was different. Thousands and thousands of President Morsi supporters with banners calling for jihad, singing songs calling for jihad, and wearing green headbands, screamed that they were ready for jihad. During the speeches the thin line between jihad in Syria and jihad in Egypt disappeared. The insinuations, the references, slowly shifted from fighting God’s enemies in Syria to fighting them here in Egypt.
This looked like a heavy metal concert that had gone horribly wrong.
Even worse, Morsi sat right smack in the middle of the most right-wing, bigoted Salafi sheikhs. It was the first time that he had associated himself openly with those people in a political setting. One sheikh after another came up to the podium to give his best hate speech. It was just short of a witch-hunt party; they asked the almighty Allah to curse and strike down those planning to demonstrate on June 30. This happened while the jihad-crazed crowd cheered and the president sat there awfully silent.
Whatever attempts the Muslim Brotherhood made for over a year to convince us that they were the acceptable “light” version of political Islam went down the drain on that day. We had so much hate going around that dissing the anti-Muslim people was not enough. So they had to bring in other people to hate and call for their death just for the fuck of it. In front of everyone, including the president, a famous sheikh demanded that no Shiites be admitted into Egypt, just as relations with Iran were starting to get closer.
Wait, what?
The Salafi sheikhs sure love to spread the hate around. They hate Christians, Jews, liberals, other Muslim Sunni (whom they consider to be less pious), and they still have some leftover hate to go around for Shiites. At this point, you are probably hitting Muslim info overload and are having a hard time understanding the hate between the Sunni and Shiites.
In a nutshell, think of the Red Sox and the Yankees; now give each of them a country (Saudi Arabia and Iran); now give both of them a good amount of oil, loads of money, absolute rule by their religions, lots of weapons, hateful ideology that crosses borders, and add to that a feud that originated fifteen hundred years ago over who should be the successor of the Prophet Muhammad. That should be good enough.
We have very few Shiites in Egypt, but they’re just another minority that the extreme Sunni sheikhs (who are openly funded by the Saudis) love to shit on. So a few days after that lovely speech against Shiites, calling them “filth and unholy,” five Shiites were killed in a remote village in Egypt. I wondered, if five people were killed as a result of direct incitement of hate in a speech, what will happen to the rest of us, who oppose the Islamist regime? Would killing us be any more difficult?
Here we had a direct sectarian speech full of violent rhetoric that would rival a Nazi party rally openly calling for a Holocaust on anyone who opposed the president. If they could incite enough hate against a minority to have them killed a few days later, what would happen to the rest of the people they incited hate against if these people openly protested the dictatorship? The Brotherhood had used their militias before, they could use them again.
As June 30 approached, it was difficult to stay hopeful. And yet, something amazing occurred that made me believe there was some good in the world. No, we didn’t all suddenly get along with glitter parades in the streets and cupcakes and lollipops for everyone. However, it was the second-best thing to that: Jon Stewart came to Egypt!
JON VERSUS THE PYRAMIDS
By now you probably recognize that I am beyond just a groupie fan girl for Jon Stewart. People usually are obsessed with rock stars, models, and actors like Matthew McConaughey (well, at least before that weird car commercial), and not often a short Jewish satirist from New Jersey, but it was because of him that I started my own show and had my own theater (well, it was a rental, but that’s beside the point). I had been on his show twice already and he had written an article about me for Time magazine when I was chosen as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” What more could I ask for? Well, other than having him on the show.
This dream came true when Jon was shooting his movie Rosewater in neighboring Jordan. He agreed to come on the show the last week of our season, two days before June 30.
Leading up to that day, things were very uncomfortable in Egypt—the countdown to the thirtieth had left the country heated and threatening to boil over. What if all hell broke loose when he was here and I couldn’t get him out of Egypt? His fans and Comedy Central would kill me.
I sent Jon an email I never thought I would’ve had to write: “Jon, I am sorry but the twenty-eighth is too close to a very heated and unpredictable day. I don’t think I can guarantee your safety.”
I hit send and just kept kicking myself over and over. Fuck politics, really. Why couldn’t we just get along long enough for Jon to visit and happily kill each other after he left?
Jon replied with one sentence, “How about I come the week before?”
That was in two days! Seriously? A new definition for awesomeness should be added in Webster’s and this guy’s photo should be next to it.
Of course I agreed. I had to cancel an interview with a famous politician to talk about the coming events, but you know what? Who cared? Not me!
So Jon made it to Egypt. Abbas arranged for a private security company to escort him, and Amr made sure that the police and secret service were involved. He was accompanied by bodyguards whose necks were as thick as his torso. When he arrived at the theater the entire street was on lockdown. Bystanders were curious if Morsi had agreed to come on the show, but then this short white guy with a long white beard (he was in movie-shooting mode) got out of the car. It was difficult for them to get a good look at him as he was overshadowed by the huge bodies all dressed in black towering over him.
I hadn’t told my researchers. Only a close circle of people around me knew.
When Jon entered the editing room, everyone screamed, and the girls almost threw their panties on the imaginary stage. (More conservative women in my team considered throwing their hijabs.)
“It seemed I am loved here more than New York,” Jon said. “I should consider moving here.”
I took him for a tour around the theater. I felt like a proud student showing my teacher my science project.
“This theater kicks ass,” he said.
He entered my office and noticed the posters with some of his quotes, like “I am not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.” He looked at them and just said “niiiiice” in classic Stewart style.
We sat down and prepared for his appearance on the show. We thought that his entrance should be totally different from what we usually did. When the moment came, I announced, in classic propaganda style, that we had captured a foreign spy who was planning to commit crimes against the nation. Jon was escorted onto the stage wearing a black sack over his head à la Abu Gharib prison chic.
The moment I removed the sack off his head the theater erupted in screams, laughter, and cheers. I actually think there were real panties thrown on the stage this time. The applause went on for nearly two minutes. I wasn’t the only Egyptian infatuated with this man!
Jon was incredible. He actually learned some dirty words in Arabic and shared them on-air; the audience ate it up. What was amazing about this interview was how we openly spoke about satire, power, and politics. He said something that still resonates with the people in Egypt: “If your regime can’t take a joke, you don’t have a regime.”
This sentence went viral all over the region. Jon never imagined that he, an American Jew, would be welcomed in the heart of Cairo and have his quotes resonate with everyone. It was a moment where people from different cultures connected; comedy and laughter against tyranny seemed to unite us, if only briefly.
Naturally, the Islamists attacked me in their media. “He is getting an American Jew to support him before the thirtieth of June” was the common sentiment. They even analyzed some of the jokes we cracked as “Masonic signals that have evil intentions about Jews coming back to Egypt and taking over.” Yup, that kind of crazy.
But all that didn’t matter. This was not just my idol coming to my show.
It was validation.
I remember joking with my staff after his visit, saying: “Well, we can’t top that, people; maybe it is time to shut down the show and retire.”
Careful what you wish for.
LAUGHING OUR WAY TO DISASTER
Only a few days before the awaited June 30 protests, President Morsi announced that he was going to make an important speech. Morsi was like our own George W. Bush. He never failed to provide the show with the best material.
With everything happening in the country this might have been his most important speech to date. Hoping (for absolutely selfish reasons, like having a good show) he would really screw it up, we all gathered in our theater to watch it live. It was like we were watching a predictable sitcom where people laughed and cheered at every calculated punch line. The speech was a total disaster. It sounded like one given in a minor banana republic, where you’d have renegade warriors shouting and cursing American imperialism, “global conspiracies,” and some made-up enemy. But Morsi’s weren’t made-up enemies; he was actually naming names—journalists, other media people, dissenters, etc. He stood there saying that, as the president of Egypt and as the supreme leader of the Egyptian army, he demanded respect, and that an insult to him was an insult to the entire country. The writers and the producers looked at me and clapped. I had made it into the presidential speech!
The guy had clearly lost his mind. He was adopting a sort of demagogic rhetoric that I heard only in movies. Here was a man who made the Emperor from the Star Wars franchise sound like a pansy.
The arena was filled with the Muslim Brotherhood youth cheering his every word, just as previously people had cheered during Mubarak’s speeches, Saddam’s speeches, and all the way back to the 1930s, when they’d cheered the propagandist films of Leni Riefenstahl. Morsi announced that he had commissioned the minister of youth to start summer camps for more than a million young individuals under the supervision of the government. Call me paranoid, but the way the Muslim Brotherhood “supervised” the young in the streets during protests was hardly confidence boosting in terms of how they might “supervise” a million young men in summer camps. Whether they employed violence or brainwashing to do so, the outcome, I imagined, wouldn’t be too appealing. Morsi’s plan echoed similar initiatives with youths in countries like Iran, where the ayatollah indoctrinated millions of young enthusiastic citizens to defend his ideologies.
Morsi didn’t forget to kiss up to the army and the police. Right there in the front row was the minister of interior, aka “the Butcher,” who had far too many kills under his belt and was hailed by the Muslim Brotherhood members as someone who was “protecting the legitimacy” of the presidency with his brutal powers.
Next to him was the guy who would lead to big changes very soon. His name was General Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the minister of defense. Remember that name. Sissi. (Pronounced “see-see,” not like the “sissy” that he is.)
Morsi praised both of these men, as if he were saying, I am about to come down on everyone, but at least I’ve got you on my side, right?
A few days later the minister of interior and Sissi would kill many of the young people sitting in that very arena, cheering for Morsi to kill his opponents.
For weeks, the Islamist newspapers published headlines hailing Morsi for deploying army troops in major cities. “The army is performing its sacred duty to protect the president and his legitimacy,” they said.
The anti-Islamic channels were hysterical because the “naming game” was at McCarthy-era levels. There were rumors about a list of media figures and politicians to be arrested once the thirtieth of June came and the alleged revolution failed. I was later told by people who were investigating the Brotherhood movement that I was the second name on the list. That made me a bit jealous. Why second? What would I have to do to beat out whoever was first?
Rumors aside, what happened as we were preparing for the episode was real: we had warnings from the Muslim Brotherhood government and the media authorities controlled by them that any sarcasm directed toward the president would be dealt with swiftly and that “any channel hosting a show that would air such material would be closed down immediately.” Well, that’s comforting!
After a very long night of editing and writing we managed to make the airing time. We were all half asleep, but had written one of our best episodes yet. But what really stayed with our audience is how the show ended, when we actually used Morsi’s own words. In his speech he had gone on complaining and whining about how certain people and “powers” were abusing democracy and attacking the presidency. He wanted everyone to know that he had been patient for a very long time, for a whole year, even, but now, “one year is enough.” Did he just put a cap on democracy in this country? Okay, guys, enough fun and games, free speech is out. I ended the episode by saying, “You are right, Mr. President, one year is enough,” implying that his time as president should come to an end.
I had just put myself in direct confrontation with the authorities.
As I was getting questions from the audience during the commercial break, I was asked the same exact question I was asked in all my interviews during that time: “What do you think will happen on the thirtieth of June?” I said that I really didn’t know but I was worried more about what would happen after the thirtieth of June. Islamists had made it very difficult for anyone to work with them. And moreover, to them, the thirtieth of June was more of a survival issue. There was no compromise: I was afraid that if they continued to be in power after that date it would prove that all the efforts of the liberal forces meant nothing and they could comfortably crush whoever stood in their way. This was not a mere assumption. The disastrous “jihad” rally that Morsi attended in the stadium was a big clue of what kind of craziness could occur.
It wasn’t a laughing matter anymore; the shit was just about to get real. And in a few days we would all get to know what surprises were waiting for the whole country.
A COUP WITH POPULAR DEMAND
JUNE 30, 2013
There are so many ways to tell the story of how the Islamists lost control of the government and the military took over. But let’s just start by saying traffic got much, much worse.
Millions of people who all hated each other took to the streets. The Islamists occupied a spot in eastern Cairo and threatened that if anyo
ne came close to Morsi, they would be “wiped out.”
And the rest of the country went out by the millions to call for Morsi to step down. Even if everyone knew that protests and rallies didn’t mean shit.
Remember Sissi? The minister of defense whom Morsi was kissing up to just a few days earlier? Yeah, funny story, the kissing up didn’t work. Sissi announced Morsi’s removal on television.
This was just typical Muslim Brotherhood routine: kissing up to authority and eventually getting screwed by it.
To add insult to injury, he had representatives from all sects of the Egyptian people, including the head of the Salafi Al Nour party, stand up on-air to show their support of the removal. This was a plot twist that was on the same level as the “Red Wedding” episode in Game of Thrones, where your closest allies stab you in the back in the most unexpected ways.
This was just typical Salafi routine, proving once again that they were nothing but tools of whichever regime was “winning.” The prophecy I gave to al-Shater was fulfilled; their majority didn’t last and their own allies were turning against them. Morsi and his aides were removed to an unknown location and all of the Islamist channels were shut down.
There were celebrations everywhere as people rejoiced at the removal of Morsi. Wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, I decided to go down and mingle with the protestors around the presidential palace. There, I heard songs from my show coming from the speakers. All the songs that were made to oppose and make fun of the Muslim Brotherhood were playing in the streets and people were singing and dancing to them!
It only took one person to recognize me to start an uproar. “Bassem Youssef!” he shouted. I tried to shush him up but it was too late. Dozens of people swarmed me. My eyes were blinded with camera flashes and my face was covered with saliva from all the kisses. Yes, we Arabs like to kiss a lot, but not one of them was from a girl, damn it!
Revolution for Dummies Page 14
