Prominent doctors from university hospitals came to the defense of the new “cure.” Hepatologists, cardiologists, and internists who were working under the “general” came out to say how wonderful this invention was. “We have been working on this for twenty-three years,” claimed one of them. “We had the results a long time ago but we didn’t want to announce it because we feared that it would be stolen from Egypt.”
Really? So you had the cure for AIDS right around the time when the whole world was screaming out for relief? Well, thank goodness you kept that shit to yourself—the world needed to see an Oscar-winning performance from Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club.
The steamed-up general made an appearance at a conference, cameras flashing and microphones peeking out from under his white mustache. He belted out, “I was working in a lab in America. I discovered that invention twenty-three years ago. They offered me two billion dollars to sell the rights to them. I refused and I said my only condition was for this cure to be in the name of an Arab and a Muslim like me. Then the all-mighty Egyptian military intelligence were able to smuggle me outside of the United States. I came here to work for my country, and for the welfare of my people.”
This was turning into a very bad sequel of Mission Impossible. Who said you needed to be a Scientologist to be that delusional?
The general repeated those claims on another TV show that evening, with the exception that he was offered only $20 million this go-around. I mean, what’s a couple of zeros, right?
But that was not all. He also announced a new way to diagnose HIV infection. He claimed to be able to diagnose your condition remotely. Sounds like a Star Trek movie, right? Well, wrong. They showed the other miracle device, but it was nothing more than a TV antenna connected to a handle. Yes, a TV antenna that you hold toward the patient. The antenna would just point at and follow you if you had the virus.
This brought to mind a famous scandal in 2008 that involved the all-mighty British Army. A swindler called Jim McCormick sold fake bomb detectors to the British Army in Iraq. He cashed in around 60 million pounds sterling ($80 million U.S.) selling around 6,000 detectors for the price of 10,000 pounds each. The real cost of one device was only around 15 pounds.
Why are all armies stupid? Especially with money?
Now that same fake bomb detector was in the hands of the con artist doctor general in a promotional video made by the army’s moral affairs department. He demonstrated how that bomb detector could find out if someone had the virus or not. He pointed it toward one of the patients, telling him, “Congrats, you used to have AIDS, now it is gone.”
Apparently, if the antenna didn’t point to you, you didn’t have HIV.
He then went on to explain how sensitive this detector is. “Even if the patient is in another room, the device will still be able to detect him,” he announced proudly. “If there was a trace of the virus on my finger, the device will point at my finger. If I wipe my finger with a tissue, the device will leave my finger and like a hound dog follow the tissue.”
Doctors who were trained and educated in prestigious medical schools went out to defend this hoax. They explained how the DNA of each virus had its own electromagnetic wavelength unique to it. The bomb detector could be adjusted for each virus’s wavelength and could detect it very accurately.
“Even if the patient was in another room, the detector will point to the patient with the wall separating them,” said one doctor, a real fucking doctor, working under that con artist Abdel Atti. This occurred during another prime time talk show. There were two doctors from the team working under General Abdel Atti who went on praising the genius of the general. “You know,” one doctor said, “the other day I was in the lab and suddenly I found the machine pointing at me. I was freaking out. But then I remembered that earlier in the day I was greeting General Dr. Abdel Atti, and there must have been some residual virus on his white coat. When he took off the jacket, the antenna pointed to the jacket. This is how accurate our machine is.”
We were howling at the videos in the editing room, thinking it could not get any better, when yet another video surfaced. It seems that all of the doctors working on the military team were having a collective orgasm over their fake medical achievement. They couldn’t stop calling all of the talk shows to demonstrate how incredible this machine was. “With the same principle of detecting a virus through its electromagnetic waves and hence being able to destroy it, we were able to utilize this principle in curing other diseases,” one elated doctor said in a phone call with a TV anchor. “We can also use it to fight bacterial infection.”
“Really?” asked the anchor.
“Yes, we have also tried it on many patients with other conditions and they were healed. We have seen patients being healed from lupus, eczema, psoriasis, and diabetes.”
“Oh my god,” shouted the anchor, “so can it also heal cancer?”
“Of course it can heal cancer,” asserted the doctor.
Of course! Why not? Just throw cancer in the mix. Because AIDS, psoriasis, diabetes, and cancer have so much in common and we never knew it. And this has been in the works for the past twenty-three years, but only now are we choosing to reveal it. Aren’t we smart?
This turned into a flat-out propaganda hit job by the army, and the military medical team continued to sell the device even more, and it seemed like they never ran out of diseases to cure. “We have noticed that patients with heart conditions and hypertension after being on our treatment for two months stopped their medications because they didn’t need them anymore,” said the cardiologist on the team.
This was a miracle in the making. A machine that cures viruses, bacterial infections, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and heart conditions. You really don’t need to sell it harder to us! But for some reason the military medical team decided to turn this invention into one of those two-for-one infomercial deals with a “But wait—there’s more!” special.
“We have also noticed that patients with sexual impotence had major improvement in their sex life,” added the same doctor.
That’s it, people. This was all we needed. If you say a treatment could also give you a boner, that’s all that was needed to sell it, even to healthy people. They might as well have run those interviews as replacements for ExtenZe commercials!
This machine was now named the “Kofta” machine. Kofta is another word for “meat” or “kabab,” specifically the kind of meat you eat on a skewer in Mediterranean restaurants. This name change happened because of the genius of General Dr. Abdel Atti, who earlier had said that the protein DNA of the virus could, through the treatment, be returned to the patient like a kabab sandwich (or kofta).
The Friday of our show people waited to see how we would deal with “Kofta-gate.”
We did not disappoint. The audience laughed and howled at every single joke. At the end of the segment I told the audience, “This was all fun and games, but this is so funny that we should actually be serious about it.”
I went on to say that this was a scandal, one sponsored by the “most competent institution in the country,” an obvious reference to the army. I told the audience that this “cure” was no trial drug. “They said they will cure everyone in June. This is called a promise,” I added. “When you make this promise to sick people and you don’t deliver, that is a crime in itself, and someone has to be held accountable for that.”
The theater was dead silent. The audience clung to every word, as they were thinking, What? Can we actually hold the army accountable? That’s unheard of!
I went on, “If you think that we will let this go, think again. If you think that we will just be silent until this is forgotten, we won’t. Here on this program, we will remind people every single week about this promise until it turns out to be real, or someone is held accountable.” The theater exploded with applause.
I was taking this personally because the doctor in me was angry; I hate people being cheated when they are sick. I didn’t r
ealize that by speaking out about basic science that we would get even more heat. This was a scandal, and we thought that by doing our job and setting things right we would be praised. But this was the army. The army doesn’t give a shit about what is right and what is scientific; they care about their own image even if it’s at the expense of the people. Years later I met the scientific advisor of the interim president, who resigned in protest over this scandal. He too had his share of heat. He told me that he met the head of Sissi’s office. When he voiced his frustrations about what happened and even brought evidence that this machine doesn’t work, he was told: “It doesn’t matter if the machine works, what matters is the uniform behind the machine, and this uniform should be respected at all costs.”
When I heard this story I was hardly surprised at how all hell had broken loose at the time.
When this episode aired, it set a trend in social media like never before.
“Kofta-gate” was the talk of the town. We realized that if we didn’t talk about the machine, it would become another hoax that would be put to sleep. We made it a point to remind people of the “promise” every episode.
The talking heads in the media lashed out against me. They accused me of being a pessimist who was bringing down the morale of the country by laughing at its army.
“If the army says it works, then it works,” one anchor would shout on his program.
“You are just jealous of our wonderful army. And to those people I say, die with your viruses,” another anchor said with a smirk.
“The cure works,” a third anchor would announce, “the security guard at my apartment building has been cured by it.”
I didn’t know if they were in denial, or if maybe I’d lost my mind and there actually is a new kind of medicine being taught now in medical school and the cure was actually real? I met doctors who were not affiliated with the military medical team, who confirmed that the machine worked.
People had to realize the fallacy of inventing a machine that could cure every known medical malady to man, right?
A shocking fact was revealed over the next few days. The celebrated General Dr. Abdel Atti was not even a doctor. Oh, surprise, surprise. He was a lab technician. He was also a felon accused and convicted of running a sham clinic, where he treated people with herbs without a medical license. His “clinic” was closed down and there was a one-year imprisonment sentence delivered against him.
People wondered how a guy like that could rise in the ranks to make general in the “most efficient and competent establishment” in the country.
But the denial continued.
An anchor proudly announced how Sissi was very happy with the invention, that when he saw it he cried tears of happiness.
It didn’t really matter if this was a real invention or not. People just wanted to believe. Months later, when I had to escape the country, a famous TV anchor met me in Dubai and told me that when asked about the AIDS invention in a private meeting with media people, Sissi answered firmly, “The army never announces anything unless we are one hundred percent sure about it.”
We kept reminding the audience every week about the approaching June 30 deadline, which was four months away.
The deadline passed but it didn’t matter. The army, the media, the overexcited doctors just stopped talking about it. Sissi supporters who were attacking the show for spreading negative energy simply ignored the whole thing. And like that, it was gone.
I felt that what we were doing in the program was amounting to nothing. Yes, people were avidly following us, laughing at every joke and cheering on every bold statement. But what was the use if no one was held accountable for that scandal? This is when I started to lose faith in change. This is when I saw how people were treating the program as simple comic relief, a way to vent, that’s all. People who believed us were helpless, and people who loved Sissi no matter what were happy in their own ignorance.
During this whole debacle—I didn’t think of North Korea, which I usually did when drawing parallels to our regime. Instead I couldn’t help but think of Gambia. Gambia is a small country on the western coast of Africa. In 1994 an army general called Yahya Jammeh took over the country through a military coup, and in 2007 he announced that he had discovered an herbal cure for AIDS. He also announced that hundreds of people were healed. For years this was an undisputed fact in Gambia. WHO workers who objected to that cure were evicted, and those who ridiculed the cure were labeled as part of the “imperial conspiracy” against Gambia. President Jammeh would appear on television with a leather-bound Quran and a long string of beads in front of a group of people with HIV. “In the name of Allah you will be cured in thirty days,” he would say, raising the Quran above their heads. The British publication The Guardian documented those early days when President Jammeh was rounding up sick Gambians to cure them: “Waiting outside Mr. Jammeh’s treatment chamber, the patients themselves said they did not need laboratory results to tell them they felt better. ‘It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body,’ a patient would say.”
Many poor Egyptians stopped taking their hepatitis C treatment. “Why spend the money? The army will heal us for free,” they collectively believed.
Reports of hundreds of Egyptians with deteriorating health conditions came to light after the army failed to deliver on its promise. They dared not submit complaints against the army.
The television anchors that sold the idea of the cure are still around today, screaming and kicking and finding another bullshit conspiracy to distract the people with. No one was ever held accountable and, as usual, the army and Sissi were untouchable.
Every time I read about another hepatitis C patient who was in a deteriorating condition because he waited for the army cure which never came, I go back to The Guardian report about Gambia and the promise of the thirty-day cure. The last few lines in the report went as follows: “Amadou Jallow, 25, who quit his job at a tourist hotel after his mother was diagnosed with AIDS. In his savings account is 8,000 dalasis (about £150)—enough, he says, to last him the 30 days Mr. Jammeh promises it will take to heal his mother. ‘I’m just afraid that, what if my account runs low?’ he says. ‘But by then I think she will be cured.’”
I-LISTEN
Okay—we are all pretty familiar with the NSA now that Joseph Gordon Levitt played Snowden in an Oliver Stone film. So, remember when Obama was apparently listening in on your phone calls and even tapping into the calls of world leaders? The NSA listening in on the American public was a topic everybody was talking about in Egypt. Not because it was happening in the States, but because it was used to justify what was happening there.
For over a year after June 30, 2013, when the coup occurred, some of the worst people were on the front lines of the media scene. They were usually deadbeat journalists whom everyone knew were associated with our own NSA and even our intelligence service. Suddenly those people were given airtime and their programs were heavily financed. One of those third-grade journalists was hosting a show called The Black Box. This show did one thing and one thing only: it broadcast private phone calls of public figures, specifically those who were vocal against the regime. Now, let’s get one thing straight here. No one can record all those calls from different people unless that person is someone at the highest levels of power. Our own NSA was famous for recording private phone calls and using them to pressure media figures, political leaders, people in the opposition, and basically anyone who would not play along. But now corruption had reached a new level of scum. Those private phone calls were broadcast on a prime-time TV show to entertain people while they ate their dinner.
The government allowed it, and “patriotic” citizens supported it and even rooted for it to continue. A spokesman of the police said, “If you are not doing anything wrong you shouldn’t worry if your calls are recorded or not.”
The neo-fascists who revolted a year earlier against a religious rule that might take away our freedoms and violate our personal
lives were welcoming the recording and broadcasting of people’s private lives. “We need to know who are conspiring against our nation,” Sissi supporters would tell you. “If they were innocent they would have nothing to hide.” That was the new standard of “human rights” in this country. Don’t do, say, or think anything bad and we won’t fuck you up.
People went to court to stop The Black Box, but the court, and the law, belonged to the state. “This is a form of investigative journalism,” the court ruled.
We were the only program that came out and derided that show. We showed our audience what a world of free-for-all information would be like, not to mention what a douchebag this two-bit journalist and the others who supported him were. Then, at the end of our program, we displayed the most common arguments those assholes use. A pro-Sissi TV anchorwoman said, “It happens everywhere else. America is doing it, the NSA is doing it. Here are your ‘democratic countries’ listening in to their citizens, so we are justified in doing it.”
Yes, but they don’t broadcast it in prime time, you dim-fucks!
PULLING THE PLUG
As if it were a surprise. There were signs, very strong signs . . .
Working on the show was becoming increasingly difficult. The more popular it got, the more hated it became. It continued to break viewership ratings and it had the most expensive price for television advertisement in Egyptian television history. Anyone would have been elated to have this show. But with me it was different.
I always had haters and people who’d prefer to see me dead in a gutter. I get that, but to be so childish as to jam our satellite signal? The opening credits would play and suddenly the signal would be lost. This had never happened on TV before.
Revolution for Dummies Page 19
