Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days
by another angry mob. They were banging on the windows and trying to
get inside. One man parked his motorcycle directly in front of the car to
block any escape.
As the only Egyptian in the group, I became the focal point for their
anger. My accented Arabic (I was raised in the United States) only heightened
their suspicions. One man kept yelling in my face, “You’re not really
Egyptian. Who exactly are you” In response to their demands for identification,
I managed to produce my Egyptian passport. My driver, Gamal, also
pleaded with the crowd, telling them that he had known me for 10 years and
knew most of my family.
But the Egyptian passport did more harm than good because it states
clearly that I was born in America: For the paranoid and xenophobic mob,
this was the smoking gun that proved my guilt. The crowd started shouting,
demanding that we be turned over to the police or the Army. I responded,
“Yes, please! Find me a soldier. I’ll turn myself over.”
As I was beginning to genuinely fear for our safety, an officer from the
military police appeared on the scene and immediately helped bring some
calm to the situation. Against the protests of the crowd, the officer managed
to get me into the taxi and, to keep us safe, escorted us to a walled-in courtyard.
There we found another group of terrified journalists—this time all
native Egyptians working for a local English-language paper. They too had
been rescued from an angry mob by the Army. Clearly, similar scenes were
playing out all across Cairo.
I don’t think that the mob that harassed me was part of a coordinated
campaign against journalists. Our attackers were just ordinary Egyptian
citizens whose nerves had been frayed by 10 days of uncertainty and unrest.
State television fueled their anxiety with a steady diet of conspiracy theories
claiming that shadowy foreign influences were behind the waves of civil
unrest and that foreign journalists were hopelessly biased toward the anti-
Mubarak protesters—thus actively helping to bring the regime down.
Elsewhere in Cairo, however, it genuinely seemed like journalists had indeed
been explicitly targeted, starting during the day on Wednesday and
peaking in a cascade of incidents on Thursday. Those who weren’t attacked
by mobs were arrested by police officers or detained—allegedly for their
own safety—by the military.
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