Egypt: Love In The Time Of Grindr

Between 2001 and 2004, police entrapped hundreds, probably thousands, of gay Egyptian men over the Internet, in a massive crackdown. Since 2013, arrests of suspected LGBT people burgeoned again in Egypt; most victims were seized at home or on the streets, yet rumors circulated that cops had returned to the Web for entrapment. 

But there was no proof — till this summer. On June 8, police arrested a Syrian refugee in Messaha Square in Doqqi; they’d arranged to meet him over Growlr. An appeals court overturned his one-year sentence, but, flouting legal protections for refugees, the Ministry of Interior deported him anyway. A month later, seemingly under similar circumstances, Doqqi police arrested an Italian national who had lived in Egypt for six years. A court eventually dismissed the charges, but, under pressure, he left the country. 

The latest cases show not just foreigners but Egyptians are targets of the snares. Internet entrapment is cruel — and successful — because it feeds on solitude. The police arrest you not because you’re dancing at a party or cruising on the street, but because, on the apparent privacy of a flickering screen, you express a need. Your crime isn’t hurting someone but being vulnerable to hurt...

From a powerful piece, Entrapped! How to use a phone app to destroy a life, by Scott Long.

Egypt: What's Going On?

So they’re going to deport gay foreigners from Egypt. My phone started ringing a few mornings ago, reporters wanting comments: solicitous but always with a subtext of What’s going to happen to you?

I don’t know. The case involves a Libyan student whom police expelled from Egypt in 2008, after a complaint that he was gay. From back in Libya, he sued. This Tuesday, after seven years – the alacrity typifies Egyptian justice — an Adminstrative Court ruled that the Ministry of Interior did the right thing, under its power to”prevent the spread of immorality in society.” In fact, then, this isn’t a new policy. The court reaffirmed authority the state always had. Two years ago, for instance, a Polish citizen was vacationing on the North coast here with his Egyptian partner. The Pole grew seriously ill and had to be hospitalized. The nurses found their relationship suspicious and called the police. After several days under arrest, the Egyptian was freed; police deported the Pole, who was still in agonizing pain. I heard all about it at the time, but there was nothing we could do.

Things are much worse these days under Sisi. I sometimes seem insouciant about threats in Egypt, but I’m not. it’s just that the atmosphere of threat is general here. It affects every corner of your personality, yet it’s hard to take it personally, so wide is the danger spread.

...

Still: this story, the deportation story, went viral abroad. It’s strange because LGBT Egypt has not been in the international news much for months. When you deal with the media, you get used to its collective movements, puzzling as tidal motions when it’s too cloudy to see the moon, or the startled shuddering of gazelles racing in unison through tall grass. But other terrible things happened here recently. A man acquitted on charges of homosexuality tried to burn himself to death in despair. Police arrested an accused “shemale,” splaying her photos on the Internet. Egypt’s government threatened to close a small HIV/AIDS NGO because it gave safer-sex info to gay men. None of these got such press. The contrast is striking...

Scott Long reports from Cairo, as ever explaining what's really going on.

Now read on...

Egypt: Let My People Go

“This court finds the defendants innocent ….” That, or more or less that, was all anybody heard the judge say. The courtroom exploded. Lawyers cheered; journalists stood on the benches and joined the cheering; and the families, manhandled outside by the bailiffs before the hearing began, forced their way in through the doors and shoved the policemen aside in return: brothers and fathers shouting to the cameras that their kids were vindicated, black-clad women trilling the zaghrata — the triumphal ululation heard at weddings. It spilled into the halls outside. At one point the families and a few friends stood fists pumping in a circle, chanting “Our sons are men!” And there were cries of “Put Mona Iraqi on trial!” I’ve never seen anything quite like this in attending countless Egyptian trials over the years. We’d never felt anything like this. No one expected it. No one was prepared...

Scott Long writing from Cairo on his excellent blog, A Paper Bird.

Please read on - his blogposts about this case are a powerful, moving document.

I was going to say 'historical document', but as Scott shows, this battle is far from over. 

Egypt: 'Gay Wedding'

In Egypt any man can harass, brutalize, and rape a woman. It happens all the time. The State will ignore it for as long as possible; the media will say she asked for it. Just try a harmless expression of mutual, consensual desire, though. They’ll hound you to within an inch of your life.

Let’s start with the video. It came out of nowhere, but by Saturday morning it was everywhere. That day — it was August 30 — I spent with some young, impeccably liberal Egyptians. They kept staring with stunned fixation at their smartphones, repeatedly hitting “play,” watching it go viral, wondering what was going to happen to the men. The YouTube comments could have told you what was coming: “They’re outside of prisons; they should worship God within them,” one outraged viewer wrote. That night I met with some of the men in the clip. One of them kept breaking uncontrollably into tears. They were trying to report the invasion of privacy, get YouTube to take it down. No use: By next day, it was on the website of Youm7 — the tabloid that’s been carrying on a homophobic campaign for months — and on TV. You think you are just a private person, contained in the fences of your skin; then suddenly you find you’ve escaped yourself, become a common spectacle and possession, a fetish cupped in the palms of everybody’s hands. No doubt this is why politicians and movie stars are so vacuous, stripped of self; but imagine sitting in ordinary obscurity and abruptly discovering you’re now an infinitely duplicable, circulating flash of light. “Mirrors and copulation are both abominable,” Borgeswrote — it was one of the aphorisms of his invented world of Tlon — “because they multiply mankind.” But that was before the Internet...

Scott Long, A Paper Bird.

Now read on...

Egypt: "Gay Websites Spread Confusion"

Earlier this month several gay websites reported a rather puzzling story from Egypt. According to Gay Star News and Pink News, 14 men had been arrested for "homosexual acts" at a "medical centre" in El-Marg district of Cairo.

Neither story gave any details about the "medical centre" or any clues as to why gay sex was supposedly going on there. Meanwhile Pink News, apparently unaware that the military had taken over Egypt last July, warned:

"Activists and LGBT citizens also fear that the new government, lead [sic] by the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, may soon ... crack down on LGBT Egyptians."

The reports from Pink News and Gay Star News were basically rehashed from an English-language report circulating in Egypt which in turn had been rehashed from a report in Arabic.

By describing the place as a "medical centre", these English reports gave the impression it was some sort of clinic run by people with stethoscopes and white coats – but it wasn't...

From Brain Whitaker's excellent blog about the Arab world al-bub.

PS Brian is the author of Unspeakable Love: Gay And Lesbian Life In The Middle East. 

Egypt & Iran: Gay Rights & The Gay Right

Everyone's pleased about the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, right?
Wrong.
Adocate columnist, porn "entrepreneur" and gay NeoCon, Michael Lucas, is gonna be really pissed off.
In his latest column, Democracy In Egypt A Myth?, Lucas writes;
"Hope, freedom, and democracy — these are three words that have little or nothing to do with what’s happening in Egypt at the moment. Yet utterly ignorant newscasters and liberal bloggers seem to equate the situation there to Tiananmen Square — where protesters two decades ago risked life and limb in a face-off with China’s authoritarian leaders. Of course, in China they lost.
"The frightening thing is that the protesters in Egypt are looking more and more likely to topple Egypt’s regime and replace it with something far worse. We, as gay people and Americans, shouldn’t be surprised by the horrors likely to come. We shouldn’t buy into the false and ignorant hopes of those on the left who falsely frame the events unfolding in Cairo and other cities in Egypt as a fight for human rights."
Something that no informed analyst of the situation in Egypt thinks, but there you go.
Indeed Khalid Zaid, a gay Egyptian man who's been granted asylum in the US, has written in reply on Gay.com;
"In 2001, after many years in Egypt I was granted asylum by the US following an arrest for suspicion of being gay. In Egypt, there simply are no human rights. Whoever thinks that there are such freedoms should actually move there rather than remotely label the aspirations of protesters as false or ignorant hopes! There is nothing frightening about an awakening that is long overdue.
"It will not be easy to predict the upcoming leadership in Egypt. Due to the complexity of the situation, it is presumptuous to assume that it will fall into the hands of radical Islamists...
"It's true that the first thing they [The Muslim Brotherhood] have promised to do is hold a referendum on Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Regardless of what anyone tells you, they are not part of a master plan to impose Sharia law on the entire Arab world."
"Inciting baseless panic about the creation of an Islamic, anti-gay, anti-Western regime is a reckless act stemming from fears over Israel's security and stability."
Michael Lucas has form on this sort of far-right scaremongering - he bends over backwards to defend every Zionist crime and has baldly stated;
"I hate Muslims... They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets."
The gay right's championing of gay rights in the Middle East is a sadly familiar saw these days - seemingly unaware that right-wing politicians have always been the most vociferous opponents of gay rights in any country in the world.
The flipside are all those gushing "Don't mention the occupation" travel features about Israel in the gay media - Pinkwash, about trips paid for by the Israeli government.
In January New York's Gay City News ran a bizarre feature; 'Sanctions Must Respond to Iran’s Anti-Gay Genocide' by one Benjamin Weinthal.
(Gay City News regularly publishes nutty rants about Iran by Doug Ireland - who Weinthal quotes approvingly. He also joins in Ireland's attacks on Human Rights Watch - who he believes “continues to be driven by an anti-Israel bias").
Weinthal is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, known as "The Neo-Con Bible", and a fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think tank.
Their policy on Iran? "Pursuit of even “tougher” sanctions, including measures intended to terminate non-U.S. purchases of Iranian oil. And, when that doesn’t work, we’ll give war another chance."
Presumably cause the last two have worked out so well.
It's shameful that the gay press regularly publishes such crude far Right propaganda.

Egypt: Less Than Human

'"The issue of human rights has become a global language," he said. "Although each country has its own particulars, respect of human rights is now a concern for all peoples" – though he specifically excluded gay rights.'

Muslim Brotherhood leader - and Class A religious nutter - Essam el-Erian interviewed in The Guardian by Jack Shenker and the great Brian Whitaker

• The photo is of a statue of Akhenaten, Egyptian pharoah and almost certainly gayer than you.

Chomsky On Egypt: "This Is The Most Remarkable Uprising"

Noam Chomsky talks to Democracy Now about the Egyptian uprising and its implications for the Middle East and beyond.
On video and a partial transcript.
UPDATE See also; 'It's not radical Islam that worries the US – it's independence' - Noam Chomsky, The Guardian.

• 'The Riddle Of The Sphinx' photomontage from Private Eye.

Egypt: Queen Of Denial?

"Suave and smooth, Gamal Mubarak would seem ideally qualified to steer Egypt through political and economic turmoil while retaining the trust and friendship of the West. Only a few months ago he was seen as “the best hope for Egyptian democracy”.
"Today, his very name is toxic. Although he has been poised for power and swiftly embraced the cause of the poor and the disaffected, two fatal flaws disqualify him from office: his name and the opposition of the powerful Egyptian Army. No one in Egypt will stomach the hereditary succession of another pharaoh, as President Mubarak, his father, is known, and the army has no time for a civilian who has not demonstrated an understanding of military power.
"To his many Western friends and former banker colleagues, Gamal is affability itself, ferociously intelligent, well-informed, a clear analyst, a man who embraces Western standards with a shrewd understanding of image and public relations. Egyptians, however, see a man aloof from their daily lives, cocooned by privilege, the beneficiary of nepotism, wealth and inherited influence...
"A few years ago it was also rumoured, improbably, that he was gay, a slur [sic] with resonance among the Islamist faithful. He married in 2007, at the age of 44."

The Times wonders if President Mubarak could hand over power to his son, Gamal.

• Read Robert Fisk on the new Arab revolts in Egypt and the Middle East, plus other essays on the current crises, via ZNet.