Young opponents of the old Mubarak regime in Egypt used (and some still use) the motto: “We are all Khaled Said” online. That was to commemorate a young activist who was beaten to death by old regime security agents in Alexandria in 2010.
- Now the old regime security is the new regime security, the old goons are the new goons.
- Just as the new regime bureaucrats are the old regime bureaucrats, just as the old regime courts are the new regime courts.
- Come to think of it: the new regime is the old regime.
- The one difference may be that the new regime probably has collected more political prisoners than the old regime, and in a much shorter time. And it is killing off more opponents than the old regime did, either on the streets or through kangaroo courts passing mass death sentences.
- Just this weekend another Egyptian kangaroo court sentenced ten more young people to hanging, adding them to the more than a thousand others already on death raw for political reasons.
- Also this weekend an Egyptian appeals court freed a police officer who was charged with killing 37 political detainees.
- So, you know where all this is heading in the coming months and years.
Expect many more Khaled Saids in the future of Egypt. Some of them will no doubt be called ‘terrorists’, but in many cases that will not be true. They will simply be new versions of the Khaled Said who was beaten to death months before the Tahrir Uprising. But they will be facing the same old enemy that he faced in 2010……..
Cheers
mhg
