Revolution at Maspero - the headquarters of the Egyptian state-owned television network*

This article is not dealing with the Egyptian protesters and the rallies in front of the building of the state-owned Egyptian television in Cairo, but with the live interview of one of the female candidates in the forthcoming presidential elections in Egypt, Bothaina Kamel, who is herself a media person and TV presenter. She was being interviewed by yet another TV-presenter, Mahmud Sharaf, of the Cultural Channel of the official Egyptian television network. This live TV interview with Ms. Kamel dealt with the election programme she put forward as a candidate running for president. She was very critical of the double standards being applied to Egyptian revolutionary women who were forced to undergo a virginity test by the interim military 'superior council' when being arrested on Tahrir (Liberation) Square after the Mubarak regime had already been overthrown on February 11, 2011. The only thing these women were accused of was the fact that they were taking part in the national revolution of Jan. 25, insisting that the demands of the revolution should be fulfilled before they would leave Tahrir Sqare  and go home. They were subjected in the post-revolutionary phase to such humiliating and gender-discriminatory treatment, whereas Mubarak, the overthrown dictator, was enjoying an accommodation comparable to that of a five star hotel,  in a super luxury hospital at the Sharm El-Sheich resort –  a striking contradiction, indeed, as Ms. Kamel stressed in her live interview on TV.  Leading figures of the old, corrupt regime that has been overthrown are receiving such a privileged treatment, and they are entitled to stand trial in an ordinary court, facing judges who are civilians, while the revolutionaries are tried summarily by military courts which have sentenced some of them to 20 or 25 years in jail! Such outraging post-revolutionary human rights offences were addressed by Ms. Kamel during the live emission, thus placing the state power in a strong, critical spotlight. These things were reason enough for her to ask the interim military council, appointed by Mubarak himself when he was resigning from office, to step down and let the state-administrative duties be run by an interim presidential council that should be composed of civil representatives of the revolutionary population that accomplished the overthrow of Mubarak and his corrupt regime. 

Ms. Kamel also criticized the unjustified patriarchal attitudes which are still persisting in Egyptian society and which let many Egyptians shy back from electing a woman for a leading office like that of the president. She questioned this by asking, “Who is the most influential person in a family, with regard to the upbringing and education of children and who is in charge of the most crucial 'administration' of everyday life in a family –  the father or the mother?” As the obvious answer that most would give suggests that the mother's function leaves its crucial mark on the next generation, why shouldn't she,  just like a  man and his true equal, be able to exercise the duties of a head of state?! However, in the course of this critique of the dominant official and non-official standards in post-revolutionary Egypt, the live emission of the interview was cut off. 

TV-presenter Sharaf was ordered by the board to abruptly end an interview that I, and in fact many other viewers I talked to, thought to be most intriguing. Ms. Kamel had been giving a much needed example, by doing away with the artificial barrier between official, state-dependant  television discourse and the thoughts of real contester, as expressed, for instance, by the words of those camping just outside the door of the State TV building! That’s why the live interview has been abruptly cut off. It lifted the ideological veil that is separating the TV studios from what the ordinary people really think and say quite plainly out there in the street – all  those ordinary people who produced the liberating revolution of Jan. 25 in Egypt while courageously putting their health and their lives at risk.
 
 

*First published in the daily  Nahdat Misr (Egypt's Renaissance), on May 14, 2011, p.9. 
 
 
 
 
 

Check...:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
 

Check: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam