Gallows Humor: Political Satire in Sisi’s Egypt

Guernica, 15 May 2014 By Jonathan Guyer The country’s cartoonists find creative ways to defy censors. His face is almost everywhere. With a stoic gaze and a stately uniform, Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah Al-Sisi looks out from magazine covers displayed at Cairo’s corner newsstands and posters decorating gas stations in sleepy Red Sea towns. Following the military’s ouster of the Muslim

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Cairo: September 2014

WIAM EL-TAMAMI 28 JANUARY 2015 I left Cairo on 19 April 2014. I was so glad to have left, so relieved and slightly disbelieving that I had finally loosened myself from the grip of Al-Qaahira – in Arabic the name, quite fittingly, means ‘The Oppressor’, ‘The Crusher’, ‘The Vanquisheress’. I knew that I could not be there then, but that I was

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Unauthorized memory

Sunday, January 25, 2015 Yasmin El-Rifae   Yesterday they shot and killed a woman on Talaat Harb Street. She was walking, along with other members of the Socialist Alliance Party, through downtown to commemorate those killed since all of this started four years ago. Many of them were carrying flowers, wreaths to lay in Tahrir. Photos of Shaimaa Sabbagh in

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Misstated Excerpt of Times Article Offers Fresh Take on President Sisi of Egypt

    By THE NEW YORK TIMES OCT. 15, 2014   There is no such thing as bad press for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, at least not if it is translated by Al Ahram, Egypt’s flagship state newspaper. A recent report in The New York Times described the muted reaction to Mr. Sisi’s speech last month before the United Nations General Assembly compared with

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A Grand Entente

Posted by Baheyya 12 Aug 2014 01:28 PM PDT In the old days, when the Israeli military bombed and shelled Palestinians and sought to destroy their society, Hosni Mubarak used a well-worn formula, fully abetting Israeli actions while uttering pro-Palestine platitudes. Occasionally, when huge protests rocked the streets, he green-lighted theatrical gestures such as his wife heading a relief convoy to

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