The Battle for Human Rights in Egypt

This is a follow-up to my post about Egypt and the million woman march. I put up some more news excerpts last night in the comments… I thought I’d bring some of them up here on the frontpage along with a few other updates.

Before I do that, here’s some footage from Tahrir. This one is a brief clip of the “shouting match” from CNN:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I don’t know about you, but I thought the smarmy expressions on the face of the young men who were shouting at the women said a lot. They seemed to have nothing better to do than to taunt these women demanding their rights.

Seemed reminiscent of this video awhile back where a young Yemeni girl responded to a bunch of young men telling her to wear a veil and all this other nonsense — she seemed to be an old soul with great wisdom and quick wit as she told them, among other things, “go get a job, all of you, sitting here like a bunch of bums.”

Here’s a link to a video from Tahrir posted on Facebook that Woman Voter sent to me. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but the unsettled expressions and voices of the women at the beginning of this as at least one woman appears to be grabbed and hassled have stuck with me.

Ok, now for the excerpts and updates.

A lot of things went wrong yesterday in Tahrir, and women were doomed it seems. There was an outbreak of tension between Copts and Muslims that took away some of the activism and attention.

Irish Times:

A worker living in Manshiyet Nasser holds a paper reading: 'Christian and Muslim, we are Egyptian' in eastern Cairo on March 9, where clashes between Egyptian Christians and Muslims occurred on Tuesday night. (Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters)

Part of the reason the women’s march failed was that many decided to participate in a sit-in staged by Coptic Christians in front of the radio and television building, a few hundred metres from the square. The Copts are protesting the burning of a church in Helwan province during a Christian-Muslim clash over a romance between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, and are urging army protection for Copts who fled the village but seek to return.

Here is an Al Jazeera report from today with more on what happened with the clashes between Copts and Muslims yesterday. At least 11 people have died according to this, though I am seeing the count has been upped to 13 in some other reports.

From the Al Jazeera link:

At least 11 people have been killed and around 100 others injured in religious clashes with Muslims in the Egyptian capital Cairo.

A security source told Al Jazeera that of the 11 that were killed on Tuesday, six were Coptic, five were Muslim and that at least 25 people were arrested by the country’s military police for their involvement in the clashes.

The deaths on Tuesday occurred in the working-class district of Moqattam after at least 1,000 Copts gathered to protest the burning of a church last week.

It was the second burst of sectarian fighting in as many days and the latest in a string of violent protests over a variety of topics as simmering unrest continues nearly a month after mass protests led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

[…]

The protest outside Cairo’s radio and television building also came a day after at least 2,000 Copts demanded the re-building of the torched church, and that those responsible be brought to justice.

The Shahedain [Two Martyrs] church, in the Helwan provincial city of Sol, was set ablaze on Friday after clashes between Copts and Muslims left at least two people dead.

The violence was triggered by a feud between two families, which disapproved of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman in Sol.

Here’s another Al Jazeera report about more clashes erupting in Tahrir today.

Also, an informative feature over at the Christian Science Monitor (from which I got the photo above) that gives a quick click-through overview on some background about the Copts and the tension — Copt-Muslim clash in Cairo renews question: Who are the Copts?

Anyhow, getting back to the women’s march. It seems like women’s rights, as always, got overshadowed yesterday and energies got divided between causes and injustice that all deserve attention.

This sort of goes along with what I’ve been discussing in the comments… women need strength in numbers here and really strong organization because this is going to be a very long hard road… this Women’s March was announced on the fly to coincide with International Women’s Day. I’m very proud of those who turned up and fought back what happened yesterday in Tahrir… I just hope as they continue to organize that they take time before the next women’s march or event. What looked like protests materializing overnight in Egypt over the last few months were really months and months in the making after the murder of Khaled Said. Women are up against the thugs who showed up yesterday and their ilk as well as a media filter that will say women aren’t turning out for themselves, etc.

Especially when just as here in the US we have the Phyllis Schlaflys… there are women in Egypt who are working for the patriarchy too. It’s not just the men saying “go home, wash clothes.” Again as I mentioned yesterday, this has written all over it shades of the “Iron My Shirt“ chant that reared its ugly head when Hillary vied for the presidency here in the US. Come to think of it, it’s also the perfect bookend to the “When Will that Stupid Bitch Quit” drumbeat that she and her supporters faced throughout the primaries and pretty much since before she even ran!

Take the following from the New Yorker News Desk’s report on yesterday’s events:

Men were hardly the only dissenting voices. At one point, a woman in a niqab began screaming at a cluster of people. Her son had died in the protests, and the conduct of the people in Tahrir—particularly the uncovered women—was inappropriate. They were dating, she insisted, not protesting. It was a sad echo of a rumor levelled at the protesters before Mubarak’s resignation, accusing them of KFC-fuelled courtship. Other women objected to the feminist values being voiced, which, they felt, were old-fashioned. Alia Mossallam, a student and writer, said, “There has always been a female presence. If you set yourself apart, you make yourself a spectacle.” Two young women said, simply, “Egypt is in a dangerous time right now. We should wait.”

Dating not protesting? *Headdesk*

So I suppose in 2008 we weren’t campaigning for Hillary, we were just having a big lesbo orgy out in public (remember, the Matt Taibbis called Hillary rallies the “Lifetime demographic”).

Women wouldn’t have to “set themselves apart” if their economic, social, and political rights were adequately protected by law and in practice.

When our rights to political protest or expression are so ubiquitously dismissed as “dating” or “Lifetime programming,” be it in Egypt or the US, then yes, we have to set ourselves apart and demand for what is rightfully ours.

As the quote that inspired the name of my blog goes:

“There are some who question the reason for this conference. Let them listen to the voices of women in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces.” –Hillary Rodham Clinton, Beijing 1995

I didn’t like it when the youth movement in Egypt gathering to demand their rights was dismissed as a “facebook party” either, or when the workers in Wisconsin and other states doing the same similarly met sneers that they were Democratic party lemmings, etc. It takes a lot to get people past complacency and out to protest in the streets.

Workers, young people, seniors, and women all have rights and one of those rights includes the rights to protest, dissent, and civil disobedience. If all people were doing at any of these protests was socializing and partying, there wouldn’t be so much hostile resistance. There wouldn’t be violent thugs, there wouldn’t be police state style crackdowns, and there wouldn’t be an effort to annihilate the rights to collectively bargain itself.

People around the world are gathering to demand their rights and they are threatening the status quo bigtime. We see the fear reflected in all the pushback this demand for equality is creating.

More from the New Yorker:

Still, on the elevated concrete median across the street from the tents, Wassef was glowing at the turnout, which he estimated at a thousand. “I am ecstatic,” he said. There had been some negative feedback on the Facebook page, but “you can’t print taboos and expect all positive feedback.” Most of the men on the median were repeating the same argument as that in the square: a female President was forbidden by Islam. But the women were arguing back, and that was important. “It’s like lancing an abscess. What’s coming out is disgusting, but it needs to be done,” Wassef said.

Wassef is the guy who put up the facebook page calling for the march. I was wary of what would happen when I heard about the march because it all sounded so haphazard and hastily organized to coincide with International Women’s Day, but I agree with that quote in bold emphasis about lancing an abscess. Again, I just hope women and like-minded men get the time they need to build up the strength in numbers they deserve and need.

Which brings me to a few other things I wanted to highlight.

While nothing that happened was terribly surprising yesterday, given the history and the attack on Lara Logan, I noticed in a lot of these reports, particularly Nima Elbagir’s reporting to CNN, that reporters emphasized how there were men marching with women on behalf of women’s rights. Of course it was mostly women, but there seems to have been more men there than one would have thought or enough to have made all the journalists take particular note of it. Men even formed a human chain around the women. Unfortunately the thugs outnumbered them by a lot and broke through.

Since so much of patriarchy is deeply embedded within attitudes–and those attitudes can be held by women too–I think it is important that women for women work together with the men who do truly seem to be like-minded. I know most men won’t stand up for women and that ultimately women are the key to progress for women, but with so many women still caught in selling the rest of us out, I think allies in this fight are important wherever we can find them, and that the women in Egypt have found some does strike me as one of the few bright notes in this story, along with the fact of course that the brave women who showed up didn’t stay silent and fought back.

Also, another point from the Nima Elbagir report. In the youtube that I linked to above (at around the 2:40 mark for anyone interested), Nima talks about how just the leaflets alone were a point of contention–one of the leaflets said “we demand control of our reproductive rights”–and how men considered it shameful for women to be distributing materials with words like that printed on them.

Again, the contrast between that and the men who formed the human chain strikes me as poignant. Especially given the following (via the Guardian):

“Women were caught in the middle and groped,” witness Ahmad Awadalla said. “When I tried to defend them they said, ‘why are you defending women? Are you queer?’”

Once again misogyny and homophobia collide underscoring that this is a fight for human rights for every last one of us. All of us–women or man, young or old, working or middle class, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim or anything else, white, black, and everything in between, and on and on–we all share a stake in this fight, and we’re all connected. The forces trying to convince that we’re not are trying to break up the strength in numbers built in to our human coalition.

One last excerpt from the New Yorker link:

The men were particularly incensed at the notion that a woman could be President of Egypt. It was, they argued, against a hadith which states that men should not take orders from women. “Don’t you obey your mother?” wondered a colleague of mine, an Egyptian whose style of dress often causes her to be mistaken for a foreigner. “I obey religion,” he replied.

“They were saying that my opinion did not exist,” my colleague said. “Still, when I asked them to step back, they stepped back.”

When I read that, I couldn’t help but think of the following 1948 Olive Oyl for President cartoon (a reworking of the 1932 Betty Boop for president cartoon that was released just days before FDR was elected)… if only all these people who fear women having any sort of power got a metaphorical thwap from Olive Oyl’s skillet and had the dream that Popeye has…