What Egypt lost in the Al Jazeera trial
The sham sentences handed out to Al Jazeera journalists have done more damage to Egypt’s reputation than any propaganda cell could have.
Long before his name became synonymous with journalists being tried by kangaroo courts of oppressive regimes thanks to the Al Jazeera trial, I knew Mohamed Fadel Fahmy as one of Egypt’s best journalists and one of my good friends. We met back in 2007 when he was working for the Red Cross in Lebanon and Iraq, and, according to him, it was my tweets about the oncoming January 25 Revolution that got him to jump on a plane and come to Egypt in 2011, and he has stayed ever since.
Now he is in jail, facing a seven-year sentence alongside Peter Greste, Baher Mohammed and other defendants in what is referred to in Egypt as the “Marriot Cell trial.” Moody, as his friends would call him, is imprisoned on charges of being the ringleader of a Muslim Brotherhood cell that aims to tarnish Egypt’s image and reputation. But everyone knows that he is really in jail for working for Al Jazeera English right around the time the Egyptian regime wanted to settle scores with Qatar.
A liberal secularist who drinks alcohol is charged with being a member of a conservative Islamist organization and the ringleader of its cell for international propaganda, despite working for Al Jazeera for only about three months before getting arrested.
That last bit of info is one that is underreported in international media, and never gets mentioned in the local media at all, but that’s not an anomaly if you compare it with the other defendants in the case. Very few here know that Peter Greste arrived in Cairo for the first time 17 days before his arrest; or that Baher, a freelancer who faces 10 years in prison, was not arrested at the Marriott, but his home on Dec. 29, when anti-terror squads shot down his door and, subsequently, his dog; or Rena Netjes, a Dutch reporter who also received 10 years in absentia, wasn’t even working for Al Jazeera, and was only meeting Fahmy for an interview on the Sinai Peninsula. Only thanks to the ineptitude of state security — which got her name and passport number wrong — was she able to flee the country.
