I did not attend US President Barack Obama's speech at Cairo University, as the invitation I received read "No bags, signs and banners", that is, all I intended to go with. Indeed, I had prepared all of my baggage and put it at the door of my apartment, as I wanted to take it with me to the speech. This way, I would be ready to jump into Air Force One (US Presidents' plane) immediately before the Egyptian security forces could stop me or confiscate my baggage. President Obama is different from the other US Presidents. He acts according to his convictions and is not pushed by some US interest-driven circles which long controlled US politics, such as the Jewish lobby, the arms industry and others. I had prepared my own speech to address to him and it would have been enough to persuade him to immediately grant me political asylum in the US. I do not want to go into the details of this speech now, as I do not want others to use it to get a US visa. Let me just say that this letter is enough to prove that I am politically, religiously and socially persecuted in this country, and I therefore seek political, religious and social asylum. Politically, I suffer from psychological tension. The doctor told me this is due to the one-party rule and to the Parties Committee, which lays in ambush against any attempt to set up a new party. Religiously, I am fighting against a creed which I was given when I was born and believed in. Now, though, I am forced to join another religion, based on extremism and terrorism. This new religion forces me to enter the toilet with my left foot and eat with my right hand, to destroy monuments and paintings, and to do things we were told are unethical when we were children, such as making women breastfeed the men they work with. Socially speaking, I am caught in crossfire. On the one hand, I am persecuted because I belong to a category called intellectuals. They are seen as outsiders, because they do not let their beards grow and do not wear those Pakistani clothes which are now fashionable in this country. As for many of their women, they are not fully-veiled and do not even wear a headscarf. On the other hand, our current government does not recognize the current intellectuals and does not like their opinions. Instead, it wishes they vanished from the face of the earth, so it leaves them prey of other social forces which tear them apart as they want, either by slandering, accusing them of rationalism and in some cases of secularism, filing lawsuits against them or trying to assassinate them if necessary. As for the banners, I am used to bringing some with me whenever I attend a speech of senior officials. This time, I had prepared dozens, hoping some people would hold a few for me. All these banners had good slogans. One of them says: "You're Opapa, you're Omama, you're everything to me". The other slogans were something like this and they reflected what people feel for Obama in Egypt. Yet, I do not want to unveil them so that no one else uses them to get the US visa I want.
As for signs, please, don't ask me what the invitation meant with "No signs". The only ones I know are traffic signs. Perhaps some people intended to bring some of them, but this would be inappropriate, as they would certainly have some political connotations that could have embarrassed the distinguished guest, such as: "Watch the road so that you can go back to you family safely", "One way" and "No U-turning." The invitation also said that we would have to be at Cairo University Great Hall three hours before the speech and that coming late would mean risking being forbidden from entering. We have got used to arriving at President Mubarak's speeches one hour beforehand. There seems to be a difference, though, between the President of Egypt and the President of the United States, as the more powerful a country the longer the waiting. For these reasons, I unpacked, did not go to the speech with all my banners and decided to ignore everything about signs. Indeed, I realized that it is much easier to stand political, religious and social persecution than those tight security measures, which might have confiscated my baggage and banned my banners, signs – if any – and eventually myself from entering. I mean, if I had been able to arrive there with all those things three hours before the speech... As for the speech itself, I comfortably watched it at home. I saw Obama and the changes in his traits from up close on my TV screen rather than far away small like Tinker Bell, about whom people were happy to hear or read about when they were children, but whom they have never seen.
