Take a walk down history lane and you will find it littered with strongmen who didn't heed economic alarm bells. "It's the economy stupid'' is a phrase coined during Bill Clinton's successful campaign against George W. Bush and it is one that (...)
Blood-stained streets from Cairo, Egypt, to Dallas, United States (US), have become the new norm. Though Ferguson, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and New York bear no resemblance to Giza, Alexandria, Ismailia, Luxor, and Cairo, the divide separating police (...)
To understand the Egyptian Rubik's Cube, your eyes must turn to the unholy trinity of terrorism, state terrorism, and systematic human rights abuses. Close examination of each arena reveals an Egyptian Body Politic in desperate need of remedy but (...)
Egypt is set to explode. When and how is dependent on who pulls the trigger and why. Those who had the opportunity to peruse the previous article came to quickly understand that Egypt has galloped to a 3, on a danger scale of 1-5, in 2.5 years of de (...)
Effective threats are often delivered in a voice not much above a murmur and with a smile. Fate drew me to this important conclusion when I tripped upon the Oscar nominated "The Imitation Game" for the second time just recently. In it, an MI6 agent (...)
Dear Mr Al-Sisi,
This letter will do something you are not used to: it will force you to listen to a citizen rather than lecture or imprison him. I recognise this will be incredibly difficult for you, as you are accustomed to giving orders, rather (...)
I kneeled down to the floor, knees pressed hard to the floor, tears of rebirth rolling down my cheeks, forehead to the parquet, in prayer: Mubarak was leaving. The reaction was not unique.Tthat day, throughout the country, while some of Hosni (...)
Within the Egyptian milieu the suggestion or mere questioning of the legalisation of prostitution is deemed thunderously scandalous. There are many reasons why prostitution, as a paradigm of economic survival and moral choice, is resoundingly viewed (...)
Even with a revolution and multiple massacres the reported Egyptian death toll is, approximately, 5,000 dead. However, a far bigger killer, Hepatitis, aka Virus C, and related liver diseases decimate nearly 45,000 annually. But without creative (...)
107 are dead and 238 injured in the wake of a major collapse of a giant building crane near the holy site of the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in the evening hours of 11 September. Initial news reports put the blame on severe weather that swept (...)
In the personal realm a lie is but a simple three letter word that can be destructive. When interjected with bureaucracies, businesses and nation states the lie undercuts the ultimate necessity in the relationship between citizen and state: trust. (...)
When the blood of the other becomes a fathomable reality, fascism is born. I remember well standing among thousands in front of the UN, on 30 June 2013, as we screamed atop our lungs against one dictator, but little did we know we would help usher (...)
The sun rose in Cairo on Saturday morning with a fury: another explosive message from "Islamic State" to Al-Sisi. The attack on a building, associated with the Italian consulate, left eight injured and one dead in its wake, and marks the beginning (...)
The Al-Sisi regime, from its unofficial start in 2013, has been about wars: a war on terrorism, a war on the Muslim Brotherhood, and today a new war was declared: on journalism. It is not surprising for those holding pens near and far from Cairo (...)
Imagine the Prosecutor General of France in a motorcade near the Place de Montmartre. Now imagine a suicide car bomb intercepting that motorcade and killing him. Today Egypt doesn't have to imagine.
On an otherwise normal sunny Ramadan day, Hisham (...)
Speaking of tyrants Nael Shama said: "A typical consequence of such a distorted mind set is the equation between personal criticism and disloyalty." Though that particular article was penned in the summer of 2008, two and half years before the [25 (...)
A minister is gone but injustice remains. At a time when Egypt longs with the desperation of a hungry toddler for its mother's milk for justice, its minister of ‘justice' has been ushered stage politically. Mahfouz Saber's mistake was not uttering a (...)
To be an Egyptian journalist on World Press Freedom Day (3 May), one must have a healthy sense of ironic juxtaposition. In Egypt, as most journalists and readers know, the words freedom and journalism, particularly under the harsh light of the (...)
Over thirty Egyptians did not return home last night and Mohamed Ibrahim, Minister of Interior, shoulders responsibility. You can be certain the honorable minister is not the only party culpable in the second disaster of its kind to strike Egyptian (...)
If Sinai sinks so will Al-Sisi. At least 30 Egyptians, mostly soldiers, are dead in Sinai because Egyptian leadership couldn't protect them. We inhabit a bottom line world and the bottom line is: Thursday, 29 January 2015, marking the second time in (...)
It is the height of naiveté to presuppose that Muslim reaction to Charlie Hebdo would be tempered. As a Muslim journalist, one understands those who have been, over the past years, aggrieved by many of the opinions and cartoons published on the (...)
If your wishes for 2014, in Egypt, included respect of human rights, a civil state and respectable judiciary, the year was an efficient delivery system of pain. The stark reality that this dark turn in history delivered, to analysts and dissidents (...)
In Egypt, the Al-Sisi regime wants opposition pens dry and artist's mouths shut. Many Egyptian viewers expected Khaled Abol Naga to be more reticent after recently saying "we may soon need to be saying ‘leave' to Al-Sisi" – those watchers couldn't (...)
The Mediterranean turned red last Wednesday. What we know is far less than we should: eight Egyptian sailors are missing, five are injured, reported the Egyptian army, in a battle with ‘terrorists' off the coast of Mediterranean city Domyat (...)
Hours ago the security puzzle in Egypt became, potentially, more deadly and highly complex: Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis (ABM) pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS). Intelligence agencies, analysts, and security experts with an unwavering focus on the (...)