24 | June | 2018 | Dear Kitty. Some blog

This June 2014 video from the USA is called Egypt Has A New Dictator.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV, 23 June 2018:

In Egypt, hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter have called on President Sisi to leave. At the beginning of the afternoon nearly 300,000 people had already asked for his resignation. Some 50,000 others expressed support for the dictator.

The hashtag ‘Sisi_Leave‘ came up after new price increases, which were announced during the Sugar Festival, the end of Ramadan. Apparently the government hoped with his timing that this would limit the discontent.

But the authorities did not count on the frustration caused by the elimination of the Egyptian football team at the World Cup. The Egyptian national football team was bound to go home after two games, after defeats against Uruguay and Russia, while expectations were high because Egypt has the star player Mohammed Salah. After the second defeat of Egypt things suddenly went fast with the hashtag calling on Sisi to resign.

The protests on Twitter are remarkable. Since Sisi is in power, street protests are being suppressed and there is also censorship on the Internet, where hundreds of websites have been removed from cyberspace.

The government has been cutting back for years. In the hope of giving life to the moribund economy, subsidies on fuel, food, water and electricity are reduced.

Islamists

Sisi as the army leader put an end to the Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, which came to power in 2011 after democratic elections, but since then seemed to be heading for an authoritarian regime. …

After a constitutional amendment, Sisi was elected president in 2014. Despite the semblance of democracy, he rules as a dictator and has jailed thousands of critics of his regime, not just Islamists, but also liberals, socialists and other secular opponents.

Sisi has called on the population to endure the hardships. “If we want to become a real nation, we have to endure the pain and misery, and we have to pay the price together.” In a country where income differences are large and large parts of the population are dependent on food subsidies, that is a difficult message.

Several major corporations and successive governments in France were and are actively participating in the repression of the Egyptian people by the current military dictatorship. They are active accomplices in mass surveillance of the population aiming to identify political opponents to be tortured and disappeared, and in arming the military junta of General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi: here.

Egyptian junta extends state of emergency and censors social media: here.

A Cairo court referred 75 defendants to Egypt’s grand mufti to approve death by hanging sentences on Saturday. The 75 are all part of a mass trial of 739 defendants, who all face the same maximum penalty: here.

Jailed [ondeath row] Egyptian photographer Mahmoud Abu Zeid to receive UN press freedom prize. Jailed Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid “Shawkan”, has been selected for the 2018 UNESCO Press Freedom Prize: here.

Young Egyptians demonstrate against Sisi: here.