Blogger Muzzled in Egypt

You might think Egypt is a mod­er­ate Arab state. This, in real­ity, is not true. It is an author­i­tar­ian police state. (See the link in this prior post for an example.)

The Egypt­ian blog Rant­i­ngs of a Sand­mon­key, authored by a self-described “cyn­i­cal, snarky, pro-US, sec­u­lar, lib­er­tar­ian, dis­grun­tled sand­mon­key,” is stop­ping fol­low­ing pres­sure from gov­ern­ment authorities:

One of the chief rea­sons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, espe­cially with State Secuirty agents lurk­ing around my street and ask­ing ques­tions about me since that day. I ignore that, the same way I ignored all the click­ing noises that my phones started to exhibit all of a sud­den, or the law suit filed by Judge Mourad on my friends, and instead grew bolder and more reck­less at a time where every­body else started being more cau­tious. It took me a while to take note of the fear that has been grip­ping our lit­tle blog­sphere and com­pre­hend what it really means. The prospects for improv­ment, to put it slightly, look pretty grim. I was the model of cau­tion, and believ­ing in my invin­cip­il­ity by man­ag­ing not to get arrested for the past 2 and a half years, I’ve grown reck­less. Stu­pid Mon­key. Stupid!

And speak­ing of the state of the egypt­ian blog­sphere, it has been pretty depress­ing in its own right. One has to won­der at some point the futulity of being a key­board war­rior in a coun­try where noth­ing seems to mat­ter to its peo­ple anymore.

I will keep a link to Sandmonkey’s blog on my blogroll in honor of his work. I rec­om­mend that every­one check out his blog while you can.