A court found Egypt’s most popular comic actor guilty on Tuesday of insulting Islam in roles in films mocking religious hypocrisy. . . . Mr. Imam [the actor] was convicted for performances in the blockbuster films “The Terrorist,” in which he plays a radical Islamist hiding among a moderate, middle-class family, and “Terrorism and Kabab,” in which his character becomes enraged at a lazy civil servant pretending to pray to avoid work. [NYT]
First, for context, let’s recall that Egypt was far from a bastion of freedom of speech. But it’s the political ascendancy of Islamist parties there that makes this story particularly notable. Likely the Islamists will crack down (even more severely than Mubarak did) on speech; one faction has signaled as much. Since the actor was seen as “a Mubarak friend,” however, it’s also possible this was payback: a settling of some old score by a faction of the interim military regime against a loyalist of the former ruler. These, then, are the depressingly limited political alternatives in Egypt: Islamists hostile to freedom, or a dictatorial military clique hostile to freedom. Neither bodes well for U.S. interests. (For more on the political culture of Egypt, you may be interested in a new interview that Yaron Brook and I did for the Whitehead Journal.)
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