(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
“People here are not afraid anymore – and it just may be that a woman helped break that barrier of fear”, writes Mona El-Naggar in her February 01 NYT article Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades: “Asmaa Mahfouz was celebrating her 26th birthday on Tuesday among tens of thousands of Egyptians as they took to the streets, parting with old fears in a bid to end President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of authoritarian, single-party rule.”
“As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope”, Ms. Mahfouz said bluntly in an impassioned video posted on YouTube January 18. She spoke straight to the camera and held a sign saying she would go out and protest to try to bring down Mr. Mubarak’s regime, noted El-Naggar.
Asmaa “is a member of the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been using the Internet to organize protests against Egypt’s authoritarian government since 2008. As protests against President Mubarak continued to grow, the group called Monday for a ‘march of millions’ and an indefinite general strike. The next day, Mubarak announced he would not seek reelection at the end of his term in September.”, writes Eric Dolan at RawStory Feb 02, who also notes that “Mahfouz made the video after four Egyptian men set themselves on fire. The men were apparently inspired by the example of Tunisia, where a self-immolation triggered protests that eventually led to the ouster of the nation’s president.”
Although Asmaa spoke in her native Egyptian language in her video, an English subtitled version was later posted to YouTube Feb. 02, 2011 by Iyad El-Baghdadi, subbed by Ammara Alavi:
“Of course, on all national media, whoever dies in protest is a psychopath,” she continued. “If they were psychopaths, why did they burn themselves at the Parliament building?”
…
“We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25th,” she said. “If we still have honor, and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25th. We go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. I won’t even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else.”
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“This entire government is corrupt – a corrupt president and a corrupt security force,” she continued. “These self-immolators were not afraid of death but were afraid of security forces. I’m going down on January 25th, and from now till then, I’m going to distribute fliers in the street every day. I will not set myself on fire. If the security forces want to set me on fire, let them come and do it.”
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“Whoever says women shouldn’t go to protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on January 25th,” Mahfouz continued. “Whoever says its not worth it because there will be only a handful of people, I want to tell him, you are the reason behind this. And you are a traitor, just like the president or any security cop who us in the streets.”
“Sitting at home and just following us on news or Facebook leads to our humiliation. If you have honor and dignity as a man, come. Come and protect me, and other girls in the protest. If you stay at home, then you deserve all that’s being done to you. And you will be guilty, before your nation and your people. And you’ll be responsible for what happens to us on the street while you sit at home.”
“Instead of setting ourselves on fire, let us do something positive,” she added. “God says that He ‘will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. [Quran 13:11]'”
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but for the past 2 nights while we were working on a few “projects” in the thuper thecret chat channels, at least 7 legendary handles were seen and signed off with ASCII images posting in the chat. One of which was the infamous “Dead Cow” head.
I think we have anti-nuke age hacktivists coming out of the woodwork for this shit.
Truly an honor.bork.bork.bork