24 hours later: What we know about the blocking of Mada Masr’s website

Mirrored from www.madamasr.com now blocked in Egypt:

 

 

Mohamed Hamama

 

May 26, 2017

 

Access to Mada Masr’s website via most of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) has been blocked since Wednesday evening.

The country’s official state news agency, MENA, quoted a high-level security source on Wednesday night as saying that access to 21 websites, which had disseminated “content that supports terrorism and extremism and deliberately spreads lies,” had been blocked in Egypt in accord with “relevant legal proceedings.”

Mada Masr has not been officially informed that any party has taken official or legal measures against it.

Several other websites have also been blocked, including two Egyptian publications: Masr al-Arabiya and the website of the print weekly Al-Mesryoon. The list also includes some Qatari or Qatar-funded news outlets that support or are managed by the Muslim Brotherhood, principal among them Al Jazeera and Huffington Post Arabic, in addition to the official website for Palestinian political movement Hamas.

The statement from the high-level security source was circulated to newspapers and wire services from the office of the presidency, Mada Masr has learned. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, Interior Ministry officials have told reporters that they had nothing to do with drafting or executing the decision to block the websites.

The move to block access to a range of websites affiliated with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt happened in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate’s decision to block many of the same sites. Egyptian authorities added Mada Masr to its list, however.

Mada Masr’s website is still accessible in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

In response to Mada Masr’s inquiry into the restriction of access to its website, Supreme Media Regulatory Council Secretary General Ahmed Selim said that the council, formed in April, has yet to take over control of digital media outlets. He directed inquiries to the Communication and Information Technology Ministry.

Mada Masr attempted to contact National Telecom Regulatory Authority head and Communication and Information Technology Minister Yasser al-Qady. His secretary acknowledged receipt of the questions and said a further response would be pending. As of publication, Mada has yet to receive a reply.

Mada also contacted newly elected Journalists Syndicate head Abdel Mohsen Salama, who said he was monitoring the situation closely but was not aware that access to Egyptian websites had been blocked. He asked Mada to draft a memo detailing the circumstances of the incident, which he would then submit to the Supreme Media Regulatory Council.

Faced with an absence of information from official sources, Mada Masr turned to technical experts, who diagnosed an RST injection attack as the reason for the inability to access the website.

What is a RST injection attack?

The internet is a network made up of computers and the electronic messages and packets of IP (internet protocol) data that pass between them. The transmission of the information that constitutes this system is formalized in various systems called “protocols.”

IP is the most basic protocol used on the internet, and it is usually coupled with TCP (transmission control protocol), which is used for web browsing and email. Data on computers is broken down into a series of ones and zeros. Each zero or one represents the smallest data unit in the language of computer communication. Data packets sent via TCP contain a block of information called a TCP header, which includes details concerning the sending and receiving parties in the exchange. In normal communications, the TCP header’s bit is set to zero and has no effect on communication. If the value is changed to one, the computers party to the exchange are notified that they should stop using the TCP connection and should no longer send any more packets using the connection’s identifying numbers.

A third party can monitor TCP packets being sent from various points of a connection and then interject a forged packet containing a TCP reset command that will change the bit of the header from zero to one. The connection is interrupted with each attempt to complete the communication.
One of the most famous examples of a RST injection attack involves the firewall that China uses to censor and suspend access to a number of websites.

This is the type of interruption which has blocked access to Mada Masr’s website in Egypt.

Continuing attempts to control the internet

Attempts to open the sites that have been blocked in Egypt have yielded a range of behaviors across ISPs. For example, most sites can be accessed via Noor ADSL.

Mada Masr has received various reports from users, pointing to the fact that the block is not uniformly in force, varying across the same ISPs at different geographical locations and times. This suggests that the RST attack has been decentralized and enforced by individual ISPs.

The recent interference intersects with the government’s decision to block The New Arab website last year. An October 2016 report on anomalies in Egypt’s online ecology conducted by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) — an international network operating under the Tor Project that monitors internet censorship, traffic manipulation and signs of surveillance — found that the injected RST packet observed to obstruct user-server communication with The New Arab website had the same “static IP identification (IP ID) value of 0x3412 as the injected RST packets” used in an attempt to interfere with Tor in Egypt. This similarity is significant, as The New Arab, which is Qatari funded and sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, is known to be blocked by the Egyptian government, suggesting that a state agency using the same server location conducted the RST injection attacks on Tor.

The same technique was used in December to disrupt Signal, the messaging and voice calling application supported by Open Whisper Systems’ encryption protocol.

Much of this evidence suggests an image of the Egyptian government as directly involved in a practice of mass surveillance, as documented in a January report published by Mada Masr.
These events are part of a wider history of the state’s attempt to control the internet, a principal concern since the January 2011 revolution and one that has risen to the surface in numerous arrests made recently in connection with the administration of Facebook pages. The government is also currently preparing legislation to combat cybercrime.

In a joint policy report published in June 2016 under the title “Anti-Technology,” the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Support for Information Technology Center, and the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE) wrote that the law “violates the principle of equality before the law and contains penalties regarding the use of information technology.”

In April 2016, sources with direct knowledge of discussions between Facebook and the Egyptian government told Reuters that Egypt had blocked Facebook’s Free Basics internet service at the end of 2015 after the US company refused to give the state the ability to monitor users.

A month earlier, in March, Google published a statement asserting that it had became “aware of unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains” issued by an intermediate certificate authority held by Egyptian company MCS Holdings, which had been contracted by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) to issue certificates for domains they had registered.

“Rather than keep the private key in a suitable HSM, MCS installed it in a man-in-the-middle proxy,” the Google statement read. “These devices intercept secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination and are sometimes used by companies to intercept their employees’ secure traffic for monitoring or legal reasons.”

In a previous report, Mada Masr highlighted leaked documents that emerged after Cairo’s State Security headquarters was stormed by protesters in March 2011, which showed that MCS had been corresponding with Egypt’s State Security Investigation Service (SSIS) to obtain the FinFisher system, surveillance software offered by the British-German company Gamma International.

The move to block and shut down websites is a new step from these recent forms of interference. The government is turning from mass surveillance, to directly intervening to block access to the websites of Egyptian companies operating in Egypt, including Mada Masr and Masr al-Arabiya.

The legality of blocking access to websites

Access to websites in Egypt can be legally curtailed in two ways, says Amr Gharbeia, a technology and human rights researcher at the EIPR. The first is tied to the issuance of an order either by a prosecutor or investigating judge, or, during a state of emergency, when the president can move to block access in his capacity as military governor. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared a three-month state of emergency on April 9.

The second mechanism concerns the anti-terrorism law, Article 29 of which stipulates a five-year prison term for anyone who “establishes a telecommunications or internet site to promote ideas or beliefs that encourage committing terrorist acts or to broadcast [information] to mislead security agencies or influence the course of justice with regard to a crime of terrorism.”

“If there is a website being investigated for one of the aforementioned crimes, Article 49 of the anti-terrorism law allows the public prosecutor or investigating judge to suspect or block the entire website or the content relevant to Article 29,” says Hassan al-Azhary, a lawyer with AFTE. Azhary says it is likely that the decision to block access to Mada Masr’s website comes in accord with an order emanating from Egypt’s judiciary.

Gharbeia points out that there may be a third option in play, which he says is more dangerous, namely that the government asked ISPs to block the websites in question, and that they complied in a manner outside of legal bounds.

If that is the case, there are two violations, according Gharbeia: one against freedom of expression and one against the sovereignty of law.

How to work around the block

The Electronic Federation Foundation has published is a simple guide detailing how to regain access to blocked websites and circumvent censorship.

"I‘m in the most abusive relationship of my life"

 

A conversation overheard:

„I love a woman who hates me, who screams at me and calls me names, who demeans me, a woman who curses me and calls me her enemy, and who shows no kindness to no one.“

„Wow, this sounds bad. What does she do?“

„She beats her kids, tortures them even out of vileness and kills some. She says she has to do this for the security of her other children, but it is in truth because those kids talked back to her and she won‘t take that and has no mercy, no humanity in her. Just cursing and beating and killing. And neglecting them, letting them go dirty and hungry to bed without caring or doing something to make their life bearable. While she eats the best food and is interested only in her own good. A terrible mother.“

„That‘s awful.“

„It is. But she tells me, I am out to destroy her. – But I do nothing. Merely criticising her – and rightly so, I should say – for the horrific way she treats her children. I don‘t know what to do.“

„You love the woman? Why?“

„I don*t know. There is beauty in her, real beauty. If only she would allow for it to be seen.“

„But a woman who acts like that one cannot love. Impossible.“

„I know. But I cannot help it. I don‘t understand it myself. But I can‘t get myself to withdraw and leave her.“

„This is awful. What is the woman called.“

„Egypt. She‘s called Egypt.“

„You have a problem.“

„I have to face facts. I‘m in the most abusive relationship of my life.“

„How long has this been going on?“

„Almost 40 years now. And she won‘t change. Just won‘t.“

„I cannot help you. You are lost to reason.“

„That is the tragedy, yes. And I am not finding a way out ...“

– Silence –  

Nothing has changed in Egypt, my dear little Omar Salah ...

... on the contrary. Things have become worse since you were murdered four years ago. Your killer is free again and there is still no respect for the life of Egyptians.


Three years ago, I wrote this

Letter to my Avatar – My dear little Omar Salah ...

one year ago to this day you were selling sweet potatoes on a street in Cairo near the U.S. embassy. It was not something you did out of choice, but because your family is poor and needs you to help secure an income. There was nothing special about this February 3rd, 2013, Cairo was calm and sunny, and nothing prepared you, when you left your home in the morning, for what was to come.

It was about noon, when a soldier came up to your cart and demanded from you to sell him two potatoes. You urgently needed to go to the bathroom at that moment and told him you would attend to him right when you would be back. The soldier did not accept this and threatened you with his gun saying he was going to shoot you if you didn't serve him immediately.

You were just a 12 year old boy. What could you know about the defects of human minds or the willingness of adults to be vicious? You did not believe him and in the innocent mind that was your right to have with 12 years of age you replied: "But you can't shoot me!"

To this the soldier replied: "I can't?" And then he pulled the trigger and shot you twice in your little heart. You were dead immediately.

The shock this had on those who witnessed it around you, was profound. The other children street vendors cried out and emotions ran high while your blood was spilling onto the street of Cairo. Amongst the soldiers, heated discussions started and the whole situation quickly became a mess.

The U.S. embassy tweeted that there had been an 'incident' in front of their gates but gave no details. For quite some time no one was aware what horror had just happened under the sunny sky of Egypt. And with the first shock subsiding that you indeed were dead right there on the street and for all to see, the military and police started frantically to do anything they could to cover up this horrific crime against you.

While your mother and father sat at home unaware they had lost you forever, the army took your little body to a morgue and covered you hoping that no one would find you and no one would find out. For accepting that one of theirs had killed you in cold blood and take responsibility for this action is not on the mind of the army of Egypt.

You must know, little Omar, that you are not the only one they killed, and not the only one they did not care for after he was dead. Over a year before you left us they had shot dead many protesters at Maspero and ran others over with heavy APCs. Again, later, they killed many at the Cabinet clashes. And so it goes on and on until today, for killing someone is the job of an army, they think. And they don't differentiate between borders or cities, it doesn't matter where they use their guns, they always think that they are in the right to kill. For no other but them has any right to a life. Only a right to be disrespected when – in the eyes of the army – the situation calls for it.

Of course, on that day one year ago, your killing had nothing to do with defending anybody. The soldier who killed you did not feel threatened or feared for the safety of Egypt. He simply expressed what he had learned as a conscript: that you as an Egyptian human being were not worth anything and that your life was cheap enough to be destroyed.

After your father had frantically tried to find you, aided by friends and NGO workers, your little blood stained body was finally found in the morgue. At first again the army tried to deny it had anything to do with this. But as pressure mounted and more and more witnesses spoke up to what they saw that day, the spokesperson felt it would hurt the army more to stay cowardly quiet than to come out with it and he put a statement on their Facebook page declaring your death an "accident" for which he offered your heartbroken parents his "apology".

The story goes that the soldier did not really mean to shoot you. He had thought that his gun was empty – because apparently Egyptian soldiers don't learn how to find out if their gun is loaded or empty and never load them themselves. It must be some hidden force that either loads their guns or not and then falls silent on the matter so that a soldier who carries his gun through Cairo is never aware whether he can actually use it or not. It seems an odd way to run an army or a disturbing way they play games, but then, my little Omar, there are so many odd things surrounding them that one does not wonder much anymore these days. Of course, after the soldier fired the first shot into your heart realising the gun was loaded after all, he had to fire a second time into your heart just to make sure he wasn't mistaken. That we understand. The army is a responsible body and what must be done must be done to make certain that facts are facts. Even in accidents.

Shortly after the world learned what had happened to you on that wonderful sunny February day in Cairo, a video surfaced on YouTube showing you only a few weeks earlier when you were interviewed on the street by an organisation helping needy children, checking whether you might be eligible for their projects.

You were humble and well-mannered but a little shy and uneasy what they would come up with and whether you would be good enough for what they were looking for in you. You told them quietly that you had to sell sweet potatoes because your family was poor and your father had wanted you to support the family. And in all shyness you disclosed into the camera that you would love to go to school and learn to read and write.

When the interviewer asked what you're dreams were, you looked away and were uneasy on this. And then you answered him. You said: "I cannot afford dreams, Sir." And you looked into the camera and then down again as if you were ashamed for this that was none of your fault.

Seeing this video of you, dear little Omar, broke many peoples heart. Hearing that you could not afford to dream, which is a basic human right for a child, and knowing you were not even allowed to live, was unbearable to witness. Seeing your wonderful eyes, your look of modesty, shyness and subdued hope, your life might one day, just might perhaps change for the better in some far-away future after all, teared us apart. It was then that I took your picture and made it my avatar on twitter. I wanted to give you your face back that had been left so sad and soiled and empty of life after the soldier had shot you dead.

There was no justice for you after all this. On public pressure of human rights activists and your family that the army tried to silence with money, a military trial was finally staged that we all never had any witnessing to. Only afterwards we were told that the soldier who shot you dead – just like that, on a sunny day in a street of Cairo – received a sentence of three years by the military judge.

Imagine that, Omar, three years for killing you and destroying your life forever. Do you know that Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel, activists of the January 25 revolution, got just the same sentence of three years for allegedly staging a protest without a permission? So killing you, in the eyes of the army, apparently was not worse than going out to protest without requesting a permit. You see what I mean when I say, we do not understand the ways of the army, but we trust they know well what they do?

One year on, my dear little Omar, I have thought long and deep over whether I would let you rest now in your little grave and put a shroud over your wonderful eyes that I see everyday on my twitter timeline. On twitter people have not a very long attention span, you must know. They easily get bored seeing the same avatar over and over for months and need changes a lot to be easy. And many times when I write critical tweets, some tweeps who do not know me or you come and slam me with words like: "Shut up, kid" – actually thinking, I was you and not a grown up man with 35 years working experience. They don't take my words seriously, because – just like the soldier – they think, a young boy has no value and no meaning and must not be respected. l cringe sometimes when I read their "kid", knowing they mean you, and feel the pain of your death they are unaware of and don't understand, and then I tell them to read my profile and come to the conclusion that whoever has no heart for you in his reaction is not worth thinking about anyway. And leave it at that.

It would be so much easier now to let you rest, my little friend, after this long year of tears and pains and death that has sweeped Egypt empty of so many hopes for a decent life, for justice and freedom and bread. On twitter they would jubilate to see a fresh face. The army would love to not have to see you anymore in the public sphere. The tweeps I criticise would not be able to slam me anymore with calling me 'kid'. We would all be so much happier, dear little Omar, if we forgot about what happened a year ago and that we can't change what happened to you after all.

But then, Omar, what can we change if we don't remember? What possibilities will we manage to create if we fall silent and look away and pretend it is all not as sad, not as bad, not as tragic as it actually is? Since your death more than a thousand Egyptians were killed, and they give us many reasons why that, different to you, was not an accident but needed to happen. But apparently they can 'live' with it just as easily. A strange tale has crept into the narrative that pretends that destroying Egyptian lives is inevitable and must be accepted, as if death more than life was the natural thing of the world that one can shrug off to return to the daily pleasures and chores. With every death of human beings falling bloodied in the streets of Egypt we are told to believe that nothing of this can be changed because it is the way of the world. And when we look away and shut our ears to the cries of the mothers and fathers of Egypt who, whether they agreed with their children or not, break down over losing what was precious to them forever and think they just cannot go on anymore, we change the world for the worst, where dying becomes the natural thing and living is just a luxury granted by some in power – whether we are lucky or not.

It must not be luck, little Omar, whether we live. It must be a right, a birth given right that no one must be allowed to take from us. Not with any form of being deliberate, calling it an accident to fool us or an inevitable need to fool us twice. If we don't insist on this, that life is the right and death is the wrong, we have lost everything that makes it worth existing on this planet we call the earth.

You had no dreams, Omar, because we did not allow you to be able to afford them. On that already we all failed you miserably. Your parents to this day cry over your death and will not forget the pain in their heart. Your eyes look at me on my avatar with all the shy innocence that was you in your modest way and I think of the narrative that all this has to be, is inevitable and not worse than going to a protest and forgetting to get a permission. So your killing has the value of a petty crime and your death is worth as much as not filling out a form. And I look at your eyes and mine fill with tears.

Let them laugh about it, for all I care. The other day I saw your picture on the internet, just the one that is my avatar that I see every day. But when I saw it, my little Omar, my heart stopped still. Like yours did on that fateful February 3rd a year ago, when a soldier thought you were worth nothing and could be done away with. When I recovered from this shock, that did not seem to make any sense, I knew I would not fail you and not leave you until justice is served. To you, Omar, who could not afford to have wishes and were not allowed to have hope – and to all the others that have lost a life that was dear to them when others decided it was not.

You will stay my avatar, my little Omar. I will tell you when Egypt is ready that we can part. Just now is not yet the time. Be patient. It will still take a long time. But where life is at stake, you know it well, time and patience means nothing. Life means all.

Egypt‘s Futile Attempt to Silence Journalists - World Coverage of #AJretrial

On Saturday, 29 August 2015, a criminal court in Cairo sentenced three journalists – Mohamed Fahmy, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste – to years in prison in a retrial of what has become known as the Al-Jazeera case. (With them, three young Egyptians were also sentenced, although not ever having worked for the TV-Station Al-Jazeera.)

The criticism at the now second farcial and clearly politically motivated verdict, accusing the journalists of "falsifying news" and broadcasting material that was "harmful to national security" by covering events happening in Egypt in 2013, was powerful. Human rights organisations, the world press and governments of the US, the UK, the Netherlands voiced their outrage and concern at this travesty of justice.

For the Egyptian government of President Sisi this was to be expected, seeing that nothing was done before the verdict to prevent such a development. Yet after the criticism of the verdict, Egypt today summoned the British Ambassador to express Egypt‘s rejection of "unacceptable interference". Egypt thus hopes to silence the world with its justified criticism and reporting – and fails epically.

See here just a ‘small‘ number of international media that has covered the sham trial in Cairo against the journalists – who did nothing else but their job: report the truth.

You can't silence the press, Egypt, you can't. Stop trying.

ABC - Australia

arab news - Saudi Arabia

BBC - Britain

Belfast Telegraph - Ireland

CBC - Canada

Channel 4 news - Britain

CNN - USA

Colorado Gazette - USA

Corriere della Serra - Italy

de Volkskrant - Netherlands

Deutsche Welle - Germany

Die Welt - Germany

El Mundo - Spain

El Pais - Spain

Elsevier - Netherlands

eNCA - South Africa

France24 - France

Greater Kashmir - India

Guardian - Britain

Herald Sun - Australia

KOSUA - USA

La Repubblica - Italy

La Stampa - Italy

Le Monde - France

Le Parisien - France

Le Point - France

Mashable - USA

NDTV - India

New York Times - USA

Nieuwsblad - Belgium

NRC - Netherlands

Powned - Netherlands

skyNews - Britain

Spiegel online - Germany

Sydney Morning Herald - Australia

tagesschau (TV 1) - Germany

The Indian Express - India

The Irish Times - Ireland

The Times - Britain

The Times of Israel - Israel

The Toronto Star - Canada

Wall Street Journal - USA

Yahoo news - USA

Your Middle East - Sweden

Die ZEIT - Germany

And there's lots more in print.

In trying to silence reporting by three journalists, Egypt has evoked for over 20 months now a constant reporting by hundreds of media outlets the world over. If anything has damaged the reputation of Egypt, the stubborn ruthlessness by the regime to attack a free press and individual journalists has.

A shot-in-foot story if ever there was one. And unless the regime of President Sisi finally gets this, the reporting and subsequently damaging of Egypt's reputation will continue. Worldwide. For as long as such attacks continue and definitely until the journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, criminally held in jail now, are set free and allowed to return to their families.

Not to mention the dozens of other journalists held without charges in Egypt's detention hell holes, in violation of Egyptian law and even the Egyptian constitution.

Journalism is not a crime, Mr President Sisi. – Suppressing journalism is.

Finally: UK, US and EU condemn state terrorist attacks on civilians in Egypt

On Wednesday a suicide bomber blew himself up near the temple of Luxor, killing himself. A second was shot by police. An Egyptian civilian and a policeman were wounded.

In an immediate reaction the allies of Egypt in the West issued statements condemning the attack:

UK, US, EU condemn terrorist attack in Luxor

The European Union, United States and UK condemned a Wednesday suicide bombing near Karnak temple of Luxor Wednesday, expressing their support to Egypt against "terrorism."

Minister for North Africa Tobias Ellwood said in a statement on Wednesday, "I strongly condemn the appalling terrorist attack today in Luxor in Egypt." He added, "The UK continues to stand with the Egyptian government and people in their fight against terrorist violence."

The US embassy in Cairo also commended the police officers and citizens who managed to foil the attack. "We extend our sympathies to those who sustained injuries. We also condemn the attack on the Multinational Force and Observers mission (MFO) base in North Sinai. The United States continues to stand with the Egyptian government and people in the ongoing fight against terrorism."

The EU joined in the condemnations, also asserting their support of the country's efforts to combat 'violent extremism.' "The EU will keep supporting Egypt's efforts to tackle violent extremism and prevent new attacks. We extend our sympathies to those wounded," the EU statement said.

------------------

At the same time, this statement was made, it became known that in the last two months more than at least 163 Egyptian students, activists or random targeted civilians have been kidnapped by Egyptian security forces and disappeared – with the family for weeks frantically and in vain searching for their loved ones in prisons around the country. This was reason for another series of statements by Western Allies that to this day has not been sufficiently reported in world media:

UK, US, EU condemn terrorist attacks on innocent civilians in Egypt

The European Union, United States and UK condemned the disappearance of 163 activists Wednesday, expressing their support to Egypt against "terrorism."

Minister for North Africa Tobias Ellwood said in a statement on Wednesday, "I strongly condemn the appalling attack on innocent citizens in Egypt." He added, "The UK continues to stand with the Egyptian people in their fight against state terrorist violence."

The US embassy in Cairo also commented on the disappeared and rumours of torture inflicted on them. "We extend our sympathies to those who sustained injuries. We also condemn the attack on innocent civilians. The United States continues to stand with the Egyptian people in the ongoing fight against state terrorism."

The EU joined in the condemnations, also asserting their support of the country's efforts to combat 'violent extremism.' "The EU will keep supporting Egypt's efforts to tackle violent extremism by the state security forces and prevent new attacks on innocent citizens. We extend our sympathies to those wounded," the EU statement said.


Several human rights organisations in Egypt, the US, Europe and UK expressed satisfaction that the Western allied powers to Egypt have finally found the courage to speak up for the oppressed Egyptian civilians who are kidnapped, then held and tortured in unknown prisons in the country with the Ministry of Interior and the General Prosecutor refusing to disclose their whereabouts.

"It was about high time", an Egyptian activist said, who did not want his name to be published for fear of disappearing.

The thoughts are free, Egypt!

On the fourth anniversary of Egypt's revolution, things are not the way they are supposed to be. But don't despair, #jan25. They can arrest activists – but never their thoughts. The thoughts are free – and will always be!

This German protest song, in a wonderful interpretation by Italian singer Milva, has scared tyrants for over 200 years and robbed them of their sleep.

The thoughts are free! – There is nothing they can do against it.

Keep going, Egypt. #jan25 is alive in your hearts and can never be removed anymore from the system.

Here is the translation in full:

The thoughts are free -
who ever can guess them?
They fly by
like nocturnal shadows
No man can know them
No hunter can down them
with powder or lead -
The thoughts are free!

I think what I want
and what satisfies me
In my inner space
and just how it should be
My wish and desire
no one can deny me
It remains a fact to be -
The thoughts are free!

And if they arrest me
and throw me in dungeons
All that will be nothing
but futile attempts
Because my thoughts
manage to tear down
the barriers and walls.
The thoughts are free!

Israel's deadly attack on Gaza - A never-ending déjà vu

A few weeks ago I bought the book "The General's Son" by Miko Peled. Peled is an Israeli. His father – Matti Peled – was one of the most respected Israeli Generals fighting in the 1967 Six-Day-War at the side of people like Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. As a colonel in the preceding 1956 war against Egypt, when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip and Sinai, Peled had been made military governor of the Gaza Strip. As his son writes: "This was a defining role for him, and it influenced his entire life."

In 1953, when Matti Peled was still a young lieutenant colonel, his visions were clear. His army, he publicly said, was preparing for war "in order to complete the conquest of the Land of Israel and to push Israel's eastern border to its natural location on the banks of the Jordan River." It is a view that many right-wingers in Israel's cabinet and society hold to this day.

After the experience as governor in Gaza in 1956 and the bloody, albeit short war in 1967, Peled's views however changed. He had seen too many atrocities not only from the enemy but from his own army too, atrocities that chilled the blood.

A week after the Six-Day-War in 1967 was over, as Miko Peled recounts in the book about his father, an Israeli army officer showed up in the neighbourhood at the Rafah Refugee Camp in Gaza, leading a company of soldiers and a bulldozer. The soldiers ordered everyone to come out of their houses and an inspection began. Finally the women and children younger than 13 were sent back home. The men however – around 30 of them including a 13 year old boy and a 86 year old man – were taken away far enough so that their families could not see. Then the soldiers lined the men up against the wall and shot all of them. As they lay on the ground, the officer went from body to body and shot each person in the head.

As if this crime was not atrocious enough, what then came horrified those who were eye-witnesses from afar. The bodies of the dead men and the dead child were laid in a row on the ground and the bulldozer began driving over them, going back and forth several times until the bodies were unrecognisable. When the families finally were allowed to the scene, they could only tell who was who by the clothes they wore.

When I read this story in Peled's book, horrible pictures of Srebrenica showing torn clothes on badly crushed bodies came back to my mind to haunt me. But more pictures started to form in my mind, pictures of bulldozers shovelling heaps of humans into piles in Bergen-Belsen, when the Allies had freed the concentration camps and were at shock over the amount of killed people they found. While the numbers of dead, both in Srebrenica and Bergen-Belsen, outnumber those of the crime Peled writes about by far, the use of bulldozers on the dead and the incredible vileness of the killing act evoke pictures that are hard to take. How low, I wondered reading this horrible story, can anyone sink to perform such atrocious acts on humans? And how, in anyone's right mind, can one then – as Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu keeps repeating – speak of "the most moral army of the world"?

Matti Peled, the respected Israeli army General and former Governor of Gaza was shocked when he, much later, learned about this "massacre", as he termed it. He personally went to Gaza, spoke to the victim's families, inspected the place were the killing and bulldozing had taken place and was utterly disturbed. When Miko Peled, after learning of this story decades later, confronted his mother with it, her reply came immediately: "Yes, I remember this. Your father was so upset he couldn't sleep for weeks. He wrote to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and to Minister Haim Bar-Lev about it, but they did nothing. This changed him completely."

Egypt refuses medical aid to Gaza

When I had bought Peled's book a few weeks ago, the current war on Gaza was not yet waging. I managed to read a few chapters and then was distracted by the real atrocities currently happening on the ground, where by now over 1300 people, almost 80% of them civilians and including more than 300 innocent children, have been killed in indiscriminate bomb attacks by Israel. I couldn't continue to read about the horrors of the past seeing the horrors that now once more happened day after day before the world's eyes.

One night, worn out by witnessing the attacks going on for the 12th consecutive day, and feeling helpless knowing that yet more children would die in the next hours and I could not do anything against it, I picked up Peled's book almost indifferently at 4 a.m. to find some distraction. A ridiculous notion of course, seeing what his book was about. But what I then came across was more than just a simply distraction.

When I opened the book randomly, it fell open on page 164 and I started to read about an effort Peled undertook in 2008 to get into the Gaza Strip to deliver medical aid.

As Gaza was sealed off from the Israeli side at the time, the only possible way to enter and deliver the badly needed aid was via Egypt. So, after having flown all the way from America via Amman to Cairo, together with a Palestinian-Arab friend with whom he had successfully worked on aid projects for Gaza and the West Bank for years, he set off for the Rafah border crossing, trying to enter Gaza from the Egypt side. He was in for a bad surprise. The border was closed and Egypt refused them entry into Gaza.

The border officials, from the soldier up to the officers, were not only denying them entry, they were also exceptionally rude and assaulting. As Peled writes: "Our (Egyptian) guide and driver were in shock at the lack of courtesy displayed by these officials. They knew we had come all the way from America to help people in Gaza and that we had medical equipment to deliver. They were as appalled as we were by the fact that the Egyptians were no more helpful than the Israelis."

In the end, Peled and his companion, who had both invested enormous amounts of time and money to help the people of Gaza in need of medical supplies, had to give up and fly back to Amman. "As it stood," he writes, "the Egyptian government appeared to be committed, along with Israel and the U.S., to maintaining the siege on Gaza."

This was 2008. Today we write 2014, but what Peled described was nothing short of a déjà vu for me, seeing that on the same day I read this a convoy with Egyptian activists that had left from Cairo for Gaza with medical supply was stopped by the Egyptian army half way across the Sinai and after hours of unfriendly debates was forced to turn back and give up their mission, returning deeply frustrated in the evening to Cairo, while the wounding and killing in Gaza went on and the medical supplies were badly needed there.

It seems, nothing has changed from 2008, and one can't help but wonder, if the stories we hear today are not just repetitions of stories we already witnessed.

What is most striking about this incident that Peled describes from back then is what it tells us about today.

The argument that Egypt is currently so staunchly opposed to help Gaza because they blame Hamas, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (ousted out of power by the Egyptian army under now President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi), for the terror attacks by Islamists in Sinai, loses credibility in the wake of Peled's report. In 2008 no such terror in Sinai had endangered Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood was banned and had little power in the political, public sphere. What was no different then to today however were the interested parties involved: Israel and the U.S., which paid Egypt's army billions of Dollars over the years to behave like a good boy should. And Egypt only too readily complied.

A true déjà vu. Nothing, as the denial of medical aid into Gaza by activists now again shows, has changed. The Egyptian government appears to still be "committed, along with Israel and the U.S., to maintain the siege on Gaza."

People have nowhere to go and die in hundreds

Three weeks after Peled and his friend had been turned away by the Egyptian army at Rafah crossing in 2008, the war on Gaza, dubbed by the Israel army "Operation Cast Lead", broke out. Within a period of eight hours the Israeli air force dropped 100 tons of bombs on Gaza and caused incredible devastation in the densely populated area. It was the beginning of 21 days of indiscriminate air attacks assisted by ground forces, turning the Gaza Strip into a place of hell and killing more than 1,400 people including hundreds of innocent children and women, wounded thousands and displaced thousands more with nowhere to go. A picture that we see right this day today, as almost 200,000 people in Gaza have fled their homes to seek shelters in U.N. buildings – where they've been repeatedly bombed by Israel with many dead –, and where hospitals – if they have not been bombed into rubble, as has already happened – despair over the incoming injuries they can't cope with anymore at this scale and the immense numbers of casualties – many of them being children as young as 5 months old who die in what Israel's army and government daily describe the "war on terrorists".

With the narrative that Israel had been "dragged into this escalation by Hamas" and the reiteration that Israel was only "defending" itself legitimately against the rockets from Gaza, being "sorry" for the civilian casualties that go with it, Israel currently makes sure that once more the international community finds no decent words for the ongoing bombing of a densely packed, populated strip of land, where people have nowhere to go and no place to flee to when the bombs rain down and can only die in the hundreds. Which they do.

A terrible déjà vu.

Paging through Peled's book describing the Gaza war of 2008, I read: "To make things worse, Israel claimed that notices were given to the local population that the attack was imminent and that people should leave areas that were going to be bombed." The same exact technique Israel uses today knowing full well that in reality this cannot work and has cost more than 1,400 lives during Operation Cast Lead and further hundreds of lives in the following Gaza war in 2012. It keeps costing lives even today, as those 'warnings' ahead of a bombing often only come a few minutes, sometimes not more than 57 seconds before an air strike, making it impossible for whole families, especially old or ill people, to get out of the house in time before the deadly bomb hits. In consequence the death toll in Gaza since the outbreak of this new war keeps rising in harrowing numbers and Israel shows no willingness to do anything to prevent so many civilians getting killed.

Cheering Gaza strikes with popcorn and drinks

When I read on, I once more by chance came across a passage in Peled's book that chilled me, because it seemed to have been written only yesterday.

After returning to the U.S. in 2008, where he lives with his family now, the Israeli Peled was invited to give a talk at the University of San Diego and writes:

"During my remarks I mentioned that the latest assault on Gaza was not isolated but rather part of a continuous Israeli campaign against Gaza, a campaign that by that point had been going on for more than six decades. Every few years, the Israeli army found a reason to conduct a brutal attack on Gaza and leave behind as many casualties as possible, beginning as early as 1953 with the infamous Unit 101, led by Ariel Sharon. What happened shortly after our failed attempt to cross the border was a continuation of an ongoing war, a war that aims to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine."

And as if that remark from 2008 did not already seem immensely current seeing what is happening before our eyes this very minute once again in Gaza, Peled added one more sentence of frightening actuality, when he wrote 2008:

"I heard stories of people who drove to the Gaza border to sit on lawn chairs and view the bombing."

A déjà vu of the chilling kind.

The world has just witnessed how Israelis dragged plastic chairs and even sofas up on hills, settle down with drinks and popcorn to cheer every air strike that hits Gaza, making for a spectacular display of colour in an otherwise frighteningly dark night and resembling fireworks rather than the lethalness that kills a child in the very minute the crowd cheers on the hill.

Reading Peled from 2008 is like opening an article of the atrocities of 2014. It happens all over again with all the brutality and unbelievable vile repetitiveness that the world has so often now witnessed again and again. And while we show our outrage over the atrocities happening today we totally overlook the pattern we have been a witness to in so many attacks on Gaza that all left hundreds of civilians, including innocent children, dead, with nothing different now than ever before. And think nothing of a world that has found its own repetitive pattern of shrugging it off as something that can apparently not be changed, only ignored.

International powers meddle

Everyone who thinks, the Israel-Palestinian problem is a local one that just won't stop because of the viciousness of the involved parties, is little informed however about how the U.S. is pumping millions into efforts, to make sure only those who to them are politically acceptable run the place.

When Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, President George W. Bush was not willing to take this lying down. It is one thing if elections within America provide results you have to live with, but outside America the nation dedicated to freedom and peace will hear nothing of it, one must gather from revelations and secret documents that surfaced in 2008. Democracy and democratically elections are supported if they produce the results America is comfortable with. If not – see Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and many more – direct involvement to get rid of the government the people of the country voted into office start almost immediately.

When Hamas won the elections in Gaza and the West Bank, Condoleezza Rice, the then Secretary of State of America, secretly flew into Ramallah with a respectable bundle of dollars in her bag to make sure, this was a short term victory. Promising $1.27 billion in aid Rice demanded from Abbas to oust the Hamas government within two weeks by staging a coup. Abbas was hesitant if the constitution allowed him as president to depose the elected government. But Rice brushed that aside. She was not going to let the Palestinian constitution get in her way. She pressed on. Her counterpart remained uneasy. It was Ramadan. Abbas said it could not be done before Eid, the end of the holy time. He then asked her to join him for iftar, a light meal with which Muslims break their fast when the sun sets. As Rice later got into her armoured SUV she fumed: "That damned iftar has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government!"

Rice should err. It took much longer to get rid of the government the Palestinian people had – to the complete surprise of the U.S. – voted into office. America pumped millions into a military training of thousands of Fatah soldiers and even got Israel to allow the smuggling of thousands and thousands of weapons into Gaza, so that Fatah would be armed and trained and could stage the coup against Hamas (arms that – another déjà vu – later fell into the hands of Hamas and trouble Israel to this day).

As vileness and stupidity often go together, word of this monstrous plan got out. And when Hamas learned that Abbas with the help of both America and Israel was planning to stage a coup – Hamas struck first and fierce battles began, at the end of which Hamas triumphed in Gaza and won full control of the Strip.

America's game had not payed off. And to this day the consequences are felt in the region and both Israel and America keep trying everything in the book to reverse the political facts in the Gaza Strip, now held – not little thanks to the ignorance and arrogance of the U.S. – by Hamas alone.

The current war against Gaza, that Israel, innocently blinking eyes, says it was "dragged into", is a direct reaction to the Government of Unity that Fatah and Hamas finally agreed upon and established in June. The idea that the Palestinians would unite in harmony and become, lo and behold, a strong democratically elected power in the region, send shock waves through Tel Aviv and Washington. With the killing of three innocent Israeli teenagers, Netanyahu got just the pretence he needed to go into the West Bank, kill eight Palestinians, raid thousands of Palestinian homes, leaving most in shatters, and arrest – without charges – more than 500 Palestinians. It was this that triggered off what Netanyahu had hoped for: futile, ineffective rockets fired by a furious Hamas that would give him the possibility to bomb back with high-tech lethal weapons, citing the "right of Israel to defend itself" and stage yet another war on Gaza to avoid having to accept that Palestinians – Fatah and Hamas – agreed on a unity both Israel and America were not willing to allow. As Peled wrote back in 2008: "Every few years, the Israeli army found a reason to conduct a brutal attack on Gaza." The fear, Palestinians, united in one government, would become strong, was the reason found this time.

To think all of the atrocities, the killings of innocent women and children we are once more witnessing on a daily, haunting basis in Gaza, is Israel's work alone, is based only on what Miko Peled describes as the wish to "ethnically cleanse the landscape of Palestinians", would be ignoring the broader picture and interests at stake. It is a fight of international proportions, where next to Israel's very own interests to gain control over all the territory of the Palestinians, America has a very personal geopolitical security interest to defend Israel and a desire to fulfil the unabated wishes of a strong pro-Israel constituency. It is this which makes it so impossible to bring the conflict to an end. The parties involved locally – Hamas and Fatah – had already agreed and established "one government representing the Palestinian people", as is now sternly demanded as an ultimate and only acceptable goal by Israel, the U.S. and its allies. However, as the events after the democratic elections 2006 and the current warfare show, not any "one government" will do. It has to be one that serves the interests of those who meddle in the region and are not short of cash to finance what they want to get.

On Sunday, 20 July, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, that the Gaza war so far has cost the Israelis $585 million. But Israel has no reason for concern. Only two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate approved $621 million to finance Israel's defence system in the sky, the Iron Dome. There is still money left in the till after that, so the war can go on. And it will.

Grab your chair and your popcorn if you have the stomach to handle it. Thanks to international politics denying the Palestinians their basic rights and an indifferent world not wanting to get involved it's déjà vu all over again.

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(A slightly shorter version of this text appeared in the Daily News Egypt, Cairo, on 24 July 2014)