Award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator Mona ElTahawy beautifully shreds the legitimacy of Kareem’s imprisonment, and gives a stern reminder to President Mubarak. An absolute must-read: Threats unlikely to silence bloggers as Egypt jails youth for “insults”. Read it all! (Hat tip: Jesse.)

Excerpts:

It is at once sadly pathetic and oddly gratifying that the regime of Mubarak – who has ruled Egypt for 25 years – felt it necessary to convict a young man “armed” only with a keyboard and access to the internet. Frightening as his conviction might be, surely it is a victory for the brigade of the young and determined who populate the Egyptian blogosphere and who like Nabil have known no other leader than Mubarak.

[…]

But why has Mubarak’s regime slammed its wrath on Nabil in particular?

Islam.

Religion and the bogeymen

Nabil has been outspoken not only in his criticism of the regime but also about both Islam and al-Azhar, the bastion of Sunni Muslim thought. There is nothing that Nabil could have said about either Islam or Mubarak that should ever warrant such a trial, conviction or sentencing. But in Mubarak’s Egypt, the regime knew putting this young man on trial and accusing him of insulting Islam would earn it cheap public opinion points.

[…]

One cannot forget that this time last year Egypt was spearheading the campaign of manufactured outrage against the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Now as then, flying the flag for Muslim anger and insult was the Egyptian regime’s lazy way of burnishing its Islamic credentials at a time when domestic Islamists in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood were stronger than they have been in years.

[…]

But when a regime’s religious camouflage is so obvious, it must expect to be held up to its own standards. If that same State is such an eager defender of Islam (and surely Islam, which has thrived for more than 1,400 years, doesn’t need defending) then let us count the ways it honours and abides by it.

What is it if not an insult to the social justice at the heart of Islam that systematic torture infects police stations and jails around Egypt? Surely it is an affront to that same Islam that while Mubarak, his family and their inner sanctum of cronies benefit from the meager growth in the Egyptian economy they so proudly point to, so many Egyptians cannot afford to buy meat or have to juggle two or three jobs to weave the most basic of lives.

What kind of Islam does the Mubarak regime defend when a bus driver can be dragged to a police station, sodomized with a stick as police officers capture the torture on mobile phone camera and then send it to the driver’s co-workers to make sure the humiliation and intimidation is recorded for posterity?

The emperor’s new clothes

Enter the bloggers. They make those connections and they text message, they blog and they post on YouTube that the emperor is naked. They also out maneuver that same naked emperor and his henchmen by manipulating and subverting a technology that is daily leveling the playing field of information.

[…]

Mubarak does not own Egypt and he does not own Islam. The bloggers will continue to remind him. And they cannot be silenced.
Not just because they know how to hopscotch over blocked IP addresses but because it is impossible to silence youth. They will always find a way to have the last word.

Bravo, Mona! Bravo!