youtube.com - Police Brutality - Egyptian Style

An interesting story popped up recently about a cellphone video showing an Egyptian bus driver being tortured and possibly sodomized by the Egyptian Police. It was all over the news in Egypt and the West. Human Rights Watchdogs and organizations have criticized the Egyptian government in its mishandling of the situation and of tolerating human right abuses against its people in general.If anybody knows Egypt, they know that their police force historically has been abusive. That comes as no shock to Egyptians (or Arabs in general for that matter) but why this was shocking is because of the video and the images. This new trend of cellphones that can take videos and pictures allows anyone to get any clip of any incident almost at anytime. These phones empowered by super influential internet machines such as youtube.com and blogging has allowed for any piece of information to be spread to the entire world. No amount of campaigning for the sake of police abuse in Egypt could come close to a single video of a man being beaten and sodomized!! It is so outrageous that even the government can not pretend it doesn't exist or that it was done for a remotely good reason. See the beauty of things like videos and pics and spreading them on the net is that it doesn't allow for the higher powers (governments or media moguls) to filter it, distort it, change it, or spin it.


For example, when the pics of Iraqi prisoner being tortured in Abu Gharib by American soldiers came out, nothing can be done to make it look anything but what it was, a disgusting and sickening act of savagery. As of late there has been videos of scandalous adult/sex parties in the Arab Gulf countries with veiled women dancing provocatively for a party of men. There was the Saddam execution cellphone video that showed us so much more than the actual hanging (I never watched the actual hanging), and now there are these videos of police brutality in Egypt.

The significance of all this is that everyone has been empowered to become a journalist of sorts. Everyone can take a clip, a pic of something that looks weird or revolting (and funny but thats not the topic here). The media has become so much less exclusive and more driven by the populous. Here are some of the Egyptian videos that were eventually aired all over the world.

Woman being tortured to confess.

Man being slapped by the Police.