Interviews with Mahmoud Salem

One day, I was going to my job, and I had my coworkers showing each other a video. And they thought it was really funny. And it was of a police officer slapping a guy in the face and then another police officer holding a big cane and beating a woman inside the police station. And, for some reason, thought this was funny. And so, I pretended this was hilarious. And I got– and I managed to get the videos from them, and then I put them online and I shared them. And it was the first video of a female getting beaten up in a police station.

The police used to like to video– to use their phone to video their torturing of victims. I guess, because it´s so much fun, and they like to reminisce, “Remember the time when I electrocuted this guy´s testicles?” You know, stuff like that. But I believe it was in order to show it to other people and tell them, “This is what we can do for you.” It was a measure of terrorism, in a way, terrorizing them. So for me, it was simple. The police are people that you hire to maintain your security. They should not be electrocuting you or beating you up or torturing you or any of that. So we had to expose that.

We had to show it to people. Because the people in Egypt, they always knew that bad things would happen at police stations. But there is something different between knowing and actually seeing it happen. And that was what we played. And we wanted them to understand that, you know, this was not working out. And I think that´s what´s so interesting about what happened in 2010 with the Khaled Said murder, which was another momentous occasion in Egyptian blogosphere. Because the interesting thing about the Khaled Said case is that it wasn´t especially after he got killed that got people riled up. It was his picture before he got killed. It was, you know, how he looked like. And he looked like everybody´s son, everybody´s cousin, everybody´s– and he could marry your daughter. He could be your grandson. You know, he looked like a decent guy. You know, which is code in Egypt for a middle class guy. You know?

And that´s what– that´s very interesting for me. It´s because that´s what riled up the middle class. That´s when they realized that, if you´re okay with the lower classes getting stepped on, you know, eventually, you´ll get stepped on as well. That´s the concept of human rights. And they got this for Khaled Said. But, for some reason, after the revolution, they´re still not getting the message. You know, especially with all the murder trials that are taking place.

Mahmoud Salem is a blogger, activist, writer and a business development consultant. His blog is the most prominent English-language Egyptian blog, entitled: “Rantings of a Sandmonkey” it won the best Middle East and Africa blog awards in 2006 and 2007, and Best English Blog in the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs award in 2011 and has over 6 million unique views and his Twitter account has over 87,000 followers. His human rights activism areas have been in freedom of speech, human rights, religious rights, and women’s’ rights.

In 2005, he started the first anti-terrorism demonstration in Cairo, and participated in monitoring the Egyptian parliamentary and presidential elections.

In 2006, he was the principal organizer of the first Egyptian anti-sexual harassment demonstration and marsh after the Eid sexual harassment incidents. Incensed by Police torturing Egyptian people on videos and sparing them, he and friends collected the videos, posted them online and pushed for a public persecution of the police officers who committed those acts, leading to the unprecedented convictions of two police officers.

In 2007, he was a stage speaker at the Atlas Foundation’s 25th anniversary conference, head of the new media panel in the Qatar Foundation democracy conference and started the Tafkir project, an Arabic language blogging website to facilitate and promote ideas and online dialogue.

In 2008, he was an organizer and a team leader of 8 Egyptian bloggers for the “Egypt blogs America” project, which monitored the US elections and created a documentary film about it.

In 2009, he was picked for the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference and the US Islamic Forum conference, and started the IRIS social campaign company.

In 2011, he was one of the leading voices of the January 25 revolution that brought down Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ran for Egyptian Parliament, started the Tweetback initiative which developed two impoverished communities in Egypt with a population over 700,000 and raised millions of pounds for social entrepreneurship projects. He also initiated the “Egyptian Bill of Rights Project,” which was later on sponsored by Mohamed El Baradei.

He co-authored two books – “Tweets from Tahrir” and “18 Days” and founded “7etan,” the first Graffiti School in Egypt. His writings have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Guardian and various online websites.