A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Sunday, December 18, 2011

This Was Inevitable. I Wish I'd Thought of It.

I've given enough of my (allegedly blog-free) weekend to Cairo's horrible weekend, but this is too inevitable to pass up, given the obviousness of the comparison, the hypocrisy, and the double standard. From the Arabic version of the "We Are All Khalid Said" Facebook site, via Laleh Khalili crediting Sarah Carr, this piece of what appears to be viral xerox lore:

Short and rather free translation for the non-Arabists (captions from right to left of course): When a girl [Aliaa Elmahdy, for those who spent the last month on another planet] deliberately of her own free will posed stark naked, people said 'Shame' [haram, "Totally forbidden"] and nobody said "it's Photoshopped"; when a girl [the woman in an abaya, beaten and stripped in Qasr al-Aini in the now famous photo] was stripped naked  against her will, people said 'It's Photoshopped.'" As I've noted, it's also shown on video, so it's not Photoshopped. (Do they think the demonstrators have their own CGI studio? No, they think the masses won't know any better.)

The bold text is emphasized in the original.

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