Responding to Lara Logan (wrongly labelled as Laura Logan):
"How did it start?
I was living in Egypt at the time, and I remember these events somewhat vividly. The ubiquity of sexual harassment in Egypt was always one of the main issues that deeply distressed me about the country and made me disillusioned about the Arab Spring very quickly.
The beginning of the phenomenon of what came to be known in Arabic taharush gamae'e, or mass sexual harassment, can be actually pinned down with exactitude in the summer of 2006. The first major incident took place during the opening night of a movie called Alia al-Tarab. It was a spoof stupid film that had become the default of Egyptian cinema starting from the late 1990s. Vulgar films of very low quality that were more of a montage of scenes of vulgar comedy, crass music, sexual inuendos, and sexual suggestiveness primarily catering to the tastes and chauvinism of working-class young Egyptian men. It was likely the worst point of decline in the history of the Egyptian film industry, the oldest in the Middle East.
The main female character of the movie was the famous belly dancer named Dina, who was attending the opening night in a movie theater in downtown Cairo. This was Eid night, the first day of the holiday following Ramadan. According to the news reports I remember from the time, as Dina showed up in front of the theater, a commotion started in the large crowds of young men gathered around the theater. She suddenly started dancing in front of them, which led to an explosion of chaos that sent Dina running to take shelter in the theater, and left the aroused young men hunting in groups in the streets for women to sexually assault.
Dina denied the incident later (I'm surprised I remember all of this), but here are the facts: that night in downtown Cairo, several women, usually in the company of their families, were savagely sexually assaulted by groups of young random men. The group of men, through acts of chaos, would usually isolate their victim from her family, drive her to either a street corner or to the middle, and then proceed to assault her. This was the first time such thing, at least with such a high profile, ever happened: in the middle of downtown Cairo adjacent to Tahrir Square (think Times Square), where much of the Egyptian government and the police forces are headquartered, on an Eid night when a very large number of people is out, and with such barbarity.
This was a shattering incident. It was first called by the press su'ar gensi, or an explosion of 'sexual rabis', and it incensed public opinion. The days after, the Ministry of Interior denied that the incident ever took place, despite the footage, and accused al-Ahram, the government's own press outlet, of spreading false information. Others blamed Dina and the movie makers for the incident, accusing them of debauchery and spreading immorality amongst the youth. Bottom line, no actions were taken.
In the following years, the incidents started to increase at an alarming pace with the highest risk typically on national holidays or soccer matches, days in which large crowds are expected to be present. The victims were of every age and of every background: younger women, older women, veiled, unveiled, etc. The perpetrators also became diverse: older men, younger men, and more alarmingly, and in my opinion, more key to understanding this, large groups of male children as well. (We are talking 11 years old) The government seemed helpless to respond to this in any way, public order and morality seemed to be collapsing at an alarming rate, and the frequency created a sense of normalcy in which this became a part of life for which the term taharush gamae'e, or mass sexual harassment (really, assault) was coined. Women had to deal with it and calculate their moves in public as to minimize the risk to the largest extent.
Then came the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, during which Logan's incident took place. I personally witnessed it twice, once around Tahrir Square and once in Zamalek, an upscale Cairo neighborhood with a lot of embassies and Western residents. Later on, and following the waves of migration to the North, European cities will become familiar with the phenomenon.
I remember the first time I witnessed this in Tahrir Square and it is still very hard to put into words. It was like watching a zoological documentary on National Geographic. It erupted suddenly without signs when a large group of young men, whom I'm certain did not know each other nor did they coordinate in any verbal way, formed a large circle around a young woman to attack her. I was frightened, but I hesitantly got close due to a vague urge of something, maybe a hazy sense of duty, to do something. I got close enough to see the people's faces, and it was, without exaggeration, one of the most terrifying scenes in my life: they were human faces that were not human faces. The eyes were completely empty except from raw instinct in action, like the face of an animal. I found myself looking in the face of a human condition I never thought ever existed: a state of pure animal existence without a trace of humanity. My friends pulled me away afterward.
The second time, which took place in Zamalek, though much less dramatic for the girl was thankfully quickly rescued by a passing vehicle, I still also remember clearly, but for other reasons. I was with two good friends, Amir and Hala, leaving a seafood restaurant after dinner. It was maybe around June, so five months after the beginning of the Arab Spring. Amir and Hala were other fellow Tahrir Square protestors, the kind Obama hailed and featured in American media: middle class, Westernized, generically liberal, etc., the Bassem Youssef type. They were optimistic about "the revolution" and the Californian future awaiting Egypt, a view which, at that point, I no longer shared. I had become disillusioned and believed that Egypt, and the entire Middle East, was heading towards unmitigated disaster, in great part because of the collapse of public order and morality which led to this kind of sexual assaults.
I had spent dinner trying to convince them that the cause was already lost and that there was nothing to hope for. They, on the other hand, were optimistic, calmer, and very hopeful, playing down everything I said (being dismissed in this way seems to be my fate) They insisted I was exaggerating and unable to see the historically inevitable progress awaiting us (both of them now live in the West) and I insisted they were delusional. As we were exiting the restaurant, we saw the incident in which a large group of young men running after a young, pretty woman wearing a nice short dress (this was Zamalek) and it wasn't hard to guess what was going on. Thankfully, a car, I don't know if the driver knew the girl or not, sped through the men, let the girl in, and took off with speed. I didn't need their validation then.
Now, if you I got you to read this far, you must read the rest of what I have to say about this,
Followers of Western leftism, a despicable ideology, would have a hard time fitting this into their worldview they would usually deny its existence altogether. So would liberals, whose ideology became a form of intellectual retardation with its recently acquired delusional and infantile views on human nature. Those who are disposed to suspicion of Islam or Arab culture would happily blame it entirely on an eternal Muslim or Arab ethos. As a person who lived it, I find all to be delusional.
This kind of truly barbarous, anti-social, and uncivilized behavior was actually a new development in Egypt, traditionally the most modernized and middle-class Arab society for most of the 20th century, and was, until 2006, unknown and unimaginable. Egypt was not a feminist society by any Western measure. Sexual harassment and assault, including street cat-calling, existed long before. Yet, and until my teenage years, it was still a largely civilized society. There were clear codes of public civility and morality; some derived directly from religion, some from modern Western bourgeois morality, and much from social norms of family relations, the honor institution, neighborly conduct, and settled ethical norms.
These ethical systems had their own structure of social authority, which most people intuitively obeyed. Again, it was not perfect, nor did it conform fully to Western standards; for instance, a man could slap his wife in public in case of an argument (not that it was very common) and expect little interference. But such public demonstrations of sheer cruelty and sexual barbarity was something that went through every grain of public order, morality, religiosity, and social expectations. Their explosion was a sign, not of the presence of a certain system of non-Western morality, but the erosion of one along with traditional authority, law and order, and the collapse of entire systems of civilizing restraints.
It is an important story not because it exposes some essential barbarity at the heart of Muslim or North African men, but a story of a society that went through a process of decivilization and in which it's institutions were no longer capable of transmitting its capital of social knowledge and psychological inner restraints, and regulated releases, to the low strata of its members. It is inseparable from the story of social implosion, state collapse, and proliferation of ever more cruel forms of violence in many parts of the region. Reducing the entire issue to 'culture' or 'Islam' is not just unfair to the people, (screw fairness) but it blinds us to understanding how a process of drastic civilizational and social erosion can happen at such a speed. The pundits who keep selling you easy answers, neat explanations, full packages, etc. are mostly lying to you and do not know what they are talking about. Understanding what happened to Arab societies since the disaster of decolonization until today and the leftist revolutionary culture wars (already happened in the MidEast in the 1950s and which the Arab left won decisively) and the revolutionary gradual destruction of every psychological restraint and social institution could be your cautionary tale about what is happening to Western societies today.
Lastly, and more importantly, these terrifying and beasts of men I watched in these terrifying episodes were still human. They were as human as myself and as every other human I met in my life from all faiths and races. If Western liberalism wants to become a pathetic lie, offering the Western youth a rosy image of a Disneyland human nature, its a lie that no self-respecting person should participate in. Civilization and socialization, things that are easier lost than gained, are the most precious accomplishments of any society, but they are accomplishments nevertheless. We are not born with them. We inherit them, we appropriate them, we take part in them, and we preserve them. They are things that arise not from design but from accumulated experience through countless lives in the past. To squander such an inheritance for the sake of a lie is the worst self-betrayal one could ever commit.
This life experience of mine is the reason I do believe in the possibility of progress but also of regress, and I consider any Western ideology that believes in laws or inevitability of progress to be nothing but the lies of of empty minds and shallow souls."
Clearly, making any link between this and allegations that Muslim migrants in Europe are linked to sexual harassment is racist and xenophobic, so Hussein Aboubakr Mansour needs to be deplatformed and prosecuted for hate speech.
Addendum:
"Since this got around, I have a few more thoughts on the issue, and I wish you read and share if you did with the first tweet.
Sexual perversity is not a unique trait of this or that culture. Sexual perversity, as a form of pathology and ill-socialization, exists in every society with varying degrees and exists on individual levels, which is often the form that may be scientifically called pathological. And since I'm not a postmodernist or a Marxist, I would say that despite that there are apparent ambiguities and variations in how each society regulates its sexual life, there is most certainly sexual pathology and perversity that are universally recognized as so in the overwhelming majority of organized social units almost at all times. Incest, rape, self-mutilation, excessive promiscuity, bestiality, asexuality, etc., are some of the clear examples. There are, of course, caveats and exceptions. For instance, asexuality is normally considered perverse; however, as a religious vow or a monastic path, it becomes a sign of holiness. In many Muslim societies, marital rape is not considered rape, but that is exactly the point: it is not identified as rape, yet the very category of rape, as a form of anti-social and perverse behavior, exists intact.
Having said all of that, Western societies have been showing alarmingly increasing signs of mass sexual perversity, such as excessive pornography (in fact, I'm convinced American-made porn in which the world is awash is an important factor in the behavior of those young Egyptian men), the obsession with transsexuality, turning sex into identity and meaning-making mechanism, and the insertion of these sexual perverse obsessions into early child education leading to the genital mutilation of children. These are some of the forms of the current prevalent eroticism in the West, a post-Christian ideology that seeks to fill the void of religion, community, and meaning through the deification of human libidinal vitality, which is ironically leading to self-castration.
One could claim that these forms of sexual perversities are qualitatively different than the ones I mentioned earlier in Muslim society, for they do not entail any cruel violence on par with what happens in many parts of the Muslim world. It is an objection that I'm willing to concede to (after all, I prefer to live here and not there), but only partially. The qualitative difference is a matter of degree and form, not of substance, and which may develop in many directions (I'm trying to explain a developmental story, not an essentialist one). A mob of young Muslim men attacking a female is indeed a high degree of cruel, inhumane violence, but isn't letting a child irreversibly damage their body through hormone treatment and surgical genital mutilation also a form of cruel social violence? It is a highly rationalized, technicality, structured, ordered, and methodological violence: the suggestible child is influenced by school teachers and Tik-Tok, the parents are promised a special kind of social prestige if they become the guardians of a trans angel, the pharmaceutical industry capitalized on the profit, and the politician finds new delusions to sell. A medical professional administers purposefully damaging toxins and eventually holds the scalpel in a very sanitized and hygienic environment to remove the breasts of a young girl or the penis of a young man. Very orderly, very neat, and very civilized form of cruel and dystopian violence.
Again, I recognize the qualitative difference between the two forms, yet I'm not sure that it makes the social outcome any better or that it is not another manifestation of a similar process of social disintegration and moral collapse as the one that happened in the last century in many Muslim societies. As a matter of fact, I actually believe it's a continuation of the same process of social disintegration, which, due to the internal weaknesses of many Muslim societies, happened at an alarmingly rapid pace and in the forms we saw.
This then brings us to the question of religion and Islam. I receive a lot of disapproving comments and notes about how I talk about Islam and its role. Even the majority of educated and liberal Arabs became utterly committed to the idea that Islam is the source of all evil. What I have to say about this is the following: these sexual evils, including what we saw on Oct 7th and with ISIS, are manifestations of Islam as much as transsexualism and pornography are manifestations of Christianity. As a matter of fact, the degeneration that happened to religion in the Middle East at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ayatollahs, the Salafis, etc., was part of the process of social and moral disintegration, and ultimately, so is this universal condemnation of Islam itself, which I situate within a historical development which started with revolutionary decolonization. The rising state brutality in places like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, the Arab high-culture elites selling out their entire society to the international left and infesting their societies with pathologies of anti-Americanism and antisemitism, Western universities pumping out Arab intellectuals brainwashed with various forms of Western leftism, the rise of Salaism, which might have been conservative in its original Saudi context, to deconstruct social units and breakdown social solidarities to recreate austere individuals and societies, and complete American incompetence in dealing with the region are some of the conditions which must be taken into account if there is any sincere attempt to understand the conditions of the Middle East of today.
Lastly, Americans, and many if not Jewish elites have been particularly unhelpful, if not outright harmful, in this story. To understand what I mean by this, you must first assume my viewpoint. For the sake of the argument, assume I was right. Assume that the problem wasn't an essentially tribal, violent, anti-Western, or antisemitic Arab or Muslim culture, but a dynamic development that came to be in the 20th century due to a factorial complex of causes which includes the Western university, modernization efforts, etc. What did most American and Jewish elites who are concerned with the Middle East do (if they were not leftist) but write books about the Arab Mind, 7th-century Arabian battles, and medieval Islamic theology, Bin Laden's Muslim theology, how hopelessly militant Islam is, etc.? What would the result be but contributing further to the factors of progressive social disintegration and political collapse? I understand that this might be a disturbing possibility for many, that good American men, Jews and none, who wanted to make the world better actually helped it to become worse, and that is exactly how I see it, but without any moral condemnation. As a matter of fact, I prefer to work with many such people to help correct their views.
I do not claim that I understand these issues well. Actually, I admit fully that I do not understand at all how society or history works. However, I'm also certain that most of are so confidently speaking on these issues are even much more ignorant than I am. This is why I can not in good conscience be quiet when I see people so enthusiastic about people like Mosab Hassan Youssef going around talking about Islam as an evil mental illness. Not because I want to defend Islam, I'm not Muslim, but because a person like him, a story like his, should actually typify the story of social disintegration I'm trying to talk about: terrorism and political upheaval destroying human lives, the most basic family relations, intimate bonds, social cohesion, and the very religious and moral foundation of a society. "Islam is an evil mental illness" is just another advanced station on the train of "capitalism is evil" and "Zionist conspiracy," "American imperialism," etc. the same way the the destruction of the sexual organ and vitality themselves was an advanced station on the train of "sex is meaning and identity.""
