Wael Ghonim didn’t intend to spark a revolution, said Jose Antonio Vargas in The New York Times. On June 8, 2010, the 29-year-old Egyptian native and Google employee was browsing news online when he saw images of Khaled Said, a young man from Alexandria, who’d been beaten to death by Egyptian police. Ghonim posted the images on Facebook and began to type. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” Within months, Ghonim’s page, which he titled “We Are All Khaled Said,” had 250,000 followers, and that community’s online conversations eventually helped catalyze protests in Cairo’s streets. In his new memoir, Revolution 2.0, Ghonim recounts his accidental rise to revolutionary icon.
Ghonim came very close to becoming another Khaled Said, said Joel Connelly in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Three days after the uprising began, in January 2011, he was walking in Cairo when police shoved him into a car. “I knew I was going to heaven,” he says. Held for 11 days, he was under constant threat of torture. “They basically terrify you. Hours were like days. Days were like years. I would have dreams that I was free.” It was testament to the movement’s strength that, eventually, he was. Despite the challenges still hindering Egypt’s transition to democracy, Ghonim believes the struggle will all one day be worth it. “It is too early to judge the situation,” he says. “I believe the revolution is a process. It was not an event.”
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