Egypt’s women rise up

last updated 8 January 2015

Video footage of Egyptian soldiers beating and stripping female demonstrators spurred thousands of Egyptian women to return to Cairo’s Tahrir Square this week, shouting, “The women of Egypt are a red line!” The most widely distributed video showed soldiers ripping off a woman’s traditional robe and head scarf to reveal her blue bra, then stomping on her chest. “This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform, and is not worthy of a great people,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The attacks on female demonstrators came during a week of street fighting between troops and protesters calling for the military government to cede power to the parliament currently being elected in multi-round polling. Hundreds of civilians were wounded and more than a dozen killed in the clashes.

The military’s brutalization of women isn’t new, said Ahdaf Soueif in the London Guardian. The regime of Hosni Mubarak used “to insinuate that females who took part in street protests wanted to be groped.” The idea spread, and harassment of women in the streets rose “to epidemic levels.” But men and women protested together to oust Mubarak earlier this year, and the military clearly hasn’t grasped that we are still united. The women’s march this week was joined by thousands of men who formed a human shield around their sisters. The video of the woman in the blue bra has utterly “destroyed the military’s reputation.”

Maybe it’s time to hit the military where it hurts—in the wallet, said The New York Times in an editorial. “If the army continues to attack the Egyptian people,” the Obama administration should cut the $2 billion in annual aid sent to Egypt “to show that it will not enable such behavior.” It’s easy to blame the military for the current chaos, said Steven A. Cook in Foreign Policy, “but the generals have had a lot of help.” Egypt’s revolutionaries, stuck in protest mode, have failed to do “the hard work of political organizing.” They simply throw rocks, even as the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood prevails in the ongoing elections. The chance for positive change is fading as Egyptians tire of “Tahrir’s Frankenstein monster, where there is no leadership, no moral force, no common cause, and no sense of decency.”