Since last Wednesday, the sets of most television talks shows were covered in Egyptian flags. And the colors red, white and black became painfully dominant in the hosts and guests’ dress code. It all seemed like Egypt was about to declare a military war – as the jingoistic mood and the nationalistic tunes made during the Egyptian-Israeli 1973 war and patriotic songs created only this week flooded the air waves.
But this time the war isn’t military, and it isn’t over land. It’s verbal and diplomatic, and some argue "political," and it followed a game of football with Arab "brothers."
The country had reached its watershed moment last week in the wake of its 1-0 football loss against Algeria during a hyped World Cup qualifying game held in Sudan. After the game, unsuspecting Egyptian fans were reportedly "terrorized" by Algerian hooligans, who wielded knives and batons threatening to slaughter the Egyptians and chasing them in the streets.
The game had followed another in which Egypt had won Algeria 2-0 in Cairo, before which Algerian team players were attacked and after which Egyptian interests in Algiers were sabotaged and Egyptian expatriates residing there were assaulted and allegedly thrown with "firebombs."
Despite the denial of Sudanese authorities, numerous eye witnesses spoke of a "horror" night in Sudan in which fan buses were thrown with rocks and pelted with daggers.
The Egyptians, many of them celebrities, said that the Egyptian embassy and Sudanese authorities had failed to secure their safety and claimed that tens of fans had endured injuries. Rumors even had it that a fan named "Karim" had died, something that was never confirmed by authorities here or in Sudan. However on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, this and similar unconfirmed reports were repeated and spread as "facts."
The President’s son Alaa Mubarak, who attended the game in Sudan along with his younger brother and the ruling party’s second-in-command Gamal, called el-Riyada el-Youm’s (Sports Today) Khaled el-Ghandour and el-Beit Beitak show recounting his side of the story. Emotional and claiming to "speak as a regular Egyptian citizen" and not as the president’s son, he described the Algerian supporters as "militias who exercised terrorism" against the Egyptian fans. "These are not fans, these are terrorists," Mubarak said.
"Thank God we’ve lost the game. Otherwise, it would have been a massacre," he said. Mubarak added that he and his brother saw Algerian "military air planes" in the airport. The planes had carried armed supporters into Sudan, he said, boasting that he and his brother refused to fly out of Sudan first and leave the national team behind.
He also said that Egypt should not play "the mother nation" any longer. "Enough is Enough," he told el-Ghandour.
In another call to el-Beit Beitak, Alaa Mubarak called for boycotting Algeria in the cultural, artistic and sports arenas.
Perhaps in an attempt to appear plucky, he said that in the next football confrontation with Algeria –if it happens– "we won’t go [to the game] with women and children" and hinting that they will be ready to meet force with force.
From his side Gamal Mubarak chose silence, and President Hosni Mubarak only broke his on Saturday when he assured the People’s assembly –to much applause– that the "dignity of Egyptians will be restored."
Media reports following the Sudan incident were not only slanted in favor of Egypt, but they seemed to be ritualistically encouraging hostility towards Algeria, with TV presenters and hosts turning a blind eye to, or sometimes approving, pejorative remarks against the Arab and African country, such as calling the Algerian people "barbarians" and deprecating their war of independence.
Many of the media outlets, mainly Amr Adeeb’s AlQahera AlYoum (Cairo Today) show, were openly incendiary.
Adeeb, along with his co-host Ahmed Moussa, launched an onslaught against the Algerian government and people, refusing to address the game itself and insisting that the attack against the fans was a pre-meditated, high-level, Algerian-government-sponsored scheme to "liquidate" the Egyptians who flew to Sudan to watch the cut-throat game.
Calls to his show included one made by singer Mustapha Kamil who criticized Algeria’s "ungratefulness" claiming that "we liberated its people, those people whose honor was violated [during the war]" and another by Algerian-Egyptian actor Ahmed Mekki who pledged loyalty to the Egyptian people and said he wanted an official apology from Algeria. Surprisingly, Mekki himself had denounced "media agitators" in a rap song that he produced before the games and in which he asked Algeria and Egypt to unite.
Other callers included journalist Mustapha Bakri who called for an action against what some now call an "enemy state." Adeeb also seemed in agreement with ex-footballer Ibrahim Hassan who called Algerian fans "criminals."
Abeeb’s discourteous attitude towards the Algerians began weeks before the Egypt and Sudan games.
An Algerian, posting a home-made video on Youtube, said that Amr Adeeb was "the main reason I now hate the 80 million Egyptians". He blamed him for fueling the rivalry between the two Arab countries and said he was especially offended and hurt when Adeeb prayed in his show that "all the Algerian people be crushed and anguished" following the game with Egypt.
But Adeeb’s show is only one of many leaping on the bandwagon and launching an unprecedented verbal war against Algeria.
A Channel 2 TV presenter, clad in black and white, sporting a pout and wearing bright red lipstick -to boast the colors of the Egyptian flag- grilled Syrian actor Gamal Sulayman in an interview during the closing ceremony of the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) in an effort to make him denounce the Algerian government, which in her words, had instigated the violence against Egyptian fans.
During the same event, another presenter relentlessly prodded Saudi actress Mays Himdan with questions until she conceded that the deterioration of relations between the two countries is "Algeria’s loss."
CIFF best actor award winner Fathi Abdel Wahab, who gave a short albeit fiery acceptance speech in support of the national football team and dedicated his award to both the team and the wounded Egyptians fans, received a hero’s welcome on the popular el-Beit Beitak talk show.
The show, which had also featured film star and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Yousra, received several phone calls from Arab and Egyptian actors that openly called for severing ties with Algeria, recalling the Egyptian ambassador to Algiers and boycotting it on the cultural level.
Some of the phone calls contained anecdotes from singers and actors who attended the play-off in Sudan. For example, with a broken voice, singer Mohamed Fouad said that he and his son were pelted with stones on their way to the Khartoum airport, and recounted how they had to hide in a house from knife-wielding Algerian "thugs" for hours until help arrived. Chocking up tears, Fouad said that his son is traumatized and has trouble sleeping ever since – as the hosts Khairy Ramadan and Tamer Amin’s faces twisted in pain, and Yousra theatrically buried her face in her hands.
Other actors called in saying that the violence took them unawares, otherwise they would have gone to Sudan ready for a fight.
While others like Mohamed Saad, of el-Limby fame, said he wished he were in Sudan so that he would pay the Algerians back in kind.
But perhaps the worst remarks came from actor Mahmoud Abdel Aziz who said that the Algerian president "pisses his pants" and from Adham el-Kamouny, TV presenter, who told el-Beit Beitak that "Algeria is infamous for its loose women" — surprisingly, the show hosts and guests were not outraged by the rude comments, and only met the outpour of insults from the callers with embarrassed smiles.
The same show interviewed a Facebook group creator and praised her efforts to unite people "against Algerian violence". By the show’s end, the group’s online participants had risen from a few hundred to over 9,000. The next day, the Zamalek area saw rowdy demonstrations where the Algerian flag was burned and the Algerian embassy surrounded.
In a previous episode, the same hosts, enticed by Alaa Mubarak’s call, said that Egypt’s media should be united against Algerian violence.
During that episode, Mubarak had criticized Dostour columnist Ibrahim Eissa for highlighting the Egyptian failure to secure fans in Sudan charging that the security apparatus was only concerned with steel mogul Ahmed Ezz and the president’s sons safety "while everyone else went to hell." Mubarak’s eldest son understood this to mean that Eissa was accusing him of cowardice, and said that Eissa’s column was full of lies.
But this is not the only instance when those who broke ranks with the mainstream anti-Algerian attitude were lashed at on air.
October, a social and political weekly magazine, was put to shame when its cover page featured the Algerian flag and carried the headline "Congratulations Algeria" for the win. Commentators on Egyptian satellite TV shows panned the magazine, as its own publishing house workers went out in protest, burning pages of the magazine and asking for the controversial copy to be withdrawn from the market. An employee of Dar el-Ma’arif, its publisher, told Egyptian TV that their colleagues from other publications are calling them traitors.
In Mona el-Shazli’s public affairs show Al-‘Ashera Masa’an or 10 PM, a slight change of discourse was witnessed where guests like Journalists Syndicate head Makram Mohamed Ahmed said that reports of attacks on fans were exaggerated and that Algerians were fed wrong reports that provoked the backlash. However, when poet Gamal Bakhit called in shouting that the Algerians were insulted and their history belittled, his fiery words were cut off by el-Shazli and footballer Ahmed Hassan.
Any other media outlet that showed but a little support for Algeria, like Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera, was portrayed as a fifth column that’s bent on knocking down Egypt in favor of its new "enemy."
