The Egyptian government is investigating puppets:
On New Years’ Day, Vodafone, a mobile-phone operator, felt obliged to issue a statement denying that an advertisement it had produced, featuring Muppet-like dolls, carried any subversive messages. The denial followed allegations, aired on a television talk show, that the advert contained imagery and words suggesting that a coded message was being issued to Islamist terrorists.
Given an intensified campaign against the ousted Muslim Brotherhood by Egypt’s army-backed government, and given the loyalist Egyptian press’s fevered efforts to cheerlead the witch hunt, it was not surprising that many viewers took the allegations seriously. Some noted that a cactus that appeared briefly in the cheaply made three-minute clip had four branches, suspiciously similar to the four-fingered salute that became a symbol for Brotherhood supporters after hundreds were killed during police operations to clear a protest sit-in in Cairo. The cactus represented bitterness and resistance, asserted one commentator, while another remarked that a Christmas ornament hanging from the cactus suggested a bomb. …
By and large, Egyptians have poured scorn and ridicule on all this silly talk. Not, however, the government. The country’s prosecutor general has formally tasked the state security prosecution service, a feared branch that handles terrorist cases, with carrying out an urgent and thorough investigation.
Any translated summary of the ad from an Arabic-speaking Dishhead would be much appreciated. The suspect puppet – Abla Fahita, the one in the curlers – took to national television to defend herself yesterday. Juan Cole looks at the bigger picture:
The Egyptian state has long been peopled by people obsessed with weird conspiracy theories. That kind of thinking is encouraged by dictatorship. It is transparency that cuts down on paranoia. Unfortunately, Egypt’s brief fling with democracy did little to dispel the conspiracy theory mindset on the part of high officials and television hosts.
In early fall, there was the case of the spy stork, when a tracking tag was mistaken for an espionage device on a stork. Although the bird was exonerated from treason charges, it was nevertheless eaten in captivity. Then there had been in the last year of the Mubarak era the allegations that sharks attacking swimmers in the Red Sea might be Mossad agents of Israeli intelligence.
Mind you, the military government has jailed journalists for alleged incorrect reporting (three Al Jazeera correspondents were recently detained) and spreading false information is one of the grounds given for the recent ban on the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Dish 