Last modified: 7:58 AM Saturday, 14 January 2017

Naming our dead

This page* names 65 Egyptian citizens killed to date in clashes with government thugs in the popular uprising that began on khamis wa-3ashrun yanayir: 25 January. It is, of course, an incomplete record; there have been, according to numerous authenticated reports, well over 200 deaths so far — and this will almost certainly now be an undercount. Nonetheless, the effort is a worthy one: Surely someone should take note of the names of those killed in these historic events, aware that behind the numbing numbers lie individual lives, no less unique and no less precious than yours and mine.

I cannot hope to do equal justice: A few will have to serve in lieu of all. But my rebuke to that ophidian latter-day pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, remains unaltered for the paucity of faces on this page, and it comes in the name of all of his victims: Anta abu zulm. Erhal al-an bismillah.

Moustache designed by Dr. Seuss?

Requiem for a martyr

Sister sites? Useful information on both

Sean Gabb: dangerously insane

‘No sail’?

Above: Sally Magdy Zahran, 23, producer and voice artist, Tahrir (Liberation) Square: “Hit in the back of the head with a bat,
went home to sleep and never woke up.”
[ Image Source ]

Above: Balel Salem, 10, Cairo: “Killed by police forces.”
[ Image Source ]

Above: Saif-Allah Mustafa Musa, 16, Cairo: “Shot at Abbas al-Aqad Street on January 28; he was not part of the demonstrations
but forces thought he was.”
[ Image Source ]

But if there was a single pair of photos that some feel explains better than any other the rage that drove Mubarak from power, I think it must have been these:

Khaled Said, as he appeared before he went to a cyber café to be murdered by the police.
[ Image Source ]

Above is Khaled Said, a 28-year-old blogger who exposed the Mubarak regime’s essential inhumanity, before the regime’s security forces arrested and fatally beat him. I will not post on this page the image of Said after the secret police had finished with him; if you want to see it, click here — but be forewarned: To look upon it is to feel within yourself the torrents of rage that swept away a government.

I call these men, women (and, terrible to say, children) “our” dead because they have died, wittingly or not, in our cause. We, too, must soon take up this gauntlet; soon this cannibalistic global kleptoplutocracy must yield to human values and fundamental morality. One nation at a time, and yet in sum so fast that the elite can never again regain its balance, nor yet think to retake the initiative, we must be shed of this metanational pathocracy.

*Originally published as a review of a Google spreadsheet displaying information about Egyptians killed in the protests beginning 25 January 2011. Update as of 9 February 2011: The list now includes 139 and will continue to grow as more information is compiled.