A Monthly Newsmagazine from Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT)
To Gain access to thousands of articles, khutbas, conferences, books (including tafsirs) & to participate in life enhancing events

Daily News Analysis

Egypt bars peace activists’ entry into besieged Gaza

Crescent International

The military-backed regime in Egypt is determined to tighten the siege of Gaza on orders from their zionist masters. The latest move comes with international peace activists, all of them women including Nobel Laureate, Mairead Maguire, denied entry into Egypt on their way to Gaza to participate in Women's Day celebrations and to express solidarity with them. The zionists are ecstatic.

Cairo, Crescent-online
Thursday March 06, 2014, 09:07 EST

Nobel Laureate and peace activist Mairead Maguire became the second person to be detained at Cairo airport when she arrived on Tuesday night (March 4). Fellow peace activist Ann Patterson was also with her.

They were on their way to join other women peace activists to enter the besieged Gaza Strip today. The delegation of peace activists was to be led by Djamila Bouhired, an icon of the Algerian war of independence from France.

She was not on a flight from Paris on Wednesday night as expected. It was not immediately clear whether Bouhired had been denied boarding at Paris.

The Northern Ireland peace activist Maguire was detained at Cairo Airport, interrogated by police for eight hours and then deported the following day. She said the police were polite but did not give any reason why she was being denied entry.

The American peace activist Medea Benjamin, also part of the delegation, was not so lucky. She had preceded Maguire to Cairo the same day (March 4). Benjamin was arrested upon arrival and badly roughed up. She said the police broke her arm before bundling her out of the country.

Benjamin is the founder of the Code Pink, a US-based feminist, anti-war organization, which has voiced strong opposition to US wars abroad, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The American peace activist has also focused on drone warfare in recent years, authoring a 2012 book called Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. Benjamin was stopped along with 20 other women in her organization at the Cairo Airport on March 4. They were en route to Hamas’ International Women’s Day festival organized in the Gaza Strip.

According to Code Pink's website, the purpose of the trip was to “show solidarity with the women of Gaza, to bring attention to the unbearable suffering caused by the Israeli blockade, to educate people back in our home countries, to push for opening the Gaza borders and to bring solar lamps to help with the electricity shortage.”

After General al-Sisi’s takeover of the Egyptian government, the Jewish-Egyptian general has come down with an iron fist over the Egyptian brotherhood and Hamas.

Al-Sisi has vowed that he will shut down all the tunnels that are the lifelines feeding Gaza with food, supplies, and necessary materials from the outside world.

The Israeli media is reporting on these developments with glee. Israel Today reported that Egypt is now going after Hamas to assure another Muslim Brotherhood uprising cannot happen again. Additionally, Egyptian officials have already told Hamas it will be shutting down smuggling tunnels between the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, Israel Radio declared on February 28.

In another move, an Egyptian court on March 4 declared Hamas a “terrorist” organization, ordered its offices in Cairo to be shut down and all its assets in Egypt confiscated. The military-backed regime has declared all out war on Hamas as part of its plan to crush all Islamic aspirations in the country.

Benjamin documented the ordeal on Twitter, reporting the actions of the police towards her and her colleagues. They were given only dirty bread and water as nourishment, and also physically abused by the police.

“The police pulled my arm out the socket, my arm is dislocated,” Benjamin said by phone from Cairo airport jail on March 4. Benjamin was deported to Turkey, Code Pink declared in a Twitter posting.

END


Sign In


 

Forgot Password ?


 

Not a Member? Sign Up