We Are All Khaled Said on Facebook Drives Protests for Alleged Summer 2010 Murder by Egyptian Police

On Facebook: We are all Khaled Said

We have just received information that the death of Khaled Said is the tinder box and match among Egyptians. It’s said that Said, a young businessman from Alexandria, was beaten to death by local police this summer.

Alexandria Khaled Said Protest July 9, 2010

Newsweek is on the same story.

Said, a young businessman from Alexandria, was reportedly beaten to death by local police this summer – well before rumblings of the country’s current unrest. But a Facebook page that bears his name has been one of the driving forces behind the upheaval that started last week.

Esraa Abdel Fatah, the so-called “Facebook Girl” for organizing a nation-wide strike through her Facebook page in 2008, says that she doesn’t know the identity of El Shaheed, meaning martyr, who is the administrator of the We are all Khaled Said page.

For all we know, El Shaheed could be a woman. Take that Chris Matthews!

Newsweek also writes:

El Shaheed’s Facebook page, simply named “We Are All Khaled Said,” began as a campaign against torture and police brutality. But this month, shortly after the Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was brought down following weeks of grassroots protests inspired by Bouazizi’s self-immolation, a post appeared on the Facebook page, announcing a day of protest in Egypt – Tuesday, Jan. 25.

Global Digital Network Supports Protesters & Activists

In my limited experiences working in support of change in the Middle East, I will say that anonymity played a key role. When Lubna Hussein was in court in Khartoum in the summer of 2009, I worked extensively with people I still don’t know.

A reporter tweeted information to someone for translation into English, and my contact sent it to me. Fifteen minutes after the judge spoke in Khartoum, I posted the news on AOC and Twitter. I will probably never know the identity of the people I work with.

When the brutal flogging of a poor woman video got bootlegged out of Sudan In December 2010, the same people contacted me with the files, because YouTube kept taking down the video. Again we worked together and haven’t communicated since.

Bloggers as Trusted Media Broadcasters

The digital age is giving much more power, not only to ordinary citizens in Egypt, but it connects people globally who work together quickly, without asking any questions. Often, the contacts come outside traditional American media, because we filter the information through our self-interested, male patriarchal lens.

That’s how Chris Matthews came to call today’s protests the “Million Man March”, when even Al Jazeera had translated the call as a “March of Millions”. With so few women in American media, especially in foreign affairs or political opinion which is man’s work in America, people like myself will become much more important in the future. Anne