Israel Matzav

Israeli and Jordanian charged with spying in Egypt?

An Israeli and a Jordanian have been arrested and charged with spying for the Mossad according to a report emanating from Egypt. The Israeli has not been named, but is apparently not Ilan Grapel (pictured), who was arrested for spying in June.

An Israeli and a Jordanian were set to go on trial in Egypt on suspicion that they were spying for the Mossad, according to a MENA news agency report cited by AFP on Sunday.

According to the report, the Israeli citizen had allegedly tasked the Jordanian with recruiting Egyptians working in the telecoms sector “to obtain technical data in order to damage the national interests of Egypt."

The arrests are part of an Egyptian xenophobia that has understandably made foreigners very nervous.

“There are days when the state security is going into people’s homes,” Youssef tells The Media Line. “One of my friends, an Italian woman, had her computer searched and when they found articles she wrote, they asked her to erase them.”

Other foreign journalists and expatriates have also reported being harassed by police. One American man recalls to The Media Line of walking in downtown Cairo in late July and being stopped by police who demanded to see his passport. When he didn’t have his ID, police took him to the local police station for questioning, where he enjoyed a night with Egypt’s security personnel.

Some Egyptians want all the foreigners to leave.

Despite these testimonials, many Egyptians question foreigners who have complained of their treatment. One such Egyptian, a 28-year-old unemployed man calling himself “Ahmed” tells The Media Line “all foreigners should leave the country.”

“Foreigners here are trying to take our revolution and they are going back to America and Israel and giving them information. So I think the police have a right to question any foreigner, including you,” he says. “Foreigners are making this country bad and they have other reasons to be here that they aren’t telling us. I guarantee you this.”

While “Ahmed” may be an outlier in Egyptian society, the current trend of anti-Westerner sentiment is growing, but it isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. Throughout the past three decades, when the former government of Hosni Mubarak felt the tension among the population, anti-Americanism was often sought.

One of the mediums most often employed was in the state-owned newspapers. They fell to reporting of US intervention in Egyptian politics and society. This, says Omar Rifai, a former journalist with the state-run Al-Ahram newspaper, was part of the “strategy of the government” to increase fears of the “other” and to “deflect society away from the government’s atrocities.”

He argues that in recent months, “the military has begun to use the media to these ends and it is heightening the undercurrents of anti-Americanism and ideas against foreigners that have long been part of Egyptian thinking, so it is hard to break free from this.”

Read the whole thing.

This is going to do (and I'm sure has been doing) wonders for Egypt's tourism industry, which used to be the country's biggest source of foreign currency. What could go wrong?

Labels: Egypt, Egyptian Revolution, spying, xenophobia

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:23 AM