People From Cairo

"I consider killing any colonialists and specially zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them."

"So the brilliant British dogs and monkeys really think terrorists will reveal their plans on Twitter."

"May I start by raising the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah? As the Prime Minister knows and has said, he is a British citizen jailed for the crime of posting on social media and has been imprisoned in Egypt for most of the last nine years; he has been on hunger strike for the last six months. The Prime Minister just said that he raised this case with President Sisi; what progress did he make in securing Alaa's release?"

"I’m delighted that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones, who must be feeling profound relief... Alaa's case has been a top priority for my government since we came to office."

"I’m telling you that I hate white people."

"can we get back to killing zionists please? they seem to be more violent when we stick to non violence."

"By his own public posts, Mr Abd El-Fattah has endorsed killing ‘zionists’ and urged more of it. He has also been widely reported as having called for the killing of Israelis, in terms so extreme that his nomination for a major European human rights prize was withdrawn when the post came to light. He has since sought to explain himself. That only underlines the point: this is not ancient history. It is a live controversy about incitement and hatred."

"Dear Zionists, please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all Zionists including civilians, so f--- off."

"Now all I can think of is joining Bin Laden and killing a few Americans."

"Tweet the wrong thing in Britain and you’ll serve 13 months. Tweet the wrong thing in Egypt and we’ll bring you here, put you up, pay for your son’s special school - while you call us apes and boast of hating white people."

"Now my real criticism of these post-police murder riots is the wrong focus, go burn the City or Downing Street, or hunt police fools."

"police are not human...They don’t have rights, we should just kill them all."

"there was no genocide against Jews by the Nazis – after all, many Jews are left."

"What the internet has truly changed is not political dissent, but rather social dissent. We must protect it as a safe space where people can experiment with gender and sexual identities, explore what it means to be gay or a single mom or an atheist or a Christian in the Middle East, but also what it means to be black and angry in the US, to be Muslim and ostracized in Europe, or to be a coal miner in a world that must cut back on greenhouse gases. The internet is the only space where all different modes of being Palestinian can meet. If I express this precariousness in symbolic violence, will you hear me out? Will you protect me from both prosecution by the establishment and exploitation by the well-funded fringe extremists?"

"And you talk to most of them, and they come out telling you they're the ones who's oppressed and victims. I seriously, seriously, seriously hate white people, especially those of English or Dutch or German descent."

"Mr El-Fattah is a British citizen. It has been a long-standing priority under successive governments to work for his release from detention, and to see him reunited with his family in the UK."

"Unfortunately, the Iranian nuclear project isn't dedicated to the extermination of the white man; Bin Laden's odds are higher."

"Egypt is not Mali. It is at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa. More than ten million Christians live there. Its economy is based on tourism and trade. This is why one cannot agree to allow it to become an Islamist Country. But there are also international strategies that project a division of Egypt."

"I read love stories and love poems. But I preferred books written about rulers. I read about a ruler whose female servants and concubines were as numerous as his army, and about another whose only interests in life were wine, women, and whipping his slaves. A third cared little for women, but enjoyed wars, killing, and torturing men. Another of these rulers loved food, money and hoarding riches without end. Still another was possessed with such an admiration for himself and his greatness that for him no one else in the land existed. There was also a ruler so obsessed with plots and conspiracies that he spent all his time distorting the facts of history and trying to fool his people.I discovered that all these rulers were men. What they had in common was an avaricious and distorted personality, a never-ending appetite for money, sex and unlimited power. They were men who sowed corruption on the earth, and plundered their peoples, men endowed with loud voices, a capacity for persuasion, for choosing sweet words and shooting poisoned arrows. Thus, the truth about them was revealed only after their deaths, and as a result I discovered that history tended to repeat itself with a foolish obstinacy"

"I knew that successful politicians cannot bear to accept defeat within themselves. A human being cannot stand up to a double defeat. That is the secret of their continuous attempt to rise to power. They draw a feeling of supremacy from their power over others. It makes them feel victorious rather than defeated. It hides how essentially hollow they are inside, despite the impression of greatness they try to spread around them, which is all they really care for."

"I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die. I want nothing. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. Therefore I am free. For during life it is our wants, our hopes, our fears that enslave us."

"Ever since I was a child I used to hear my father say: ‘If the price we pay for freedom is high, we pay a much higher price if we accept to be slaves"

"he explained to me that refusing a Head of State could be looked upon as an insult to a great man and lead to strained relations between the two countries. He added that if I really loved my country, if I was a patriot, I would go to him at once. So I told the man from the police that I knew nothing about patriotism, that my country had not only given me nothing, but had also taken away anything I might have had, including my honour and my dignity"

"My heart faltered, overcome by its frightened, almost frenzied beating because of something I had just lost, or was on the point of losing for ever. My fingers grasped at his hand with such violence that no force in the world, no matter how great, could take it away from me"

"She replied that it was precisely men well versed in religion who beat their wives. The precepts of religion permitted such punishment. A virtuous woman was not supposed to complain about her husband. Her duty was perfect obedience."

"Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now; a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago."

"Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist."

"That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife"

"A successful prostitute was better than a misled saint. All women are victims of deception. Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows."

"There is a proverb that says, ‘Talk so that I may know who you are.’ But I say, ‘Show me your eyes and I will know who you are."

"Now i had learnt that honor required large sums of money to protect it, but that large sums of money could not be obtained without losing one's honor. An infernal circle whirling round and round, draggng me up and down with it."

"Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?"

"How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self became really mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years of my life that were lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp since the very first day?"

"Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money"

"Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture"

"For truth and death are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them. And truth is like death in that it kills. When I killed I did it with truth not with a knife. That is why they are afraid and in a hurry to execute me. They do not fear my knife. It is my truth that frightens them."

"Everybody has to die. I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed."

"Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men."

"But I feel that you, in particular, are a person who cannot live without love." "Yet I am living without love." "Then you are either living a lie or not living at all."

"Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself"

"Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years"

"I discovered that all these rulers were men. What they had in common was an avaricious and distorted personality, a never-ending appetite for money, sex and unlimited power. They were men who sowed corruption on the earth, and plundered their peoples, men endowed with loud voices, a capacity for persuasion, for choosing sweet words and shooting poisoned arrows. Thus, the truth about them was revealed only after their death, and as a result I discovered that history tended to repeat itself with a foolish obstinacy."

"They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous."

"Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women's liberation has been achieved?"

"Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another."

"Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic."

"All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face."

"What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system."

"I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet"

"Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows"