Washington D.C. to celebrate the resignation of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. There was a great showing of Egyptian Americans as well as others who came to express their solidarity with the peaceful Egyptian people who made this beautiful revolution possible.

Medea Benjamin and Tighe Barry from CODEPINK opened up the night with an incredible slideshow presentation of their experience in Cairo during the protests. They showed pictures that captured the rollercoaster of emotions felt by the Egyptian protesters: peacefulness and happiness, determination to achieve their goal, pain inflicted by Mubarak’s thugs, anger at Mubarak’s refusal to step down, and ultimately euphoria when he resigned. The pictures included many profound moments of solidarity the CODEPINK peace delegation had with the Egyptian people, sharing their moments of both joy and sorrow while celebrating their common humanity and desire for peaceful change. They also made it a point to mention the hypocritical policies of the United States government, which claims to strive for democracy throughout the world, yet sends billions of dollars in military aid to dictators like Hosi Mubarak.

After Tighe and Medea spoke, Hana Elhattab from the DC Egyptian Youth Organizers spoke for a few minutes about her personal connection to the events in Egypt. After her, Mokhtar Kamel from the Alliance of Egpytian Americans offered a few words about his take on the revolution. His talk was followed by one given by Hossam Mansour, a young man who played an instrumental role in facilitating the organization of local solidarity actions here in D.C., specifically in front of the Egyptian Embassy and the White House. This success of these events can be attributed largely in part to his adroit use of social networking tools, specifically Facebook, which reached out to hundreds of people and allowed CODEPINK to get in touch with him and plan events together.

After the speakers CODEPINK awarded several organizations with Pink Badges of Courage for their part in the Egyptian struggle. These groups included Amnesty International, Al Jazeera, and Human Rights Watch. Before the awards were even finished, the Arabic music was blasting and people were out of their seats singing and dancing in celebration.

Congratulations Egypt!

Despite the danger on the streets, we went to the square carrying with two big banners. One said “World Says Time To Go, Mubarak!” and the other said “Solidarity With Egyptian People” in both English and Arabic. When the people in the square saw us and discovered we were Americans, they erupted into cheers. “Thank you, thank you,” they cried. “We love you.” We were crying as well. It felt so good to help lift their spirits after such a terribly violent day.

I saw a friend who is a professor at the American University in Cairo. He had a big gash in his head. “Please, help us tell the world what is happening. Tell them how we were viciously attacked,” he said. “Tell them we will die here if we have to, but we will NOT turn back.”

I couldn’t believe that after today’s attacks, there were still women in the square who planned to spend the night. A group of young women ran up to us and started hugging and kissing us. “You don’t know what your presence means to us,” one of the students said. ” Please tell Obama that we need him to do more to push Mubarak to go NOW, before more of us get killed.”

One way Obama can send a stronger message to Mubarak is to announce that the United States will cut off all aid to this regime. For 30 years the U.S. government has been supporting this autocratic, repressive state. Cutting aid now will send a clear signal that the U.S. government is finally distancing itself from this regime.

Tomorrow, a group of us will go to the U.S. Embassy with this message. We will sit outside the Embassy, despite the risks of being attacked by government thugs, and call on our government to immediately stop all aid to Mubarak’s regime. Please join us by taking the same action back home.

Now is the time that the Egyptian people need our solidarity. Don’t let there be one more “Made in the USA” teargas canister hurled at these people. Don’t let there be one more U.S. bullet or U.S. weapon aimed at them.

The Egyptian people are writing a beautiful chapter in the history of nonviolence revolutions. Let’s show them we are on their side.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace.

See photos of the delegation here.

If you are a member of the press and wish to contact Medea in Egypt please see phone numbers in our press release here.

Sign onto CODEPINK’s Call to the President to cut military aid to Mubarak here.

January 25, 2011
Today belongs to the youth! Using Twitter and Facebook and who knows what else, tens of thousands young men and women took to the streets of Egypt. They gathered to protest the Mubarak regime. Twenty thousand filled Cairo’s Tahrir square. They protested in Suez, Fayoum, Ismailia, Kafr el Sheikh, Bultim, Mahallah, Mansour and cities from Alexandria in the North to Aswan in the South. Nothing of this magnitude this has happened in Egypt before.

The government had warned the leaders of the few political parties Egypt allows to stay away. The leaders obeyed but their people turned out. The Mufti (highest Islamic authority) issued a fatwa forbidding participation but Muslims turned out. The Church forbade its members from participating; Christians turned out too. The Muslim Brotherhood refused to back the demonstrations—less than 150 of them came. Still, the government claims the Brotherhood incited the protests and admits to jailing 212. For years the Mubarak regime has raised the specter of “Islamic fundamentalism” to scare the Western powers into supporting it.

Despite the warnings, the young people of Egypt protested by the thousands. They demanded change not as party loyalists, not as members of NGOs, and certainly not as Muslims or Christians but as Egyptians—the most for the first time. This is not an ideologically driven event. It is certainly not religiously inspired. It is populist and nationalist.

While organized by those with access to the Internet, the youth of all Egypt’s social classes met in the streets; students from the elite American, German and British Universities of Cairo and the 20-year-old peddler near my building. The three men buying cigarettes at his kiosk had been in the Tahrir Square demonstrations and planned on returning. One, a gardener in the small park across the street said, “I can’t live on 240 pounds a month.” (40.00$) I didn’t say that teachers make less. Students from the elite American, German and British Universities of Cairo.

The government was blindsided. It permitted the ‘standing’ demonstration thinking, as did the rest of the country, only the usual 200 activists would show. Local media coverage was virtually non-existent; a function of surprise and self-censorship. I heard of the demonstrations from my daughter in the States who’d heard about them on NPR. Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, was probably the first to air here but most of us followed the events on YouTube because of the ‘functional’ blackout in the news.

The most immediate impetus is likely a soaring cost of living and grinding poverty.  But people don’t need political science to know that dictatorships support the corruption of their cohorts who siphon off public coffers. People know they can’t survive on the dregs.

They chanted “Change. Liberty. Social Justice.” “No to dictatorship. Mubarak must leave. This government must fall.” Some carried pictures of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1952 revolution.) The have specific demands: Mubarak must resign. His son Gamal must not inherit the presidency. Parliament and councils elected in the country’s most fraudulent election must be dissolved, the constitution revised, and new election held which are fair and free.

There were echoes of Tunisia in the air. In Cairo, protesters were and remain peaceful to a fault. The police was reasonably restrained—at first. By afternoon, everything changed. They set upon the young people with batons. They shot water cannons, tear-gas and rubber-tipped bullets and used cattle prods. They killed four in Suez and bloodied hundreds  in Cairo and the rest of the cities. By evening, the situation took a turn for the worse. Surrounding the thousands in Tahrir  Square, they closed off the routes of escape, blanketed it with teargas and shot into the crowd. They jammed the airwaves and blocked cell-phone reception. Armed vehicles, sirens wailing, sped across the bridge near me. Despite Ministry of Interior guarantees it arrested hundreds and hundreds of people, including 80 journalists. One was from the UK Guardian newspaper. You can hear his moving report from a police van on the paper’s electronic home page. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/audio/2011/jan/26/egypt-violence-jack-shenker-arrest-audi

The protestors pledged to stay the course. No one quite knows what this means but everyone I’ve met is cheering them on. And, true to the Egyptian sense of humor, they say, “When we win this round, we’ll have a rematch with Tunisia!”

January 26, 2011

Although the Hesham Center for Human Rights has 1000 confirmed names and knows of many more arrested, the government has admitted to only 500. Today it called for the use of ”all necessary” force to disperse any gathering and strict enforcement of Egypt’s notorious Emergency Law that makes it illegal for over 5 people to congregate.

The streets are choked with security: policemen in riot gear and dusty blue vans, armed vehicles and water cannons. Facebook and Twitter were closed down for a while—the internet savvy youth used proxy sites. And though bloodied and reduced in numbers, people are still demonstrating: ‘walking’ in Cairo’s streets to offer less of a convenient target, calling for by-standers to join.

And as I write tonight, 500 people are demonstrating at the Lawyers’ Syndicate while literally thousands of police are dispersing supporters with batons to the legs and head.

The EU and France, even the United States has called for respecting the right to peaceful demonstration and called for police restraint and non-violence.

Egyptians are still demonstrating and, while in smaller numbers, they’re all over the country: in Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura and Suez.
Change will happen;  maybe not this week or next. Maybe not even this year. But things are going to change. They already have.
Calls have gone out for a ‘Friday of Rage’ tomorrow, January 28th, 2011. Demonstartions scheduled for after noon-time prayers.

Dr. Winter is an Egyptian-American psychologist in Seattle who currently lives in Cairo, Egypt during the academic year where she is Visiting Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo’s Graduate School of Education. She is a member of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, the Arab American Community Coalition in Seattle, and the Arab American Institute’s Pacific Northwest representative. Her numerous consulting positions include the U.S. Department of State where she trains women in the Middle East to run for public office and the creation of training programs for panels of mediation specialists in over 450 Egyptian family courts. She and her colleague, Sheryl Ga Feldman, operate the website www.myeyeonegypt.net

When CODEPINK was in Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March last year, we led and participated in small, peaceful protests that were set upon by hundreds of riot police at the behest of repressive Mubarak regime.

But now there has been a seismic shift. There are not 50 people rallying in Cairo, but hundreds of thousands protesting across the nation. Dozens have been killed; hundreds have been wounded.

But the Egyptian people will not be turned back. They feel their power and are determined to seize the moment.

The US has given Egypt $68 billion since 1948, and since 1979, Egypt has been the second-biggest recipient of US aid after Israel. Our government currently gives $1.3 billion a year of our tax dollars in military aid to the Mubarak regime.

Join us in telling President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Congress to stop funding the Mubarak regime now, to call on Mubarak to resign, and to expressly say that our government stands with the Egyptian people. After all, in his recent State of the Union Address, President Obama declared: “The United States stands with the people of Tunisia.” Shouldn’t we also stand with the Egyptians?

Sign here to stand in solidarity with people who are giving their government, our government and the world a lesson in democracy.

Mubarak is refusing to leave. But our government can—and must—break its ties to this dictator. As courageous Egyptian citizens are being assaulted with U.S. tear gas and other Made-in-the-USA weapons, we must say: Enough.

Solidarity with Egyptians

• Add your events and ralllies for Egypt to our calendar here!
• Find an Embassy of Egypt near you
• Women of Egypt: protest photos on Facebook

News

• Al Jazeera English Live Stream
• Washington Post list of Twitter feeds that are live in Egypt
• Follow the following hashtags on Twitter for more news: #Egypt, #Jan 25, #Jan 28, and more listed here:
  A Primer On Following Egyptian Protests On Twitter, NPR, Jan 30, 2011
• Ahdaf Soueif piece from The Guardian
• Factbox: Most U.S. aid to Egypt goes to military, Reuters, Jan 29, 2011

For a people who have been sleeping for three decades, Egyptians have awoken with a jolt and are spontaneously organizing themselves in a manner that is nothing short of a miracle. The police, after teargassing, beating and shooting protesters during the first few days of protests, have now vanished from the streets. Instead, citizen committees are doing everything from controlling traffic to patrolling their neighborhoods and protecting the shops.

The main square in Cairo—Tahrir Square—is the headquarters of the revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people clogged the square today, and thousands have been camping out all week and insist they will stay until Mubarak leaves. They are young and old, mostly men but a surprising number of women and children. They are professionals and farmers, well off and poor, urban and rural, PhDs and barely literate. Some are long-time political activists who have been jailed by the regime; most have never engaged in anything political.

Army tanks line the entrance to the square, but a cordon of civilians separate the army from the protesters. Civilians also set up a 24-hour security detail to check people coming in—men frisk the men to make sure they have no weapons; women inspect the women’s belongings. The young people have organized clean-up crews, collecting garbage, sweeping, holding signs encouraging people to put their trash in the bins. A group of volunteer health workers in white coats walk around taking people’s blood pressure and checking up on their health.

All the stores around the square are closed, but no one is going hungry. Supporters are constantly bringing in food and water to share. “Please, take a roll, madam,” an elderly man urges me. “Have some candy,” says a young girl handing out sweets. “Is there anything you need? Water? Food? Drink? Just tell us,” a man insisted. People are taking care of each other as if they were one big family.

“Where do you go to the bathroom?,” I asked one of the women, as there is not one port-a-potty or bathroom in sight for this sea of people. “We go out to the street, knock on doors and ask to use the facilities. Complete strangers are opening their homes to us,” she answered.

The techies in the group hooked up a live wire from the light pole to set up a phone charging station. Others hung a big white sheet from a building overlooking the square and rigged up a projector to broadcast Al Jazeera live. The government has closed down the internet, but everywhere you look, people are photographing and videoing the street scenes from their cell phones.

Circles of people gather to recite poetry, play music or sing. Others march round and round chanting “Down with Mubarak, down with Mubarak.” They hold handmade signs with all kinds of slogans. While mostly in Arabic, some signs in English say things like “Christians and Muslims, together against Mubarak” and “USA, Stop supporting Mubarak; We don’t wanna hate the USA.”

Some people are playing chess; others are quietly reading the Koran. Young girls gather around their Kindle reading revolutionary verses. A women walks around with a picture of Che Guevara, explaining who he is to anyone who will listen. “It’s important to educate the young generation about revolutionary heroes,” she insisted.

Everywhere, people are engaged in animated political discussions about their nation’s future. Some support Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammad El Baradei as an interim leader. Others believe he is too far removed from the people, since he has lived abroad for 30 years, and they prefer a collective, interim government to write a new constitution and hold free and fair elections. Religious men with long beards, aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, argue that Egypt needs a Muslim government; others disagree vehemently, insisting on a secular state. The discussions are passionate, but also friendly and respectful.

Egyptians have no idea what the future will bring, but one thing is certain: they have discovered their voices. One man who is helping with security told me that a few weeks ago, when his family was watching news on TV about people taking to the streets in Tunesia, his 10-year-old son asked him if he would participate in something like that in Egypt. “I was silent,” he said, “because I didn’t know the answer.” At the first sign of protests in Cairo, however, he jumped in. Now every night he runs home to show his son photos from the day’s events. “My son is very proud of me,” the father beamed. “So you are doing this for your son and the next generation?” I asked. “Not really,” he laughed. “I am doing this for myself. For the first time in my life, I am proud to be Egyptian.”

No matter how the situation in Egypt unfolds, a new nation has been born. Ordinary people are doing extraordinary things. They have overcome their fears and regained their dignity. They are writing their own destiny.

This is what a revolution looks like.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange. She can be reached for interviews in Cairo at (20) 107148431.