Why Our Football Fans Are More Patriotic Than Our Bloggers

In the past few days, the atmosphere in the Egyptian street and the mood of people has been great. This is due to the victory of our national football team of the Africa Cup of Nations championship for the seventh time and the third time on the row. Celebrations took place in every street of every Egyptian town, people spent all night out cheering and singing patriotic songs with the Egyptian flag in the hands of every man, woman, and child, not because their football team won a competition, but because in that specific moment, they were truly proud to be Egyptians. It was indeed a patriotic utopia, even if it lasted for a few days.

With that image in mind, let’s move into another.

For years now, whenever we hear the two words “Egyptian” and “blogger” in the same sentence, the first things that comes into our minds is someone who writes about politics, more specifically, someone who uses their blog as a launching pad for vicious attacks against every decision of the Egyptian government. Surprisingly, this is not so far off the truth. Do some search online and you will find that for every one non-Egyptian-politics blog, there are at least ten blogs that are criticising the Egyptian government. I absolutely do not have a problem with that. I have always been an advocate of the freedom of speech and have always attacked media censorship. I firmly believe that everyone has the right to express their own opinion freely.

However, the problem is, those bloggers do not do that. Most of the blogs out there, which I am not mentioning as I am not giving them advertising via my blog, are not just an honest expression of opinion; they provide nothing but a clear, blind attack on every decision of the Egyptian government and most of the times on the people in charge themselves. Those bloggers claim that the sole purpose of their blogs is attempting to improve life in their homeland by making the people aware of what their government’s plots against them. They claim that their love and passion of Egypt is the motivation behind their words, and that they do not care if they were imprisoned for it.

If you ask me, they do not deserve to be imprisoned, they deserve to be executed. These blogs do not aim at improving life in Egypt, I once read a post in one of those famous blogs giving tips on how to deceive your boss into believing that you are a hard worker while you actually do not work at all, neither are they all that patriotic. How can one be so patriotic and filled with love for their country when the benefits of “other” countries are far up their priority list than the security of their homeland?

Those bloggers do not care about the Egyptian people or aim at improving the Egyptian life. They have some specific agenda that will only be achieved by poisoning the minds of the simple people into rebelling against the government. So much that smiles on the Egyptian faces and few moments of patriotism send them into a frenzy of anger.

While most of the Egyptians were celebrating their teams victory and living a moment of happiness and patriotism that does not come so often, those people where all over the internet attacking this moment, calling scenes of celebrations aired on the TV words as “disgrace” and calling the great mood their fellow Egyptians were in a “coma”.

So we have two images, one containing people who are proud of every victory belonging to their country, even if little or not so significant, and another containing ones who not only do their best to undermine those victories but also do their best to disrupt order in their country. Which image do you believe contains the ones that truly love their country?

I rest my case.