DEMOCRACY NOW
On Wednesday, University of California-Davis Professor Noha Radwan joined Democracy Now! for an interview from a studio in downtown Cairo. Just after finishing the interview, she was attacked in the streets. “I got attacked by the mob and beaten half to death by the Mubarak thugs, who were happy to snatch my necklaces off my neck and to rip my shirt open,” Radwan said. We speak to her again today by telephone, asking her to describe what happened.
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NOHA RADWAN: … They asked me why I was trying to get into the square. I said I had friends and relatives who are injured, and I’m just checking on them. But then the big question came: “Are you pro-Mubarak or anti-Mubarak?” And I didn’t want to answer the question. I just left the person who was asking the question and tried to get in.
Two, three meters later, somebody caught on to the fact that I was trying to get in anyway, and then they yelled to the mob, “She’s with them! She’s with them! Get her!” And I found two big guys who came and held onto my arms and took me out, and they kind of handed me on to a mob that started beating me and pulling my hair. They ripped my shirt off. They ripped a gold necklace. If you see the recording from yesterday, you’ll see that I was wearing a very close-to-the-neck kind of big necklace. So, in ripping this, they actually injured the neck. And through all the beating, I had to get a couple of stitches to the head yesterday.
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The worst part of it is that the Egyptian media has been broadcasting nonstop that we are infiltrators, that we are foreign-paid, that most of the people in Tahrir are not actually real Egyptians, they are, you know, paid by foreigners outside. There have been reports about a Belgian who was caught and turned out to be a spy, Israelis who were caught in the demonstration, and so on and so forth.
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