In May, I spoke on a panel at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2011 about the power of censorship.

Here’s what I said:

And here’s the full panel.

I was on CBC Connect with Mark Kelly to talk about the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog hoax.

An Egyptian general speaking on condition of anonymity admitted to CNN that that female activists detained on March 9 had indeed been subjected to “virginity tests”, as the women have insisted all along.

I talked about “virginity tests” and gender politics on two CNN shows below.

By Mona Eltahawy

The Guardian

There’s a thin line between sex and politics, and it is nonsense to keep repeating the mantra that Egypt’s revolution "wasn’t about gender". What revolution worth its salt can be fuelled by demands of freedom and dignity and not have gender nestled in its beating heart – especially in a country replete with misogyny, religious fundamentalism (of both the Islamic and Christian kind) and which for 60 years has chafed under a hybrid of military-police rule?

If the "it wasn’t about gender" mantra is stuck on repeat so that we don’t scare the boys away, then let them remember the state screwed them too, literally – ask political prisoners, and remember the condoms and Viagra found when protesters stormed state security headquarters.

Lest we forget, we replaced Hosni Mubarak with a supreme council of Mubaraks – aka the supreme council of armed forces (SCAF) – a general who recently spoke to CNN kindly reminded us how the patriarch sounds. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he admitted that female activists detained during a Tahrir Square demonstration a month after Mubarak’s overthrow had indeed been subjected to "virginity tests" – as the women have insisted all along. "The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."

I have no doubt he genuinely believed that explanation would actually make sense. It is, after all, very rare for Egyptian women to spend the night outside their home, and couples must present a marriage certificate if they want to book a hotel room together. But even the patriarch misfires.

Almost exactly five years ago, Mubarak unwittingly politicised many previously apolitical Egyptians when his security forces and their hired thugs began to deliberately target for sexual assault female activists and journalists at demonstrations. In conservative Egypt, where most women endured daily street sexual harassment in silence, the regime was determined to fondle and grope women in the hope it would shame them back home. Instead, women held up their skirts torn into pieces for the media to see. It’s one thing to be groped and harassed by passers-by, but when the state gropes you, it gives a green light that you are fair game.

The next year, mass sexual assaults in downtown Cairo targeted girls and women during a religious festival. The police watched and did nothing. The state denied the assaults took place, but bloggers at the scene exposed that lie; this encouraged women to speak out and forced men to listen. For many Egyptian men, this was the first time they realised what it meant for their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters to navigate the battlefield that Egyptian streets had become. More than 80% of women now say they’ve been street sexually harassed, and more than 60% of men admit to having done so.

And with the virginity tests, here is SCAF retracing that thin line between sex and politics again, in the hope of shaming women away from demonstrating. The council has already replicated many of the other sins that had Mubarak facing the wrong end of a revolution: military trials for civilians, detentions and torture (by military police now, state security then), and an intolerance of critics.

Let’s be clear, "virginity tests" are common in Egypt and straddle class and urban/rural divides. Be it the traditional midwife checking for a hymen on a bride’s wedding night, or a forensics expert or doctor called in after a prospective bridegroom’s suspicions, young women are forced to spread their legs to appease the god of virginity. But no one talks about it.

But it’s different when the state/SCAF is the one forcing women’s legs apart. A protest is planned for Saturday. It’s a perfect time for gender to come out of the revolution’s closet.

This must be our moment of reckoning with the god of virginity. The rage against the military must also target the humiliation brought by those tests, regardless of who carries them out.

So far, Egypt’s Arab-language media has largely looked the other way. As Fatma Emam, a young revolutionary, told Bloomberg soon after Mubarak was forced to step down: "The revolution is not only taking place in Tahrir, it is taking place in every Egyptian house. It is the revolution of fighting the patriarch."

On Thursday, I was on CNN to analyse Pres. Obama’s Middle East speech.

And on PBS Newshour along with Rami Khoury and Martin Indyk

I was on “In the Arena” with Elliot Spitzer to talk about why Pres. Obama didn’t release pictures of a dead Osama Bin Laden.

On CBC Connect I discussed reasons behind the frat-boy scenes of celebrations we’ve seen at Ground Zero.

By Mona Eltahawy

The Guardian

May 3, 2011

I could hear the cheers as I got out of the taxi, two blocks away. I could hear them from right in front of Park 51, the site of a planned Islamic community centre and mosque that met ferocious opposition last year for being too close to the "hallowed ground" of Ground Zero. It was minutes after President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, and I was heeding a friend’s suggestion that we – both Muslims – take candles and stand in vigil where the World Trade Centre stood before Bin Laden’s footsoldiers took it down.

So it was a shock to find hundreds of others had turned that hallowed ground into the scene of a home crowd celebrating an away victory they hadn’t attended, the roots of which they were probably not there to experience or were too young to remember.

There was always something sickening about tourists taking pictures of themselves posing in front of that big gaping hole called Ground Zero. "Me at site of mass slaughter, NYC" as holiday photo caption is wrong in every language, surely. It didn’t take 10 minutes for the frat party atmosphere to sicken me. Olympic-style chants of "USA! USA!" I could just about take as a freshly minted American, as of Friday. But "Fuck Osama! Ole ole ole!" crushed any ambition of dignity for the thousands killed, many of whom had jumped hundreds of storeys to their deaths, their bodies shattered to pieces close to where we stood.

I wanted to stand in vigil, too, for the thousands more killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq as part of the war on terror that George Bush unleashed and Obama hasn’t done much to rein in. I wanted to stand in vigil as a Muslim who just last summer reminded Americans – insisting that Park 51 move "out of sensitivity for 9/11 victims" – that Muslims were also its victims.

Good riddance, Bin Laden. An unwelcome squatter in the house of my religion who tore down all the walls and was prepared to throw them on a fire to keep himself warm. Al-Qaida killed more Muslims than non-Muslims. Anytime it committed an atrocity anywhere, Muslims over here paid for it. My brother, a cardiologist, was among thousands of Muslims visited by the FBI in November 2001 and forced to submit to special registration fingerprinting, his photo and information for ever in homeland security’s files. Hundreds were detained. Hundreds were deported. Profiling.

Good riddance, Bin Laden. I long detested you and knew that when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid last December, he was igniting a fire that would render irrelevantBin Laden the man and his inflated self-importance. When Tunisians overthrew Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 29 days and Egyptians Hosni Mubarak in 18 days it was an appropriate rebuke to dictators and Bin Laden. What had become more mesmerising to young people in the Middle East and North Africa: change via revolutionary fervour that has blown apart stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, or the hate-filled al-Qaida message that falsely promised change through nihilistic violence?

I wanted to have that conversation. But there was only one woman nearby holding candles. In between the dozens of requests for interviews and photos she got, I quickly told her she was the most dignified person there. She was stunned.

I moved to the US a year before 9/11. The day after the attack, a drunk tried to set the local mosque on fire. I first visited Ground Zero in July 2002 and could only cry and pray. "Good riddance, Bin Laden," I wanted to shout on Monday; but this new American instead quietly recited Al Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an, with "USA, USA USA" as my backdrop. I recited it for the innocent lives taken in NYC, Washington DC, Shanksville in Pennsylvania, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan – wherever the war on terror left its stains.

The scene at Ground Zero was like a parody of Team America, the film created by the South Park team to parody Bush’s America gone wild on nationalism. Now that we’ve parodied the parody, can the frat boys go home and can we return to the revolutions of the Middle East and north Africa that symbolically killed Bin Laden months ago?

I’m not hearing sympathy for Bin Laden from Muslims and Arabs I know. They’re relieved he’s finally gone. But they’re understandably concerned that media obsession will let him hijack these noble revolutions. One man has been killed; dozens courageously staring down despots are slaughtered every day.

I moved to the United States on July 16, 2000. On April 29, 2011 I became an American citizen. I took my oath along with 158 people from 51 different countries, I am grateful that Dirk Eusterbrock came with me and took these pictures of the ceremony. I am now officially an Egyptian-American

Taking the oath. The woman on my right was from the UK, the man on my left from the Dominican Republic.

Clapping for ourselves!

Certificate of citizenship and a mini-flag that came in our naturalization envelope, that included a letter from the President of the Unites States…

I didn’t recognise my picture on the certificate because I’d gone in for biometrics right after I was on CNN and hence covered in layers of makeup. I almost told the immigration officer “That’s not mine!”

After we took our oath, we were shown a message from President Obama in which he welcomed us as “fellow citizens” and then the immigration officer told us we’d hear an “inspirational” song. That song was one of the cheesiest I’ve ever heard, the chorus being “And I’m proud to be an American, because at least I know I’m free!”. I went around singing it at occasional intervals throughout the day to remind my friends.

Now when I argue with Muslim-hating members of the Tea Party, I’ll wave the flag in their face.

Me and the Tea Party and some foam shoes

Arabian Business magazine recently compiled a list of 100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011, which placed me at 51 and a list of 500 Most Powerful Arabs in the World, which placed me at 124.

It was interesting to compare the Arabic-language bio they’ve posted for me with their English-language one – quite different!

I spoke on a panel on media and popular culture along with Spike Lee, Donna Byrd and Will Griffin at the Aspen Institute’s Symposium on the State of Race in America (our panel starts at 1:21:00).

It was a pleasure to introduce Ronit Avni of JustVision and to present her and the team behind “Budrus” the Nation Institute’s Ridenhour Prize for Best Documentary Film 2011 and to recognise Palestinian non-violent movements.

I’m making public a message I got from Ramsey Khattab because he threatens me over Saturday’s fundraiser for Egypt at which I’ll be speaking: "

I will be attending Saturday’s event and you better watch what you say otherwise I will have you thrown out of the meeting and humiliate you in public." I will not hesitate to call law enforcement for anyone who threatens me or comes to my events to make trouble.

Ramsey Khattab 13 April at 11:26 Report

I always have been saying that you are a disguesting excuse for a woman who has always been dying to seek recognition from media by the same means Sulman Rushdi, Tea Party, Florida’s Revern who burned the Quran and many other pathetic losers.

No one has authorized you to speak on Muslim Women behalf or assigned you to fight for them or their rights. So why don’t you just mind your own patehtic and miserable life and don’t try to appear as you are their representative. I dare you to show me one woman who actually ased you to do so.

By the way, since you stated that Niqab is not mentioned in the Quran and Sunna therefore, you don’t believe in it and want the ban on Niqab declared everywhere, well, Hijab is mentioned. So why are you not wearing Hijab ya hypocrite instead of forcing us to see your ugly face and body all the time?

I will be attending Saturday’s event and you better watch what you say otherwise I will have you thrown out of the meeting and humiliate you in public.

As the ban on niqab (face veil) went into effect in France, I debated the issue

- with Sarah Joseph on CNN International’s Connect the World

- with Sam Harris and Tariq Ramadan on BBC Newsnight

here .

- with Hebah Ahmed on CNN’s In the Arena

I was on CNN American Morning on Wednesday and Democracy Now! on Thursday morning to discuss the gang-rape of Eman Al Obeidi by Gaddafi troops.

Other uses of sexual violence to silence and intimidate women came up, such as the Egyptian army’s forced virginity testing of female activists detained from Tahrir Square in March. Also talked about the inspiring effect of revolutions and uprisings on Saudi women’s fight for the rights.

I was part of ABC’s This Week’s Roundtable discussing Libya, international intervention and what next.

Jake Tapper subbed for Christiane Amanpour and the other panelists were George Will, Joe Sestak and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Here’s Part One and Part Two.

I contributed the following to a NYTimes.com Room for Debate asking “Will Egypt’s Youth Movement Be Pushed Aside?”. The other contributors are here.

Stepping Up to the Challenge

By Mona Eltahawy

March 25, 2011

Young people are already stepping up to the challenge of forming a viable coalition with new initiatives like the Youth Revolution Coalition and the Tahrir Council. These groups represent youth activists and are aiming to field parliamentary candidates who are younger than 40.

The minimum age to run for parliament right now is 30, which would bar many of the people who issued the call for protests two months ago. In its latest meeting with the military council, the Youth Revolution Coalition asked that the minimum age for president be reduced to 35 from 40 and to 25 from 30 for parliament.

Surely aware of how time isn’t on their side, the groups recognize that they must marry what has worked for youth activists (the Internet) with what works for the remnants of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brotherhood (networks on the ground). There is a huge Egyptian youth presence online. We saw it respond to the initial call for protests by the April 6 Youth Movement on Facebook and Twitter.

The Tahrir Council initiative already has a Facebook page and an online form for prospective candidates as well as applications for young Egyptians interested in managing election campaigns.

As with the Youth Revolution Coalition, the Tahrir Council is open to all political affiliations. That is crucial to youth representation in any future parliament or government. Youth activists are better able to talk across political lines than their parents.

The resounding victory for the “yes” vote in last weekend’s referendum was a reminder that the revolution can’t remain trapped in either Tahrir Square or on social networks. To hold onto a revolution they helped start, Egyptian youth know they have work to do, but they’re doing it.

By Mona Eltahawy

Toronto Star

NEW YORK—As if further proof were needed of the intellectual as well as physical cave Al Qaeda inhabits, their new online magazine “Al Shamikha” (Majestic Woman) is the latest reminder.

As women and men, passionate for freedom and dignity, fuel uprisings and revolutions that are sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, one wonders who wants to read that a “Majestic Woman” does not “go out except when necessary” and that she always wears a face-covering niqab for protection from the sun. Call it SPF:Niqab.

What a laughable idea when you see a photograph of a woman in niqab hugging a Coptic priest in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution that ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Try telling her or any of the other women in headscarves and those women not wearing any kinds of veil that they shouldn’t “go out except when necessary”. They would laugh at you and remind you that they marched and chanted alongside men in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemeni and most recently Gaza, the West Bank and Syria.

With such a breathtaking display of women and men power, surely Al Qaeda realizes the market — albeit the literally radical fashion niche one — is shrinking by the minute.

Al Qaeda espouses an ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam which extols “out of sight and voiceless” as its ethos for women because it considers a woman’s face and voice objects of desire to be covered and silenced. Otherwise, the group steadfastly ignored women until it became convenient to recruit them to blow themselves and others to pieces in Iraq and elsewhere where the head-to-toe covering could get them into places men fitted with a suicide belt could not.

How on earth, one wonders, could its magazine marry such an ideology with the flipped-on-its head brew of women’s magazines: fashion, sex and starvation?

Getting a man is still the goal. The right man for a “Majestic Woman” is of course a “mujahid” (warrior in the name of Islam). In one interview, a woman extols her glorious marriage to a jihad fighter who was killed and how she broke the happy news to her children.

Flipping through its online pages, I couldn’t help but think one has to have been living under a rock inside that cave to think Al Shamikha’s market is anything but a quickly shrinking one. Al Qaeda and its message that only violence can bring about change is irrelevant. The role models for millions of young women and men — not just Muslims but all across the world — are those revolutionaries in Egypt who showed how non-violence could end decades of a dictator’s rule in just 18 days.

Look no further than Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world where Al Qaeda does have a presence. The truly “Majestic Woman” is Tawakul Karaman. Dubbed one of Time magazine’s “16 of History’s Most Rebellious Women,” she was the first Yemeni female journalist to remove her face veil on the job. As chair of Women Journalists without Chains, she defends human rights and freedom of expression and has been protesting outside of Sanaa University every Tuesday since 2007.

Her goal — and the uprising that she helped to start on Feb. 10 after a boost of inspiration from Tunisia and Egypt — is to end the rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power since 1978. Karaman has been jailed several times, including just days before the start of the uprising.

Who do you think young Muslim women are most drawn to? Al Qaeda’s out-of-sight “Majestic Woman: or a woman whose fierce majesty (Yemeni friends love to share videos of Karaman leading protests with her chants) poses one of the most serious challenges to a dictator in 33 years?

I was on NPR’s On Point last week discussing Peter King’s congressional hearings on “Radicalization in the Islamic Community”. The other guests were Leila Ahmed, Asra Nomani and David Schanzer.

I was also on BBC Radio 4 to discuss the hearings.

I spoke on a plenary at J-Street’s Second Annual Conference on the implications of revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. I stressed that the rally for freedom and dignity sweeping the region would not stop at the borders of Palestine and I challenged J-Street and Israel to join a revolution for freedom and dignity for Palestinians.

Here’s my part of the plenary. Q&A on the upper link.

By Mona Eltahawy

Huffington Post, Feb. 23, 2011

NEW YORK – If Tunisia kicked down the door of the Arab imagination by showing it was possible to topple a dictator, Egypt drew a blueprint of non-violence for the house of revolution that detailed how to demolish a stubbornly entrenched dictator and now in Libya a mad man is trying to burn down the entire house rather than face eviction.

For 42 years, Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s antics have blinded too many to a brutality they finally see on full display as he desperately tries to quash the most serious uprising against his rule. If too many chose to not see, Libyans have known all too well.

Half the struggle for Libyans has surely been getting the world to move beyond Gadhafi the Clown, a role he seems to have uninhibitedly embraced. Who hasn’t been distracted by the eclectic wardrobe, the Kalashnikov-armed female bodyguards, and the tents he would pitch at home and abroad for talks with officials.

A source of embarrassment for Libyans, Gadhafi has never been a joke: disappearances, a police state, zero freedom of expression and poverty for at least a third of the population of country tremendously wealthy thanks to oil.

For years, Gadhafi squandered that wealth on causes and radical violence abroad that he chose because they epitomized the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" school of diplomacy. In 2003, just as the U.S. became mired in Iraq and its non-existent weapons of destruction, Gadhafi realized no one was scared of him anymore and voluntarily gave up his weapons of mass destruction programs.

When the world has paid attention to his crimes it has invariably been to those against non-Libyans such as the mid-air bombings of a French airliner over Niger and of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. Once he compensated families who lost relatives in those attacks, Gadhafi became persona grata and money and business deals came and went along with high-level dignitaries.

Gadhafi was a guest of the leaders of Italy and France and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — with businessmen in tow of course — visited Libya soon after Gadhafi’s rehabilitation.

Oil, business and arms deals have always trumped the rights of the Libyan people who long suffered his crimes yet rarely if ever saw compensation let alone the same attention and condemnation as that of the crimes that kept Libya a "pariah" state for so long — until Gadhafi learned to bribe the world’s conscience into forgetting.

I visited Libya in September 1996 for the 27th anniversary of the "revolution" — a military coup that a 27-year old Gadhafi led to topple the monarchy and since which he has ruled. Some were optimistic that Gadhafi’s "revolution" could herald a new Libya but it didn’t take long for his brutality to stamp out any such hopes.

During the 1970s, police and security forces arrested hundreds of Libyans who opposed Gadhafi or those the authorities feared could oppose his rule: violent suppression of student demonstrations, imprisonment and disappearances of every political and social group you can imagine from academics to journalists, Trotskyists to members of the Muslim Brotherhood, all labeled "enemies of the revolution." In case anyone questioned Gadhafi’s bloodlust, there were even a number of televised public hangings and mutilations of political opponents, rights groups say.

In the 1980s authorities introduced a policy of extrajudicial executions of political opponents abroad, termed "stray dogs."

What is believed to be the bloodiest act of internal repression under Gadhafi’s rule occurred just a few months before I arrived in Tripoli with a group of journalist from Cairo. Very few, if any of us, knew though. More than 1,000 prisoners were shot dead by security forces on June 28 and 29, 1996 in Abu Salim prison, Tripoli. It wasn’t until 2004 that Gadhafi publicly admitted to the Abu Salim killings. Relatives of the murdered men have refused compensation in place of judicial process.

One of Gadhafi’s crimes that I was aware of during my visit was the disappearance of former Libyan foreign minister turned dissident Mansour Kikhia. Egyptian agents abducted Kikhia during a visit to Cairo in Dec. 1993 while attending a meeting of an Arab human rights organization he had helped found. Kikhia had asked for Egyptian security protection while in Cairo but agents of now toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak’s regime handed Kikhia over to agents of Gadhafi’s regime, who spirited the dissident to Libya, where he is believed to have executed and buried in the Libyan desert.

I interviewed his wife Baha Omary Kikhia in 1994 as she visited the region trying to find out what had happened to her husband. I think of her now as I hear many Libyans I know whose relatives have been disappeared in Libya wonder if they’re still alive, hoping for the best as they hear of Gadhafi’s all-out attempt to quash the uprising.

And so I watch in awe at the breathtaking courage of Libyans, rising up again — it is an insult to think this is the first time for they long have resisted Gadhafi’s tyranny and bloody crackdowns on dissent.

The Tunisian revolution left every Arab dictator in fear, Egypt’s toppling of Mubarak left them terrified — even one of the U.S.’ best allies in the region could fall. And here they watch a psychopathic dictator unleash his full horror on pro-freedom demonstrators and still fail to terrify them into submission. The Italian foreign minister has said reports that 1,000 people have been killed in 7 days of uprising are credible.

The price of toppling Gadhafi will be steep. But Libyans will topple him and in doing so they will bring down with him the castles of fear our dictators thought they had fortified.

I was on a PBS Frontline programme on Egypt’s Revolution and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Here’s the transcript of the full interview I gave Frontline in which I explain that the revolution gave the middle finger to many things.

I was featured in this Newsweek piece on talking heads on Egypt.