OPEN
SEASON
become ubiquitous, broadcast on
television and across billboards
showing soldiers holding smiling
infants.
By Halawa’s account, the military has effectively co-opted the
protest movement that ended
Morsi’s presidency last June.
They have “capitalized on fear,
exhaustion and frustration with
the Muslim Brotherhood-led government,” she says. “Through the
propaganda, the original message of those protests has been
skewed.” In short, public revulsion at the prospect of Islamist
rule has been manipulated into
tacit acceptance for a crackdown
antithetical to democratic rule.
For Ammar, popular support for
the military has not stopped him
from speaking his mind. Even after security forces took his brothers away, the 22-year-old civil
engineer refuses to hide. He is
unabashed in acknowledging that
he writes news stories for the proMuslim Brotherhood online news
website Rassd, which is frequently re-printed o