And the war against 25 January revolution in the mainstream media by the State itself continues ,today we found out the ministry of interior reportedly interfered to suspend the broadcast of a TV series starring a group of  a Pro-#Jan25 revolution actors because among its characters a corrupted police officer before the revolution !!

Yup according to the producers and makers of the TV series “The people of Alexandria” {Ahl Exenderia} may not be broadcast next Ramadan on Al Hayat TV and Mehwar TV channels after pressures from the ministry of interior aka security apparatuses.

Stated-owned “Media City for production” ; the producer of the series admitted that there were pressures from security apparatuses on the two channels not to air the TV series. For the production company , this will be a huge financial loss. The ads have been booked and actually we got billboards all over Cairo about this TV series.

The Holy Month of Ramadan will commence next week and it is well known fact that it is the golden season for TV shows and TV soap operas in the Arab region.

“The people of Alexandria” is a socio-political TV series written by writer Belal Fadl and starring Amr Waked and Basma Ahmed. According to the synopsis of the series , it is about a corrupted police officer in Alexandria who was punished in 2010.

I believe that this is another sequel to Fadl’s hit series in 2010 “The people of Cairo” where he criticized powerfully and boldly the political and social status of the Egyptian society.

Fadl issued a long statement about what happened earlier today in Arabic on his official Facebook page saying what happened was unprecedented and did not happen in the time of Mubarak.

He also referred to the fact that there was an online campaign launched to boycott the TV series by a group of Pro El-Sisi/Pro-Mubarak supporters who hate its crew from the #25 Jan traitors !!

Beside Fadl you got a true Pro-Jan25 cast whether Amr Waked or Basma Ahmed or veteran actress and leftist activist Mohsena Tawfik.

Amr Waked is already under fire for being one of the earliest actors to publicly support the 25 January and to join the protesters in Tahrir square. Insisting that he comes from Palestinian family “which is untrue ” , Amr Waked is attacked usually in the Anti-Jan25 Revolution TV shows and Facebook pages.

Basma Ahmed is the wife of the Pro-Democracy Liberal politician Amr Hamazawy. 

El-Mehawar network said that it would go on and broadcast the series. I do not know about Al Hayat TV network. Already the promo of the series was released on online.

On twitter Amr Waked and Hisham Selim , another renowned actor commented about the news of suspending the broadcast of the series.

ولا إحنا رجعنا ل٢٠١٠؟

— Amr Waked (@amrwaked) June 22, 2014

Amr Waked : Are we back to 2010

انا قاعد في بيتنا مستني يقبضوا عليا علشان مثلت مسلسل فيه عمرو واكد و بسمة و انا و مدينة الانتاج جواسيس. مصر القديمة مازالت قائمة

— Hesham SELIM (@heshamsselim) June 22, 2014

Hisham Selim : I am waiting at my house to be arrested because I starred a series along with the spies Amr Waked and Basma and produced by the Media City. Old Egypt is still there.

There is a hashtag started on Sunday’s afternoon against the TV series’ ban.

It started that TV hosts like Reem Magued have no place on the screen now and replaced by hateful ignorant bigots , then TV shows like Bassem Youssef’s El-Bernmag are suspended by ordered from the Egyptian regime as well Saudi regime too then we got TV series suspended because its writer and its leading actors support The 25th January revolution !!!

Ironically the current constitution recognizes the 25 January as a revolution and newly elected President El-Sisi recognizes the 25 January as revolution in his speeches , so why to fight it like that !?

I know the answer and I think you do know it too.

If in one year we end up with military rule, we don’t blame the military. We can only blame ourselves.

Alaa Al-Asway in an interview to the New Yorker Magazine
January 2014

I remember these words as soon as I read renowned writer and novelist Alaa Al-Aswany’s announcement on his official twitter account that he would no longer write in Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper because only one view is welcomed in the paper.

الى القراء الأعزاء . لقد توقفت عن الكتابة في جريدة المصري اليوم . . اشكر لكم حسن متابعتكم لمقالاتي الأسبوعية ونلتقى بإذن الله في مكان اخر

— Alaa Al Aswany (@AlaaAswany) June 23, 2014

Dear readers , I stopped writing in Al-Masry Al-Youm. Thank you for following my weekly column , we will meet inshallah in another place.

لم يعد الان مسموحا الا برأي واحد وفكر واحد وكلام واحد . لم يعد مسموحا بالنقد والاختلاف في الرأي . لم يعد مسموحا الا بالمديح على حساب الحقيقة

— Alaa Al Aswany (@AlaaAswany) June 23, 2014

Different views are no longer allowed ; only one view , one though and one talk. It is no longer acceptable to have different opinion and to criticize. It is no longer acceptable to say the truth but to praise only.

Strong words.

Of course on that night Al-Aswany had his shares from Pro El-Sisi TV channel media attacks to the level that he complained about it next day on twitter.

ما ان تعبر عن رأى مختلف حتى يخرج عليك المذيعون في الفضائيات ليشتموك بأقذرالالفاظ ويتهموك بخيانة وطنك ،هذا الإرهاب المعنوي يتم برضا السلطة

— Alaa Al Aswany (@AlaaAswany) June 24, 2014

As soon as you express a different view , the TV hosts go and insult you using the worst names and accuse you of treason. The regime accepts this morale terrorism.

الرئيس السيسي يطالبنا بالتحلي بالأخلاق ، هل من الأخلاق ان يتم اتهام مواطن مصري بالخيانة والعمالة في التليفزيون لمجرد انه يختلف مع رأى الرئيس

— Alaa Al Aswany (@AlaaAswany) June 24, 2014

President El-Sisi demands us to have manners. Is it from manner to accuse an Egyptian citizen of treason because he has got a different opinion than the president’s opinion.

Giving no further details , people were not so surprised because as it is no secret that the Pro-25 January revolution and its prominent faces from activists, protesters,intellectuals,TV hosts and writers are being stalked whether legally or in the media in not so-secret war.

The last op-ed for Al-Aswany had a direct criticism to El-Sisi and the protest law where he published an alleged letter from a young protester who decided to leave the country and immigrate due to the lack of freedoms in Egypt.

Eventually Al-Masry Al-Youm revealed that the bestselling novelist decided to stop writing there because the newspaper did not publish a teaser on the printed Front page of the paper for his three last articles as it was agreed upon in his contract.

Then Al-Aswany fired back claimed that the newspaper’s administration was forcing to him accusing the regime of pressing the administration to stop him.

Al-Masry Al-Youm’s owner Salah Diab denied those accusations and so on.

I do not care if Al-Aswany was acting like a diva or that Al Masry Al Youm was actually pushing him to leave the newspaper in the same way Al Shorouk did with Belal Fadl but I care for the fact now only he began to feel that there was something wrong after all those months. He failed in doing his homework I am afraid.

Ironically the New Yorker’s piece speaks about Ibrahim Eissa too , the so-called liberal prominent journalist who is now justifying the imprisonment of his fellow journalists in Egypt.

Now Dr. Alaa Al-Aswany is speaking now but where he was in the past year when voices were gagged and activists were sent to prison not mention human rights were abused widely. He should have spoken about the human rights committed against the Islamists before the Non-Islamists.

I know that faces like Al-Aswany were kept away in the media yet he should have been more vocal, more vocal about that the scenario he kept warning us of during 2011 and 2012 a.k.a The Counter Revolution or as he used to say “The Romanian Scenario”. 

It is an irony because the man who introduced us to “The Romanian Scenario” fell for it.

I think Dr. Alaa Al-Aswany is blaming himself now for that unconditional support to El-Sisi.

By the way I do not consider Alaa Al-Aswany as a liberal , the Foreign media should know the difference by name. Al-Aswany like many intellectuals from his generation is Nasserite.

Of course Nasserites have a very soft spot for the military , for nationalism and populism and are still trying to achieve their lost bloody dream of 1967 in 2014 regardless the fact that

Anyhow I do not gloat over Al-Aswany as some are doing because I consider him an important voice and it is better to wake up late than never but it is still too late.

The more voices are forced to shut up and to be cornered , the more damaging it will be for Egypt and its people more than you think.

Happy and blessed Ramadan to all the world from Egyptian Chronicles.

Tomorrow insh Allah will be the start of Ramadan in Egypt and a number of countries around the globe.

Hopefully this year’s Ramadan will be better than last year’s. Of course one can not stop thinking about the families of the detainees this year.

I pray to God this Ramadan that this injustice end soon insh Allah and all those imprisoned unfairly to be free soon.

Do not forget to check Egyptian Chronicles insh Allah tomorrow at 8 PM Cairo Local Time as Scheherazade will be back for a new tale this year insh Allah.  You can check back Egyptian Chronicles’ Arabian Nights here.

Sorry for the delay but here we are continuing our interesting tale tonight.

Here is the third episode of our tale. It was the 345th episode of the show on the Egyptian National radio.

Now here is the episode , you can listen to it in Arabic after the break. An English synopsis of the episode is below .

Now we are being introduced to a new character the Queen or rather Sultana Malka who is dying to get one big jewel for her crown. Her husband King Dandash orders the jewelers to get one.

At the same time King Dandash and his vizier decided to return back as dervishes to check once again that fake king and his luxurious palace. Returned once again to the river and taking the same boat like time , the two disguised men arrived to the palace to find no one. Suddenly the palace was deserted.Extremely furious , the king orders his vizier to arrest the owner of that palace who claimed to be a king.

Sultana Malka goes and complaints to her husband that the jewel she wants for her crown is owned by a man called “Shamalan The lazy” who refused to sell her the Jewel.

The vizier found out that the owner of the palace is a foreign man who is not from their realm , that foreign man comes to visit their kingdom once a year.

That foreign man is no other than Shamalan the lazy.

Tomorrow night insh Allah we will know more about Shamalan and his mystery.

You can check back the previous episodes here.

Sorry for the delay , one was busy with the Blair’s consultancy project in Egypt. Anyhow let’s leave Blair , El-Sisi and their realm and go back to Scheherazade's realm as it is much better by all measures.

Tonight Scheherazade continues her tale about King dandash and that interesting mysterious man claimed to be Sultan who owns a jewel even the king does not own ; Shamalan the Lazy.

Here is the 345th episode of the Egyptian radio Arabian nights after the break.

By the way is the player working fine in Google Chrome !?

Here is the synopsis :

King Dandash sends his order to arrest Shamalan the lazy to the rulers of the foreign countries. In his way back to his home Shamalan is warned that King Dandash wanted to arrest him because of the Jewel his wife is seeking. Shamalan decides to send to King Dandash the Jewel and even to return to that kingdom.

The Queen tells her husband that she got the diamond. After his arrest Shamalan was taken to Dandash’s court where he presented a bigger Jewel to the king and the queen. The King got too many questions to Shamalan : Why did he lie and claim to be the Sultan ? and why did he have a day for his misfortune !? 

Shamalan , the lazy told the king that he did not lie because he was once a sultan and … he started to tell King Dandash his tale.

Come back tomorrow to know the tale of Shamalan.

You can check back the previous episodes here.

The Guardian’s report about Tony Blair and his possible work as adviser for El-Sisi in Egypt under Emirati Sponsorship is the talk of the town at least online in Egypt today instead of football match.

The British newspaper published a report saying that former British PM Tony Blair accepted to ‘advise’ president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as part of a programme funded by the UAE to help ‘business opportunities’ in Egypt.

Not only Blair was said to advise El-Sisi but also his former press secretary Alastair Campbell was also giving a PR advice to El-Sisi and the Egyptian government. Oh yes Campbell of the doggy report of Iraq invasion. I wonder if El-Sisi and Egyptian government know read more about Campbell !!

Both Blair and Campbell are part of the UAE programme according to the report. This report is not made by The Guardian’s correspondent in Egypt Patrick Kingsely but by Seumas Milne. 

Milne wrote yesterday that Blair should be sacked from his position as Middle East peace envoy mentioning more interesting details about Blair and his UAE connections in Comment Is Free. The Guardian’s editorial also spoke about him too.

Of course today El-Sisi’s supporters accused the Guardian of lying and that it was being owned by the Qatari which is untrue while some of them did not reject the idea that the man who led Iraq invasion and supported the New Middle East map in 2003 was actually advising Nasser 2014 aka El-Sisi because Obama hates him !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

In the end Blair’s office issued a statement denying that the former British PM was working as ‘ formal adviser’ to El-Sisi and that neither he and his companies ‘have any commercial interest in Egypt, nor are they seeking business in Egypt’ 

Well interesting use of wording indeed because the Guardian actually said that Blair was being paid by the Emiratis for their own plans to help El-Sisi economically so he can be “informal” adviser.

Already Blair has been from the early western politicians that declared their support to El-Sisi and the regime in Egypt after 3 July and has been a frequent guest in Cairo for months so far.

It is worth to mention that after leaving the office e Blair was also a guest in Gamal Mubarak’s conferences in Mubarak SR’s last years in office if you can remember this.

The scary part in the Guardian’s report is not Blair’s consultancy , already the man used to advise Qaddafi and we all know what happened to him but actually those words“UAE-funded Egyptian taskforce in Cairo now forms a shadow government within the government.”

Talk to me about Egyptian sovereignty !! This reminds me so much how UK and France appointed officials in the Egyptian cabinet after the British invasion in Egypt.

Anyhow when I look to it from another side not only UAE and Saudi Arabia as well are trying to help El-Sisi to succeed economically and politically but they also are worried that all those billions they spent in the past year would end like the billions or the trillions they had used to send to Mubarak in corruption.

Now I can not help thinking about how many Pro El-Sisi supporters are cursing ElBaradei and blaming him for what has happened to Iraq and yet their president has been receiving one of the true criminals who destroyed Iraq by lies for months and their media is praising Blair and his war on the Muslim Brotherhood in UK and in the world.

I mean now Blair is said to be advising El-Sisi whom they believe that he saved Egypt from a similar Iraqi chaos scenario as well the region from the so-called New Middle East plan launched by none other than G.W Bush and Tony Blair !!

By the way for those who forgot ElBaradei’s position from the war on the Iraq blaming him for the destruction of this great nation exhausted by after years of dictatorship and failed military conquests , I dedicate this video.

On the other hand here is Egypt and Gulf’s friend Tony Blair delivering his speech about Iraq and the importance of military action against it .

Here is Tony Blair speaking in 2010 about the Iraq war. I hope someone translate these videos to Arabic and dedicate it to those El-Sisi’s supporters crying rivers on Saddam now.

And he has no regret for what happened.

Also I hate to bring this up but if we are bring to blame ElBaradei for the destruction of Iraq then you must bring up the role of Mubarak and before him the great Gulf above them Saudi Arabia whether in 1990s or in 2000s. I have not forgotten.

Actually seeing Blair in Egypt makes me fear the fate of Iraq as I remember the visits of Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq in the 1980s as well how Blair himself was advising and helping Qaddafi not to mention the US economic help to Augusto Pinochet in Chile. 

I am concerned on our national security and its secrets seriously speaking with all that Gulf-Western politician aka war criminals like Blair meddling in our matters like that. 

As I am Sick and tired I missed last night episode of the Radio Arabian nights but it is never too late to return back to this fairy tale world , it is much better than the depressing daily dose of torture , murder, detention and explosives devices in addition to austerity measures in Egypt

And we are back to the tale inside tale , the famous technique used in 1001 book. Tonight we will begin to know the mystery and tale of Shamalan, that filthy rich man who was once a Sultan and now is being called Lazy Shamalan.

You can hear the 5th episode or rather the 346th episode of the Egyptian Radio’s Arabian Nights after the break 

Shamalan is arrested and the king is insisting to know his story , a story inside a story as I hinted before.

Now  we will start our 347th night , we will know tale of Shamalan , which is another tale inside a tale

We are introduced to Shamalan’s parents , a very poor couple living in the woods. The father “Zakzok” works as a woodsman while the mother “Mabrooka” is a housewife. Living happily despite their poverty , only one thing the woodsman and his wife wished for : To have a kid.

One day Mabrooka is warned by a friend that her husband may marry another woman for the sake of the baby.

In desperate moment Mabrooka calls for a miracle and suddenly out of nowhere a dervish appears to her. That dervish calls himself “Abu Tarab” and he gives her an apple. He told her to boil that apple and eat her that night and that she would have a happy baby. Mabrooka would listen to the strange Dervish’s instruction carefully but something happened suddenly that changed everything.

Come back tomorrow to know what happened.

You can check back the previous episodes here.

And of course things happen unexpectedly to change the course of fate in our Arabian Nights’ tale of mysterious Shamalan.

Tonight is the 348th episode in our Classical Radio nights. You can hear the episode after the break in Arabic and read the synopsis in English.

Mabrooka listened to the instructions of the strange dervish carefully , she boiled the apple he gave her in a cauldron. For some reason she left her hut leaving the apple to boil and for another reason Zakzok , the woodsman returned  the hut earlier. Already he did not feel well.

Zakzok ate the apple. When his wife returned from the market , she told him about the story of “Abu Tarab” and the magical apple. Did not believe much in such talk , the couple laughed. Mabrooka wondered if her husband would become a pregnant.

Next day the wicked lady friend of Mabrooka was speaking with Zakzok wondering why wickedly he would not marry another woman to have a child.

Selling the wood her husband brought from the forest at the house of chief merchant in the city , Mabrooka got a generous offer to work as a maid but she refused.

Back at their small hut , Zakzok feels sick and wishes to eat beans mud “whatever that thing is” and her wife is wondering sarcastically if he were pregnant

You can check back the previous episodes here.

Now things are evolving and it is getting crazy in our tale , seriously tonight’s episode is crazzzzzzzzzzzzzzy

Yup tonight’s 349th episode is crazy and so you have to hurry up and click the “More” link in order to listen to the episode after the break.

And the miracle happened , the poor yet happy couple “Zakzok” and “Mabrooka” will have a baby as the woodsman is pregnant. Yup after eating that magical apple given to Mabrooka by that strange dervish “Abu Tarab” ,  the woodsman becomes a pregnant

To avoid scandal as well to have rest , the poor man had to stay at home and his wife decided to work as maid at the chief merchant of the town. One day the chief merchant decided to visit “Zakzok” as “Mabrooka” told him and his wife that he was extremely sick.

Panicked that her husband’s crazy secret would be exposed, “Mabrooka” hurries up to the hut to find another surprise waiting for her. “Zakzok” gave birth to a baby boy and that baby boy was delivered by none other than Dervish “Abu Tarab” through his leg !!!

The dervish tells the new father that that baby boy would have  great future.

After few hours the chief merchant arrives and sees the baby. Amazed to see the poor couple got a baby suddenly , he feels sad.

It is crazy I know but this is An Arabian nights tale !!