Monday, March 11, 2013

New Egyptian Law Allows Unrestricted 'Citizen's Arrests' Of Foreign Tourists



Thinking of making a trip to Islamist Egypt to bask in the wonderful Arab Spring? You might change your mind after reading this.

The Egyptian prosecutor general for the Muslim Brotherhood regime (their equivalent of our Attorney General, Eric Holder) has enacted a new law permitting ordinary Egyptians to make what amounts to carte blanche arrests of foreigners in Egypt for things like suspicion of 'spying' or blasphemy, or pretty much anything else that goes against Egypt's sharia based legal code:

Egypt's Coalition to Support Tourism (CST) condemns the prosecutor-general's decision to allow citizens' arrests announced on Sunday, arguing it raises many worries among tourists.

Many tourism agents called the head of the CST, Ehab Moussa in alarm. He told Ahram Online that they wanted to confirm the rumour over what they feel is a strange decision.

The "judiciary policing" (the direct translation for the criminal law) will allow any citizen to arrest someone committing a crime.

Moussa claims that tourists would then be mistreated and blackmailed in Egypt.

"If a tourist rebuffed an Egyptian merchant, refusing to buy something, the merchant might accuse the tourist of spying and arrest him," he said.


Not to mention things like phony accusations of things like rape,theft, proselytizing for Christianity, blasphemy, you name it. And the end result if you don't pay up, or maybe even if you do? If you're lucky, some very unpleasant jail time until payment of a very heavy 'bail' to enable you to get back to civilization.

I'd say that this would finish off what's left of Egypt's tourist industry, but there's still this going on to attract a certain kind of clientele.

Unless that's what you're looking for, there's no reason to go to a poverty stricken Islamist hell hole where Jew hatred and persecution of Christians is the norm and women get treated like animals.

According to the article, Egypt has fallen to the lowest rank out of 140 countries in terms of safety and security, just behind Pakistan, Chad and Yemen, in the World Economic Forum (WEF)'s Travel and Tourism (T&T) competitiveness index released last week.Hardly surprising.

By the way, our brilliant Secretary of State John Kerry just gave the Egyptians $250 million in military aid and would have given them more except that Congress stopped him. This at a time when the Obama Administration is using the excuse of the sequestration to throw U.S. troops out of the military, close PX's, and lay off teachers.

And this is after the Muslim Brotherhood regime stood by while a mob sacked our embassy.


5 comments:

UCSPanther said...

This is has "legalized kidnapping" written all over it.

Rob said...

Yes...the same thing happened before in Egypt, and also in Iran where we essentially ransomed American citizens.

Our forefathers went to war over this sort of thing in the past, when America was far less powerful and well established, but still stood on the principle that being an American citizen meant something.

We were a different country then.

Unknown said...

Obama's not going to Egypt is he?

Sara Noble said...

Oh this can't be - we have that wonderful democratic Arab spring. We just gave them tanks, F-16's, hundreds of millions, actually billions of dollars. We created all that good will.

Ex-Dissident said...

Wonder when Menendez and Clinton will begin frequenting Egypt? Wasn't Kerry a frequent visitor of this part of the world recently?