A trip to Amarna, the desert city of Akhenaten

Don't get me wrong, I am a relatively accomplished Arabic speaker and thought it was my role in life to be like him and those like him. But being a white dude who speaks Arabic is the only hurdle set, and no one says that is the only bar to surpass to report on US news in English. You need more and if you didn't speak English at a minimum people will laugh you out of a media outlet if we compare; only in the Middle East does that make you hot shit. It is partly that, and partly that everything is romanticism facing outward bc that is all the system tolerates. I always get away with stuff bc I can string sentences together and I am fluent enough to be charming. It is all you need to be respected, albeit increasingly less in Egypt, even if you are looked upon skeptically as a spy by some and Egyptians call it Foreign Syndrome, 3odet al-khawaga. That skill gets you places, but you cannot be reporting on relevant internal dynamics are you are gonna be sorry.

I know some that are a few degrees separated from me but close to many local people going to jail for sedition or failure to comply with censorship regulations, explicit or not. No amount of Arabic will teach you to hang out in those circles as a journalist, unless you're an Italian researcher during the Mahalla Labour disputes and you want to get beaten to death by the cops for looking into govt involvement in labor inequity. That happened and whoosh the human rights ambulance drove away to never came back. I'll google him later but no one recalls that dude anymore. None one gives a shit about my friends who learned Arabic and stayed during the revolution. Many of them learned not to write bc posting real stuff gets you in real trouble there. End of story.

So Peter is all nice and good but we have a made a global media economy where this is the most that can be tolerated in Egypt and similar regimes down the street bc it sells. Fuck the locals, who cares! And I say that a guilty westerner who fears for family and knows my nation helped facilitate this garbage, and shout at my ignorant Western family for not getting it when they humored me for a visit. The compounded problem is a lot of us work in the software industry building tracking systems used on those brave people who speak up so only an idiot involves himself or herself in that shit directly. Direct or not, I feel great shame at this.

But amarna is nice though.

As he says in his article, mafeesh faida.