Rape? Women? Stripped? What really happened to Lara Logan?
By Témoris Grecko
I witnessed part of the mob attack against CBS’s Lara Logan at Cairo’s Tahrir square on the evening of Friday, February 11th. I was struck when I read CBS’s February 15th communiqué describing the attack as a “brutal and sustained sexual attack”, and attributing her rescue to “a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.” This account does not fit with what I, and others, witnessed.
The TV network’s communiqué, which came rather late, as noted by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, was promptly interpreted by many in the international media to mean rape, and in these terms it became a debate that soon adopted racist and sexist overtones. Egyptian and Muslim men are portrayed as wild beasts and Islam as an inherently violent religion. Attractive women, many commentators have said, should avoid taking on risky tasks, and if they insist, then they had it coming.
I was buying tea from a vendor in Tahrir with two friends, Amr Fekry, a 26 year old Egyptian call center agent, and Andi Walden, a San Francisco political science student. Then we heard the noise and saw the mob coming. A blonde woman, neatly dressed with a white coat, was being dragged and pushed. It didn’t seem to me she was panicking, but rather trying to control the situation. They passed us in an moment. They were yelling “agent!, agent!”
I tried to run to intervene, but some Egyptians I didn’t know prevented me from doing it. There was nothing I could do and, as a foreign journalist, I’d surely end up being accused of being an agent too, and attacked. Fekry did go there and dissapeared into the crowd, 50 or 100 people strong.
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