Danger — News Reports! Handle With Care

On Sunday, March 23, I spent the whole day traveling back home from Egypt. It was more than a day, really. It was a day stretched out over several time zones. When I left my hotel in Cairo at 6 a.m., it was still Saturday night in New Jersey, where I was headed.

It wasn’t a bad day. On traveling days you can just go into the tunnel and have a long meditation and let the world go by. I enjoy unplugging from emails, Facebook and the news media for a while. It’s a rare and precious moment when you are authorized to shut out the media for a few hours.

When I got home I was exhausted and went to sleep as soon as I could. I paid no attention to the news. Then the next day I heard about a report I had missed while I was traveling.

According to the reports, 529 members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been sentenced to death for violence in a southern Egyptian city last August.

I was horrified. The thought of 529 people being put to death, all the misery that would cause, radiating out into the lives of the people over generations, the bitterness, the fueling of the cycle of violence as we have seen in so many situations around the world, set my mind reeling.

Other things also crossed my mind; not as serious as the deaths of hundreds of people, but serious enough. Egypt has been a favorite whipping boy for the international media lately. What would this do to Egypt’s image around the world, to its international diplomacy and business, including tourism?

I hoped that something would happen to avert this tragedy. Perhaps after the election the new president would follow Mandela’s example and try to set the stage for reconciliation, using his authority to commute these sentences.

Then I consulted my contacts in Egypt, both Egyptian and American. They all seemed sure that these death sentences would never be carried out. Such are the vagaries of the justice system, they assured me.

One of them was Marc J. Seivers, Chargé d'Affaires, of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, effectively the acting U.S. ambassador. He told me, “I am quite confident this verdict will be overturned by a higher court, most likely quite quickly.”

The sentencing was only the first step in a long judicial process, I was told. Harsh preliminary rulings in Egypt are routinely overturned.

Even CNN’s Cairo correspondent, Ian Lee, said it was “highly unlikely” the sentences would be carried out. “When you hear something like this, well it is shocking,” he said, “but you do have to step back and say there's a lot between the sentencing and the execution.”

I was given examples of other court proceedings with sentences that sounded extremely severe and were later overturned, such as the case of the deposed autocrat Hosni Mubarak. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing hundreds of protestors at the 2011 anti-Mubarak protests that led to his ouster. But he appealed the ruling and was granted a new trial, which is still ongoing.

The sentencing was not a verdict by the court, I was told, but was a recommendation, which must then be reviewed by the Egyptian Mufti, an official Islamic scholar/consultant appointed by the government.

Opinions versus Facts

The opinions I heard were unanimous. But they were more than just reassuring comments. They were underpinned by facts and history. Some of the best factual information I received in relation to the issue came from Farah Abouseif, a young Egyptian woman who was a participant in the demonstrations of both phases of the Egyptian revolution but is now in England working on a Masters Degree. She is the daughter of the country director of Egypt for Big Five Tours and Expeditions.

She told me that according to Egyptian law, when the defendant is not present, the court must levy the maximum penalty. In this case only 123 of the defendants were in court. The rest had been released, were on bail or in hiding, according to a Reuters report.

According to Abouseif, 17 of the defendants were acquitted outright. “I didn't see that make the headlines at all,” she said, “which is a shame because here's what they're charged for: these are the people who broke into prisons and police stations, killed police officers, torched churches and killed those guards in charge of protecting the churches in Minya.”

Abouseif reiterated what others had told me; that these were only preliminary verdicts. “There are three different stages before a final verdict is reached,” she said, “and plenty of appeals will be filed. I hate how this is now used to show how Egypt and El-Sisi are turning into a dictatorship – when this is purely a matter of the rule of law, which El-Sisi is far from interfering in. This is not a matter of Egypt fighting Islamists, or even radicals, which I strongly defend our right to do. But this is a matter of punishing criminals who have decided to take the law into their own hands, attack state institutions and religious establishments. And I would like us all to consider how people in Minya, or even all of Egypt, especially the Coptic community, would react when acts of terrorism (which I think is the perfect term to explain the torching of churches and police stations, and the killing of officers) go unpunished.”

In essence, Abouseif agreed with everyone else I spoke to: “I can almost guarantee you that the death penalty will not happen,” she said. “And regardless of my personal feelings towards this, according to Egyptian law, it is the maximum punishment. And even if they do not appeal, or even if all trial stages result in the same verdict, the cases of those 528 people will be transferred to the Egyptian Mufti, who will go over it according to Islamic Shari'a law, and then he would be required to decide.”

Media Burn

This was one more incident that taught me that you have to be very careful about making judgments based on news reports.

I had taken the news reports literally and had been convinced that the Egyptian government was going to carry out these extreme sentences. And then I was reminded how foolish it was to draw conclusions from a news story about a situation I knew virtually nothing about.

How many times does it have to happen before I catch on to the fact that you rarely gain enough knowledge from a news report to draw any reliable conclusions? It happens over and over that news reports are later completely discredited, and yet somehow I still tend to believe what I hear at first.

I had just spent nine wonderful days in Egypt during which time I had seen that the situation I encountered there bore very little resemblance to anything I had heard about it through the media. I had written about it for the folks back home, to try to make them understand as well that what I was experiencing in Egypt was so different from the news reports that it was hard to believe it was the same place.

And yet the first day I returned I also got carried away by a dramatic news report that engendered fear and panic in me. And when I learned more about it, my feelings and impressions changed dramatically.

Calling the Kettle Black

Before we cast judgment on Egypt and say that its laws are primitive or strange, we need to adjust our vision by looking back at ourselves what we are familiar with.

We are often judgmental of other countries for not living up to our ideals, when we ourselves don’t live up to them. If we want to think clearly about these issues, it seems we should give other countries the same benefit of the doubt we give ourselves and our more familiar allies.

Tourism goes on independently of most of these political and social issues. If we are going to refrain from visiting a country because we don’t approve of its laws or political events we don’t approve of, we might not be able to allow ourselves to be in our own country. Governments are imperfect instruments.

The United States, oddly enough, is one of the few First World countries that still has the death penalty. According to a report on the death penalty in The Guardian, the biggest executor in the world is China, followed by Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the U.S.

When it comes to the incarceration rate relative to population, according to The International Centre for Prison Studies, the U.S. tops the list.

I’m not trying to bash the U.S., but before we say we can’t go somewhere because of the government, we should not set standards that would not allow us to visit our own country.

And before we cast judgments on Egypt’s judicial system, remember that judicial systems tend to be rather archaic. That’s part of their function in a society. While other parts of society may move forward rapidly, the judiciary is there to make sure the old principles are not abandoned. In England, the barristers in court still white wigs from the 18^th century. They look extremely odd and out of place in the 21^st century, but we accept it. The judicial system is one of great dignity, and yet it’s a bit funny in some ways too.

When it gets down to the business of tourism, what goes on in the streets, what a traveler experiences usually has little to do with the kind of news that concerns governments and appears in the news reports.

As Bruce Poon Tip of G Adventures told me the other day, “These problems are often quite centralized and removed from where tourists actually visit and where they are are. And quite often, tourism can still go on in these places. I’ve been in so many countries where there are travel advisories and there is no sense of any kind of danger as far as I can tell.”

And no matter what political problems there may be in any country, the free exchange of people to people in tourism is usually a positive force that works toward greater understanding between the two countries. Sometimes it’s the people on the ground who have to lead the leaders to better, more humane policies.