Hyenas and jackals: spots & stripes remain.

Mubarak's scavengers, cowards before the millions-strong demonstrators for democracy, have slunk back.

From here:

When the Egyptian army entered the streets of Cairo at the peak of the protests in Tahrir Square in January, its members were welcomed as heroes. When they pledged not to fire on the demonstrators, people in the streets shouted, “The army and the people are one!” It has taken only a matter of weeks for that promise to come undone. [...] In meetings with half a dozen activists and demonstrators on Monday, people kept referring to “the events of Wednesday night” and “what happened at the museum.” For many who risked everything to oust a dictator and set Egypt on a democratic course, Wednesday, March 9th, has become a turning point: the moment when it became unambiguously clear that the Egyptian military was not the guardian of the revolution they hoped it would be.

Samira Ibrahim Mohamed is a 25-year-old woman from Upper Egypt. She came from her home more than eight hours away in January to join in the protests in Tahrir Square. Like many others, she has stayed in Cairo, occasionally returning to camp out in the square as a reminder of the democratic promises that the military and remnants of the old regime have made. She was in the square on the afternoon of March 9 when members of the army and men in plainclothes attacked the demonstrators, arbitrarily arresting people on sight. Samira was one of the protesters who was dragged away from Tahrir that afternoon. [...]

Samira was handcuffed to a wall in the museum complex. For nearly seven hours — almost every five minutes, she said — Samira was electrocuted with a stun gun. Her torturers would sometimes splash water on her and others to make the shocks more painful. The electrical jolts were applied to her legs, shoulders and stomach. She pleaded with the soldier to stop. Repeating what the demonstrators had chanted in Tahrir Square, she said, “I begged them. I said, ‘You are my brothers. The army and the people are one.’” Her tormentor replied, “No, the military is above the nation. And you deserve this.” [...] But the most humiliating moment was when they first brought her into the prison. She and 10 other women arrested in the square were stripped and forcibly examined to determine whether they were virgins. She had been told that any woman found not to be a virgin would have prostitution added to her charges.

When they led her into the room where she would suffer this indignity, she paused for a moment. Behind the military man waiting for her, she noticed a photograph. It was a portrait of Hosni Mubarak. She asked the soldier, “Why do you keep that up there?” He replied, “Because we like him.”

Samira was subjected to *barbaric* torture, almost identical to the abuse experienced by female political prisoners during the authoritarian dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, countries whose *barbaric* cultural traditions are informed by *barbaric* religious ideology, which in South America is evangelical christianity or fundamentalist catholicism.

Gynophobia is hatred so profoundly rooted in some men that they will justify collective - and individual, when done to female family members - terrorist practices by claiming *God* made them do it.