Hunger-Striking American Student Wins Freedom from Egyptian Jail
As a rule, most Americans, especially leftists who spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week trashing their country, do not realize how good they have it here in the United States.
Maybe they will rethink their situation after hearing the story of Mohamed Amashah.
Amashah, who at the time was a citizen of both the United States and Egypt, traveled to the Middle Eastern country last year, where he urged the government to ensure “freedom for all the political prisoners.”
In Egypt, unlike in America, political prisoners actually exist.
Amashah ultimately became a political prisoner for daring to speak out against the government, spending 486 days in an Egyptian prison. Toward the end of his sentence, Amashah joined other political prisoners in going on a hunger strike.
Fortunately, Amashah’s prison sentence has come to an end. Egypt released him from custody on Sunday, and he has now returned to the United States.
“Amashah was forced to recuse his Egyptian Citizenship in exchange for his freedom. This allowed the government to use the foreigner deportation law to deport him out of the country,” Mohamed Soltan, head of the Washington, D.C.-based Freedom Initiative group, told ABC News.
Breaking| Egyptian-American Mohamed Amashah has been released from Egyptian prisons after 486 days in arbitrary detention. He arrived in Dulles Airport this morning!
This is welcomed progress that we hope is built on for the release of others
Statement: https://t.co/AMU61S5uXE pic.twitter.com/YP2A2bT5Gc
— The Freedom Initiative (@thefreedomi) July 6, 2020
It’s worth noting that the charges Amashah was locked up for included “misusing social media.”
Here in America, an obsession about “misusing social media” has engulfed the American left.
Silicon Valley, a powerful force in American life, has not hesitated to crack down on social media users for spreading “misinformation.”
Facebook decided to label posts organizing protests against coronavirus-related lockdowns as “harmful misinformation,” with CEO Mark Zuckerberg assuring totalitarians on the left that “we take that down.”
Facebook has also removed several of President Donald Trump’s campaign ads, again citing so-called misinformation, Depending on the results of the 2020 presidential election, the censorship of “misinformation” — more often than not a synonym for “conservative content” — may only get worse, not better.
Last month, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden unveiled a new campaign initiative entitled “Fix Facebook. Beat Trump.”
Biden asked his supporters to sign a petition asking Facebook to take a tougher stance on “misinformation.” Apparently, the aforementioned examples just were not good enough for the firmer vice president.
There is obviously a difference between censoring someone by removing their social media posts and censoring someone by throwing them into prison. But the “slippery slope” argument definitely applies here.
If America does not rein in this type of censorship, it could spiral out of control into the totalitarian nightmare that has become the norm in Egypt.
While the First Amendment protects Americans’ freedom of speech, that has not prevented the punishment of Americans who dare to hold views that the elites deem “unfashionable.”
For instance, a school principal in Vermont was fired for expressing skepticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and a college student in Texas was expelled for sharing her similarly unfashionable opinion on social media.
Hopefully, what happened to Amashah will cause leftists to think twice about continuing their partisan crusade against “misinformation” and “misusing social media.” It would also be nice if Amashah’s strict punishment for speaking his mind led the far left to re-evaluate its intense hatred of America.
In America, perpetually oppressed leftists are triggered by syrup bottles and sports mascots.
While the First Amendment gives liberals the right to whine about such trivial matters, common sense gives Americans the right to stop taking them seriously.
If leftists want to experience real oppression, all they have to do is travel to Egypt or one of the third-world dictatorships they revere such as Cuba or Venezuela. Americans, especially those on the left, do not always grasp just how much they take for granted.
Americans should view what happened to Amashah as a warning of what can happen when one person or group of people accumulates too much power. It should also lead to a newfound respect for the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution that people in other countries can only dream of.
As Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” It will take a collective effort on the part of the American people to preserve our freedoms and make sure that what happened to Amashah never, ever happens here.
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