Congratulations, Hosni

It has been a red-letter week for the Egyptian censors. First, they scared one of the best English-langugae Egyptians bloggers off the Internet. The Sandmonkey has finished his last rant. He writes:

"I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me...I ignore[d] that, the same way I ignored all the clicking noises that my phones started to exhibit all of a sudden, or the law suit filed by Judge Mourad on my friends..."

Fresh off that success, an Egyptian court sentenced an Al-Jazeera reporter to six months in prison for producing a film about police torture. The crime is "harming Egypt's national interest" -- an ironic charge, given the negative public surrounding Egypt's press crackdown.

Egypt is lashing out at bloggers and the media from a position of weakness, not of strength. If the Mubaraks were comfortable with their hold on power, they would not feel the need to attack bloggers. If someone wrote an article comparing Cairo in 2007 to Tehran in 1975, I would read it.