NOVANEWS
Four Egyptian kids who dared make fun of ISIS in a harmless video are headed for trial along with their teacher on charges of “insulting Islam,” after their Muslim neighbors got hold of the footage and went to police.
Aged between 15 and 16, the youths could face up to five years in a youth detention center – while the teacher would serve any sentence he receives in prison – if the court finds them guilty of violating Egypt’s blasphemy law, Egypt-focused activists say.
Still shot of one of the boys from the video
“They are some kids who decided to have fun in a private place,” Mina Thabet, activist and researcher at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, told the media from Cairo. “They were on a trip with their teacher, but somehow rumor got out that they’d thrown down the Koran, and had insulted Islam, so that led to their arrests.”
The teacher, Gad Younan, 42, had been escorting the four boys – and a fifth Coptic youth seen in the video – on a faith-based excursion outside their home village of Al-Nasriyah in Minya Governorate. At some point, the teacher allowed the boys to shoot a video on his cell phone in their hotel room.
Thabet said the 32-second clip – provided exclusively to the media– fails to support the rumors about the boys having allegedly insulted Islam. Instead, it shows them mocking ISIS by imitating a beheading – a form of execution that has become one of the terror group’s multiple signature atrocities.
“They use some words that are used in Muslim prayers, but they are in no way being disrespectful to Islam,” said Thabet. “And even if they were, they should have the right to free speech – but in Egypt we have this law.”
Article 98(f) of the Egyptian Penal Code criminalizes a series of faith-related comments, including “insulting a heavenly religion or a sect following it.”
Residents in Al-Nasriyah filed an initial complaint in early April, leading to Younan’s arrest and, says one newspaper report, questioning over four days. More than 2,000 local people launched a series of marches over three days in order to put pressure on the parents of the children to give up their loved ones to the authorities, witnesses reported.
“They were…chanting: ‘With our souls and blood, we will defend you, oh Islam! We will not leave you; we will take revenge for you!” Salah told how the mobs were “pelting homes with stones” and “pounding threateningly on doors and windows” of shops.
