Mohamed Fahmy after his talk at Columbia Journalism School. (The Ink/Asem Alghamdi)
A journalist who was held in an Egyptian prison for more than 400 days asked an audience at Columbia University on November 24th to continue pressing for the release of more than 200 reporters behind bars across the globe.
Mohamed Fahmy, an Egyptian-Canadian news correspondent, who was freed in September after Egyptian President Abdulfattah Elsisi pardoned him, said during an open conversation at Columbia Journalism School that the world is going through its worst attack on human rights and freedom of speech.
Fahmy, 41, and his two colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Peter Greste, were arrested in Egypt in 2013. They were accused of being terrorists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and with spreading false news that favored the Muslim Brotherhood. And because their media licenses had expired, they were accused of violating Egyptian broadcasting law. In a trial that was condemned internationally, they were each found guilty of all charges and sentenced to three years in prison.
“The Egyptian government at that time started something similar to McCarthyism,” Fahmy said. Al Jazeera English, where he then worked, was “viewed as the mouth of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Fahmy said.
The crowd in the World Room at the journalism school laughed when Fahmy described how shortly after reporting on a new law that banned the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Fahmy was accused of belonging to the same group. “We went to jail because of a law I just reported,” he said.
Fahmy, who currently teaches journalism at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, spoke about his time in prison. With his two colleagues, he started a radio program that included interviews with ISIS fighters and Al Qaeda prisoners held in the terrorist wing of the jail.
Fahmy was told by Egyptian officials to stop the radio show. “In the prison they took me off air again,” he said.
He described how reading Nelson Mandela’s biography, “Long Walk to Freedom” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” in prison helped him get through the experience. “It is the books that kept me on,” he said.
Fahmy had to renounce his Egyptian citizenship in order to be released from prison. He is trying to reclaim it and said he is willing to go to court to do so.
Fahmy also discussed the $100 million suit he has filed against Al Jazeera Network for not hiring a qualified lawyer to represent him during his trial and for asking him to work in Egypt with an expired media license. He believes he is a victim of a cold war between the Qatari government, which owns Al Jazeera, and the Egyptian government.
In June, while he was still in prison, Fahmy wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, titled “How Qatar Used and Abused Its Al Jazeera Journalists.” In the controversial piece, Fahmy accused Al Jazeera executives of using the Cairo bureau of its English channel to support its plans to empower the Muslim Brotherhood. “They made us unwitting pawns in Qatar’s geopolitical game,” Fahmy wrote in the Times.
In the Q&A session after his talk, Fahmy was asked about his views on government-sponsored television networks. He said objectivity does not exist at any network, including those that are independently owned. “There is no specific network that is 100 percent free,” he said.
Fahmy advised the journalists in the audience always to be careful when in the field reporting and to study the risks before taking a news assignment. He said no story is worth dying for or being arrested. He recently created the Fahmy Foundation, a nonprofit based in Canada that will provide financial support to imprisoned journalists worldwide.
Editor’s Note: Asem Alghamdi previously worked as a correspondent for Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia.