WaPo On Egypt's Anti-Gay Crackdown

Via the Washington Post:

Egypt’s government has aggressively cracked down on Islamist and liberal opponents over the past year. Now officials are increasingly targeting another group: gay people. Police raided a public bathhouse in Cairo this month and arrested at least two dozen men, parading them half-naked in front of television cameras before hauling them off to prison. It was the latest in a series of police busts at suspected meeting places of homosexuals across the country. Arrests of gay people have been on the rise since President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi seized power in a military coup in 2013, but in recent months the arrests have escalated, rights groups say. “It’s a full-on crackdown on all sorts of freedoms,” said a prominent gay rights activist in Egypt, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing crackdown. “There is a lot of fear in Egypt’s gay community,” he said. “Many people want to leave the country.”

Homosexuality is technically legal in Egypt. Those arrested have been charged with "debauchery." More from the above-linked article:

The bathhouse raid, on Dec. 7, was particularly troubling for the gay community, activists here say. Not only was a television crew from a popular satellite channel on hand to document the operation, but the channel’s own journalists also had prompted the arrests by informing police that gay men went to the location to have sex. The channel, Al Kahera Wal Nas, had planned to feature the bathhouse, or hammam, in a special report on AIDS in Egypt, calling it a “den of sin” but offering no proof that any illegal activity had taken place there. Bathhouses are popular in the Arab world, with men and often women visiting them to relax in hot baths or steam rooms. “This is the first time I have seen such close coordination between the media and the security forces” on an anti-gay raid, said the activist who is outside Egypt.

A coalition of local civil rights groups have issued a denouncement of Mona Iraqi, the reporter seen in the photo above. Via press release:

Mona Iraqi took the media frenzy to a new level as she transformed the job of a presenter to that of an informant, working for the police, reporting to them what she thinks is a crime. Those who were arrested did not commit any crime punishable by law. Yet various media outlets promoted the idea that the biggest sex ring in Egypt for “practising deviance “ had been arrested, before any verdict was reached or any accusation against those individuals was actually proven. Iraqi boasted about her reporting, calling it a heroic deed and a "moral triumph." She took pictures of those arrested, in clear violation of the basic ethics of journalism. The signatories to this statement condemn most strongly what this media presenter did.

Her acts disgrace the professions of media and journalism. We assert that the person who violated the law is the presenter and not the men who were arrested. Besides prying into people's intentions and their private, consensual practices, this presenter clearly violated articles 75 and 58 of the law of criminal procedures: these prohibit anyone from disseminating information about persons arrested by the police to others who do not have standing in the case. We demand that the presenter, Mona Iraqi, be held accountable before the law for misusing her profession to violate the privacy of others and slander and misrepresent them, and for pursuing professional benefit regardless of consequences.