Many Egyptians wanted free elections, but not everyone wanted Mubarak to go. Egyptian Christians, members of the Coptic Church, said things I’d heard before in Arab countries ruled by kings or autocrats: that even though these leaders were dictators, they sometimes protected members of vulnerable minority communities. These minorities did not want to take their chances with pure majority rule.
Nick and I were planning to write a story about the Copts and their apprehension about the protests. But the day we began our interviews, we heard there was another demonstration planned. When we arrived, we saw a two-man team from a German TV channel standing on a pickup truck filming the demonstrators. At this point in the protests, Egyptians would often gather in front of cameras and make a lot of noise, hoping to send a message to viewers across the globe. But the German TV reporter wasn’t satisfied with the crowd’s response; he wanted more. He raised his arms like a concert conductor, urging the men in the street to yell louder, while his colleague filmed them.
“Are you crazy?” I yelled at the TV crew in German. “Come down!” These crowds could be volatile, and riling them up seemed dangerous, not to mention unethical. As we moved through the crowd, I began to worry about Nick, who stood out as a foreigner because he is tall and blond. But Nick wasn’t the problem—it was the Germans. I turned and saw people pointing at the TV team, and I heard men yelling, “Kill him! He filmed us! He’s a Jew and a spy!”
Luckily, we’d brought along a large team. Nick and I had eight people with us: our driver, whom I’ll call Z because naming him could endanger his family; seven Egyptian men who had formed neighborhood protection groups during the unrest in Alexandria; some of their friends joined us as well. It turned out to have been a prescient decision. I asked two of the Egyptians to stay close to Nick, while the other five and I walked back toward the TV crew. By the time we got there, the crowd at their feet had turned into an angry mob.
The Germans were trying to get away, but there was nowhere to go. Just then, a man pulled up in a car. One of our Egyptian companions asked him to give us a ride. He agreed.
“Get the hell into the car!” I yelled at the TV guys in German. “These people will lynch you!”
They ran over and scrambled in, and I climbed in after them. Meanwhile, Nick had come over and was standing nearby. We both realized there was no room for him in the car. He gave a little wave, and I waved back, as if to say, “What can we do?” There was no chance; if he’d tried to get in, the doors would not have closed. Nick waved again, telling me to go on. I felt awful. I saw Nick turn back into the crowd and walk casually away. I hoped that the Egyptians I’d asked to stay with him would make sure he was safe, but I didn’t know.
In the intervening seconds, one of the men in the crowd had reached through the driver’s open window and grabbed the car keys out of the ignition. Now we were stranded, surrounded by angry men with knives, sticks, and machetes. The camera team was paralyzed. “What do you want?” I screamed at the mob.
“We want the camera, we want the pictures they took of us!” one man shouted. I looked out my window and saw that two men with knives were trying to slash our tires.
“There is no way out,” our Egyptian driver said. He didn’t know any of us but had stopped to help. Now this poor man was stuck with us, I thought. I told the cameraman to give me the memory card with the pictures he had taken. But the TV reporter refused.
I turned to him angrily. “Are you nuts or what? You want us to get killed for some pictures of protesters and your stand-up in front of the camera?”
The crowd outside our car was growing angrier. “Give me the memory card, NOW!” I shouted at the reporter and cameraman in German. Finally, the cameraman handed it over.
I opened my door and started screaming at the crowd in Arabic: “What’s wrong with you people? What is it you want? You want the pictures?”
The Egyptians seemed to be in shock. They hadn’t expected me to speak Arabic or to get out of the car. They started to back away. I hurled the memory card into the crowd, and the men in the street dashed to find it.
In the chaos, one of our friends from the local neighborhood watch group somehow managed to get our car keys back. The driver started the engine, but men packed the road ahead of us. “You have to drive now,” I told him in Arabic. “Drive!” When he protested, I put my hands firmly on his shoulders and spoke in as even a voice as I could manage. “They’ll move, just drive.” He stepped on the gas and the men in front of us melted away.
We were all in shock. Back at our hotel, I greeted Nick with relief. One of our Egyptian neighborhood watchmen took me aside. “Are you aware there was a guy on your side of the car who had a knife?” he asked. “When you got back in the car, he was coming after you. If we hadn’t held his hand, you would have had a knife in your back.”
I was holding a glass of water and I saw that my hand was shaking. “Thank God they got what they wanted,” I said.
“They didn’t get what they wanted,” the German TV reporter said with a smile. “We didn’t give them the footage. We gave them an empty memory card.”
I was furious. There were only two hotels in Alexandria where foreign journalists were staying: the Four Seasons and our place, the Cecil. We already had a security issue at the Cecil because an Al Jazeera crew was staying there and had been sighted filming stand-ups on their balcony. When the angry men we’d seen that day realized they’d been given the wrong memory card, I feared they would find out where we were staying and come after us.
We decided to get out of there. The next day, Nick and I headed back to Cairo, traveling in a convoy with the German TV team after they asked us not to leave them alone in Alexandria. When they ran out of space for their equipment in the trunk of their car, we even offered to let them stow some of their luggage in our trunk.
When we reached the edge of the capital, we were stopped at a checkpoint, one of many on the roads at that time. The men who ran them wore plainclothes and carried knives and sticks. It was impossible to know whether they worked for the government or some other group.
One of the men asked our driver for his identification papers and told him to open the trunk. Z had been growing more nervous the closer we got to Cairo; I played Arabic songs on my phone to calm him down. While we were sitting there, I saw the men at the checkpoint wave the Germans on. They sped past us toward Cairo, not even bothering to pull over and wait to see if we made it out all right.
When the men opened our trunk and saw a large bag with an orange microphone sticking out, they started screaming in Arabic, “These people are spies!”
“It’s okay. We’re not spies,” I said, trying to calm them. “All is good.”
One of the men had a gun in his hand. “We should kill them,” he said. “They are spies.”
“We’re just journalists,” I said. “It’s all okay.”