… where i’ll be a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for nine months…

My experience at the airport this time was my worst. My plane landed in San Fran airport around 1:30pm… I got out of the airport by 5:45pm… after spending beidan enjoyable time with the US Department of Homeland Security.

Like the usual, you get to the Immigration Officer, who goes thru your passport, asks you few questions, then you give them your fingerprints and they scan your fucking eyes… You should leave immediately then, and go claim your bags… unless you are a male Middle Easterner, refugee, or anyone the US govt deems dodgy… Then, you are asked to go to another room that has a banner that reads “Secondary”… You enter the room, hand in your passport, and wait till they call your name for interrogation.

Few mins and I get an officer who called my name and accompany me thru a corridor to another room. And the questions start… The normal stuff.. name, address, why are you in the US, where you’ll be staying, etc… Do you have bags? Yes… Ok, let’s go pick them up…

We start walking to the luggage reclaim area… “How’s Hosni Mubarak?” He asks…

“He’s doing well, and he’s very grateful for the $2 billion he gets from you every year,” I answered.

The officer laughs, and then asks me, still walking: “So is his son, Gamal, the next president?”

“Daddy wants that and so does Jimmi… Anyways, we’ll see… Since the old man will not live for long.”

This officer was friendly… He started chatting, telling me he’s originally Ethiopian, and spoke about his family…

We picked my two bags from the belt, and then walked back to the “Secondary” room.

Still walking: “Has your family passed by Egypt on their way to America?” I ask…

“No. And probably it’s a good thing. I hear Africans don’t get good treatment.”

“Have you heard of the Sudanese refugees massacre?”

“Yeah! Horrible! The Egyptian police killed many in some square in Cairo, right?”

“Yes, it was Mohandessin sq. in Giza. My blogger friends were there and documented the bloodshed.”

“Good… It’s a shame… Our region is full dictators. And they are very old… very old…”

By then we reached the “Secondary” room….

Embarrassed, he asked me to open the bags, and said that he’ll have to search them.

He opens the first one, and start going thru my clothes and stuff, asking me what’s in this bag and whether I packed it myself, etc.. It doesn’t amuse me in general when someone goes thru my bags, especially when it is full with private belongings… (And I swear next time I’m travelling to a Western country, I’m packing the most smelly socks I have..)

The second bag doesn’t wanna open, and it turns out that I brought the wrong bag, which looked EXACTLY like mine.. So we run back again to the luggage reclaim area… and found my bag… We return again…

Another officer comes in: “We’ll have to check your laptop too.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to switch it on, and check there is no child pornography pictures nor illegal material.”

I knew something like that could happen… And anyways, I had already encrypted my work files I don’t want anyone to see in a secure place in the cyberspace… So I gave him the laptop…

For over two fucking hours, the officer was going thru the laptop.. I didn’t see exaclty what he was looking at… but every couple of minutes, his eyes would roll… and then call another colleague to watch whatever he was watching…

“Could you come here for a second…?” the officer says… “I need you to translate this Arabic for me.”

I look at the screen, and it’s no “child porno”… The “child” the officer was looking at was no one but Naji el-Ali’s Hanzla in a poster by the Palestinian Trotskyist blogger Wahad Iftradi…

“When they mention ‘red lines’ to me, I go crazy!” I translated. “I know only one red line: The biggest Arab head does not have the right to sign a treaty of surrender to Israel.”

“Ooh!” the officer replies… “I see.”

The guy continued searching my laptop.. and it became clear he was going thru the folders that had activist artwork and photos taken by me and other photographers of demos and labor strikes.

I returned to my seat, and the guy’s eyes kept gazing at my laptop with disbelief… I told myself I bet anything he’s checking Latuff’s cartoons now… and indeed when I scanned my computer later to know which folders he went thru.. I found that there was a specific interest in the following pix that were opened several times…

This one by Latuff….

And this one…

Last but not least was this photo of Sayyed Aboud, the Egyptian volunteer who carried out a suicide attack against the Israeli occuaption troops in Gaza in 2002…

The photo, together with others, were posted on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad website. I had come accross them back in 2002, and managed to track down the family in Shoubra, and interviewed them for the Cairo Times. It was actually me, who confirmed the news of Sayyed’s death to his family, after I showed them his photos on my laptop screen.

“Why are those sleeping pills and aspirin…?” asked the other officer who was still searching my bags, and now my wallet as well as anything he can put his hands on.

“It’s to commit suicide if I stay here for another hour,” I replied fuming….

“So why were you arrested in Egypt?” asks a third officer.

[If you apply to the US visa, the forms include among other questions: "Have you ever been arrested before? Have you ever been a pimp, a prostitute or a member of a terrorist organization?" And you have to tick yes or no... And I tick yes, since my arrest is nothing I'm ashamed of, and actually it's badge of honor under fucking Mubarak's dictatorial regime.]

“I was arrested during student protests.” I replied.

“When was that?”

“In October 2000.”

“Why were you arrested then?”

“I chanted against President Mubarak in a pro-Palestinian demonstration.”

“How long did you stay imprisoned and were you charged?”

“No I wasn’t charged, but was kept in police custody for four days.”

“Were you arrested again?”

“Yes, in 2003 following the anti-war demonstrations.”

“What war?”

“The Iraq war!”

“Were you charged?”

“No”

(I forgot actually to mention there was another one-day arrest in May 2002, prior to a demo we were planning to hold in Tahrir Sq to mark the Nakba anniversary.)

The other officer was still enjoying his time with the laptop, calling over his colleagues every now and then to have a look.

The guy was now going thru the folder of my articles, as well as the CVs I had on my hard drive of friends whom I was helping to find jobs, or family relatives whose English weren’t good so they had asked me to translate theirs from Arabic.

“Who is X? Who is Y? And why do you have their CVs?”

“They are friends.”

“This guy is my friend, but I don’t have his CV,” the very smart officer told me, pointing at his colleague who had finished searching my bags by then.

“BCOZ you both know English, and he’s not looking for a job!”

“So if you are anti-US, as it’s clear from the stuff we are seeing, then why are you here?” asked the officer who was inspecting the laptop.

“I’m against the US foreign policy in the region, in the same way that there are people here in your country who don’t like its foreign policy.”

This BEIDAN continued for another hour, till the officers went to bring in their boss, who was gonna make the decision whether I should enter the fucking paradise USA. By then, I was TOTALLY EXHAUSTED… and I honestly started wondering why the fuck did I even leave the cradle of civilization (Nasr City tab3an), and come here…? And by then, I didn’t give a rat’s ass whether I would get deported or not… Actually, I started legitimizing it in my head that it would be better to get deported to at least save the fortune I’ll be paying in California, since the fellowship doesn’t include my living expenses…

However, I heard the officers in the corridor speaking to their boss… I could catch few words of what they were saying. Moments before the boss and the officers came in, I could hear the officer who was inspecting my laptop saying something that ended with “…. but… against the war!” That’s when I heard the boss screaming: “So what? I’m against the war too!” and then said other things I couldn’t hear… but I told myself: “I should get this guy a blog!”

The boss came.. He asked me again about my arrest, few other questions… and then asked why there was Islamist literature on my hard drive. “I’m a journalist,” I answered. “And I work for HRW trying to track down disappeared Islamist suspects the CIA sends to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation and torture… So it’s natural to have these files on my hard disk.”

“I see…” The boss replied. “Ok, wait here and we’ll be right back.” and they left…

Few mins later, the officer who was inspecting my laptop came back to the room… unplugged my laptop.. and gave it back to me… while the American-Ethiopian officer smiled and said: “Welcome to America.”

I left the airport, and I was fuming… But there was also a sweet taste of victory… Little did the DHS dudes know… YES I’M A TERRORIST! A quick google search can show you that I’m a senior-ranking card-carrying member of the Brigades of the Martyr Malek Mustafa, the armed wing of the 30th of February Organization (an offshoot from Retards For Change [Officials]). Although we are not listed yet on the US State Dept list of terror organizations, we are no less notorious or dangerous, and we are involved in so many crimes: Defaming Egypt’s image abroad, fabricating torture videos and shamelessly accuse the poor Egyptian fucking pigs police officers known for their clean record in human rights.. We are also involved in the 9/11 attacks, the 7/7 London bombings, and the spreading of the Ebola virus, as well as manufacturing the bird-flu disease…

Despite all of this, we still travel to Western countries, under the nose of the Western intelligence services, and we are establishing “sleeper cells” everywhere, ready to blow up shit, (as well as defaming Egypt’s image abroad of course…)

So you get Nora Younis, another senior member of the 30th of February who carried out at least three suicide bombings before in Abdel Khaleq Tharwat St, allowed to enter the US last spring…

As well as Wael Abbas, who heads the Brigades from his hideout in Cairo’s Downtown caves… yet still allowed to enter the US too…

Other 30th of February terrorists managed to infiltrate European countries like Ahmad Gharbeia, who likes to travel around the world, disguising himself as a “human rights activist,” while really all what he does is buying arms for the organization…

[Above: Ahmad buying deadly weapons in Yemen.]

Kossomokom ya me3arrassin ya manayek ya wlad elhabla…! And TAKE THAT poster…