“Despite flimsy evidence, the group was eventually charged on seven counts, including operating an unlicensed organizations, inciting street children to join pro-Muslim Brotherhood protests and sexually assaulting minors. The group denied all the charges, and human rights lawyers said the evidence against them was fabricated. The state’s own forensic report found no evidence that any of the children in their care had been sexually abused. Reports suggested that a boy they had allegedly kidnapped had never been to the Belady Foundation, and he was later found in another province.”
The Post offers a refutation of the sexual assault charge but lets the Muslim Brotherhood charge go by unchallenged except for the blanket denial. If it is false, why not present some evidence of that fact, as with the sexual assault charge?
If Hijazi is indeed Muslim Brotherhood, whose idea in the White House was it to make freeing her top priority? Why a Muslim Brotherhood operative? Why not press for the freedom of Mohamed Hegazy to emigrate? He is the Muslim who converted to Christianity and was imprisoned, harassed, and persecuted for years until finally he was broken and returned to Islam. Why not press for the freedom of some of those others imprisoned for leaving Islam?
If Hijazi is a Muslim Brotherhood operative, this episode is yet more evidence that the Trump administration, which promised to drain the swamp, has instead been conquered by it.
“Who is Aya Hijazi, the American freed from jail in Egypt?,” by Louisa Loveluck, Washington Post, April 21, 2017:
BEIRUT — During nearly three years spent shuttling between an Egyptian jail and a Cairo courtroom cage in a case dismissed by human rights groups as “bizarre,” Aya Hijazi’s American citizenship did not seem to count for much.
She was a dual national at a time when Egypt was gripped by the widest-ranging crackdown in its modern history. Her case had become a national scandal, cast by state media as a victory of law and order. And despite calls for her release, the Obama administration seemed to have little leverage with the Sissi regime to make it happen.
But on Friday, she entered the White House as a free woman, having flown home on a U.S. government plane after being acquitted in a Cairo court.
The court’s decision came after months of backroom negotiations between the Trump administration and representatives of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi.
Hijazi, 30, grew up in Falls Church, Va., graduating from George Mason University before moving to Egypt for further study. She went on to found the Belady Foundation, an organization that aims to shelter and rehabilitate marginalized street children.
As a crackdown on civil society groups was gathering pace in May 2014, police raided the Belady Foundation’s Cairo premises. Hijazi was detained alongside her husband, Mohamed Hassanein, and others at the foundation. She would have to wait four months to even find out what she had been arrested for.
Despite flimsy evidence, the group was eventually charged on seven counts, including operating an unlicensed organizations, inciting street children to join pro-Muslim Brotherhood protests and sexually assaulting minors. The group denied all the charges, and human rights lawyers said the evidence against them was fabricated.
The state’s own forensic report found no evidence that any of the children in their care had been sexually abused. Reports suggested that a boy they had allegedly kidnapped had never been to the Belady Foundation, and he was later found in another province….