Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.
BASSEM YOUSSEF
And of course there were clashes there because people, they tried to remove those protesters from Tahrir. And I was, like, doing my job as a doctor treating them.
More Bassem Youssef Quotes
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Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.
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People would believe propagate, spread rumors or conspiracy theories in order to protect their own system of denial.
BASSEM YOUSSEF -
Satire has its limits. It is really up to the people to make the change. The satirist’s role ends at the screen.
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And of course there were clashes there because people, they tried to remove those protesters from Tahrir. And I was, like, doing my job as a doctor treating them.
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It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days.
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By the way, I follow the American elections, and I have never seen someone who is that offensive. I have seen people who are stupid. But stupid and offensive, that’s new.
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There are people who believe in Egypt that I – I’m actually – I’m getting paid by external powers and external intelligence entities in order to use satire to bring down the government.
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Make me a CIA agent to use sarcasm to bring down the government and bring down the country because this was all, of course, part of a worldwide conspiracy against the country.
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People say, ‘Are you afraid? Are you scared for your life?’ and I tell them: If I choose today to tone it down, if I choose today to shut up, tomorrow me, you, and all of us will be forced to.
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People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually – a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be.
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I’m sure even in America, where you have, like, free speech people self-censor themself. And it’s not – it happens because of different reasons. Because maybe it’s politically incorrect, it doesn’t have to really to be put in jail.
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We have Internet now and people are not stupid. But it seems that some people are trying to push the same agenda of the Cold War of conspiracy theories and amazing achievements that are very easily traced and validated.
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It doesn’t matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the – in Egypt. So we became very good in that.
BASSEM YOUSSEF