Hitting the Streets in NYC and DC for Alaa

The Mubarak regime seems to have messed with the wrong blogger. The security agents at Saturday's peaceful rally in Cairo denouncing the crackdown on the reformist judges cornered a crowd of protestors against the Egypt Museum. According to Sandmonkey, they then cherry-picked out a few key figures to arrest.

Alaa Abd El-Fattah is easily recognizable with his curly looks and scruffy get-up. He's also helped organize many a protest, parlaying the popularity of his Egyptian blog aggregator Manalaa.net (cited by Or Does It Explode on several occasions) to get the word out. So Alaa got fingered, and now has at least 14 days in the lovely Tora (Bora) Prison ahead of him - and possibly even longer.

But if this was an attempt to shut down Alaa and his blog network, it appears to have been a huge miscalcultation. In just over 24 hours, dozens of major international blogs and media outlets have taken up his plight. Alaa's international profile just rocked up a notch, and the Egyptian government has another embarassment on its hands.

And you can help deepen the embarassment. Appropriately enough, Alaa's blog aggregator has a new post up announcing that solidarity rallies will be held in the US tomorrow. Here's the essential info:

Activists in the U.S . will picket the Egyptian embassy and consulates in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday, May 9 at 12:30PM (local times) demanding the immediate release of all jailed pro-democracy protesters arrested from April 24–27, 2006, in Cairo. Dozens of opponents of Egypt's authoritarian government were assaulted and arrested after riot police attacked a demonstration in support of reformist judges who are challenging election fraud. Journalists covering the protests have been attacked and threatened by police, and in a separate incident, the chief of the Al Jazeera TV bureau has also been arrested.

Head on down during lunch break. This kind of quick-response grassroots organizing was impossible even a few years ago, but we've got to put bodies into action fast to hold the lumbering Egyptian police state in check.