Cairo - In a photo posted to the social networking site Facebook on Tuesday night, Egyptian blogger Mohammed Gabir hoists a sub-machine gun in the air, a Palestinian-style scarf wrapped on his head. Portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin hang on the wall behind him. In a screenshot taken from al-Jazeera and also posted to the same page, Osama bin Laden raises his arm in a hortatory gesture. But the shot has been doctored: In the top right corner, beneath the words "Al-Jazeera Exclusive," an inset photo shows four smiling Egyptian bloggers brandishing guns.
In another photograph of an Egyptian blogger brandishing a gun, the words "bloggers in support of terrorism" are written in Arabic across the bottom.
And so the "February 30 Organisation," first born as "Retards for Change" to organize street protests in 2005, resurfaced.
The guns in the photos are plastic fakes. If there were any doubt, the bloggers also posted photos of themselves posing with a child- sized bow and arrow and a photo of a plastic, space alien ray gun and wrote, in English, that all guns used were toys.
The photographs and the online manifesto accompanying them are a satirical protest designed to call attention to the imprisonment of fellow blogger Mohammed Adil, an Egyptian detained in November for travelling illegally to Gaza in January 2008 after the border was breached.
An accompanying statement, written in the style of hard-line Islamist websites and exaggerated for comic effect, dubs Adil "Brigadier-General Dead," a reference to the title of his blog, "Already Dead."
Blogger Wael Abbas, one of the protest's organizers, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur
