Special Announcement: Free Alaa

Thanks to our friend Yaakov Kirschen at the Dry Bones Blog, who passes this important message along:

An Egyptian blogger, Alaa Abdel Fatah, has been imprisoned along with a number of others for trying to exercise their freedom of speech in support of a free Egyptian judiciary. A blogger named Sand Monkey gives this report:

Alaa is a secular democracy activist, and a tireless advocate of freedom, free speech and human rights. He organizes demonstrations and engages in protests against all kinds of injustices in Egypt and is the winner of the international Best of the Blogs award from Reporters Without Borders last December.

Alaa was arrested while protesting to support Egypt's Judges fight for independence. 2 weeks earlier he had organized a "National Unity" protest to show solidarity with Egypt's Christians who suffered a sectarian attack on 3 churches on Good Friday. Before that he was one of the few voices that urged calm and peaceful dialogue while the cartoon crisis was hitting its peak. He is a desperately needed voice of moderation and democracy in Egypt, and one of the few flickers of hope in a country whose future seems mire between the crushing rule of the regime and the fanaticism of the Islamist opposition.

And now Alaa needs your help. We have started an e-mail campaign to the Egyptian embassies and the US State Department in order to push for his release, and have started protests in front of the Egyptian embassy and consulates in the US for his release. We will also hold protests in France, Italy and Gemany. We could use your help in getting the word out and sending them an e-mail demanding his release.

Addresses for the Egyptian embassies in the US and Canada are available here, templates for e-mails to be sent to the embassies here, and the contact information for the person to e-mail in the US state department is here. If you are a journalist or know one, help us spread the word by writing about this or demanding your local newspaper write about this. If you have a blog or a website and would like to raise awareness about this issue, banners for the Free Alaa campaign can be found here and here. We could use any help we can get, so if you have any ideas or ways to help us, please do.

For further information, go to Free Alaa and to Sand Monkey here and here.