Ultranationalism is a lovely state of mind. It makes you believe that you are the greatest nation on earth. It can drive poor and crushed masses into believing that they are the chosen ones out of billions of people. It can make millions believe that you have defeated the United States of America’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and captured their commander while Obama screamed uncle (yes, more of that still to come).
And it can also, magically, cure AIDS.
It was a cold February morning. Writers and producers were in the office discussing the backlash we faced from last week’s episode; the fact that we made fun of Sissi’s campaign tactics (which could be summarized as “we really don’t need a campaign”) caused numerous writers and talk shows to unleash their wrath on the show. I mean, how dare we take his pseudo-campaign lightly?
The team settled down and had the usual chat about our previous episode. Now we had a sensitive issue to tackle.
Sissi had just visited Russia. But it was hardly just a visit to share a vodka toast with Putin. The propaganda machine talked about that visit as if we were still in the Cold War. Our TV had 1960s propaganda all over it. If we had black-and-white TV sets we would expect Elvis to pop up. Except now we had an Egyptian Elvis, alive and kicking and wearing black Ray-Bans and posed with Putin for pictures to show Obama that we were moving on.
“Obama is having a nervous breakdown right now,” one TV host said.
“According to American newspapers, Obama will shoot himself in the head after Sissi’s visit to Russia.” That was a headline of a major Egyptian newspaper.
Such was the narrative of our media. According to them, Obama was hoisting a huge boom box outside of Sissi’s window blasting Peter Gabriel’s captivating, imploring “In Your Eyes.”
In America I saw Trump supporters adoring Putin and drawing parallels between him and Trump. I saw it in Egypt way before that.
The narrative of our episode was taking shape. We now knew the kinds of videos we would use. But this time we were really talking about sensitive issues: arms deals, international relations, and refuting the fact that Obama was having a crying fit in the West Wing restroom.
We were once again taking a risk by ridiculing Sissi and his image as conqueror of the world, which was considered by the authorities a national security issue. He was untouchable.
WE WERE STRUGGLING WITH THE SECOND SEGMENT. WE WERE trying to make a mundane education bit work, but there was a lack of decent material and we were really forcing it.
Hend, my producer, rushed into the office. “Bassem, you have to come and see this.”
We went out to the hall, where the TV screen was broadcasting a huge press conference. Every single person in that conference was in military attire.
Did we just declare war? No, it was a ceremony to launch a new military hospital.
Another achievement by the army. Interim President Adly Mansour and the de facto president and defense minister, Sissi, were there. It seemed they had just been notified of the discovery of the century and had left the ceremony for the people in charge to announce the amazing news.
An older man in military uniform with a general’s rank on his shoulders started to talk. Once he opened his mouth we all had a feeling that he had the air of a hustler or, at best, a con artist who made his way selling junkers at a shady used-car lot. He was introduced as General Dr. Abdel Atti.
He started by stating the fact that Egypt has one of the highest rates of hepatitis C infection in the world. But now we have the cure, he said.
“We have named it CCD. Complete Cure Device.”
The pun was quite obvious. CC invoked Sissi. How tacky could you get? But oh, it got even better. “This device will cure patients of hepatitis C in a mere few days,” Atti said.
Seriously? The most chronic disease known to our country would be cured just like that?
“By June thirtieth there will be no more patients of hepatitis C in Egypt,” he announced.
The promised date had no relation to the date denoting the anniversary of Morsi being ousted by the army. It was a mere coincidence . . . of course!
“I can also say confidently that this device cures AIDS,” Atti continued.
There was a most daunting silence in our hallway as we watched while army generals clapped at that marvelous announcement.
“You see, the AIDS virus is a much weaker virus than hepatitis C virus. If we can cure hepatitis, AIDS is just a piece of cake.”
I had to take a seat as I was watching this; it was too much.
“The DNA of hepatitis C is quite similar to HIV,” he continued. “That is why our device can work on both viruses. Our device destroys the virus completely in the patient’s bloodstream. Now we have free protein DNA floating into the patient’s blood. As you know, viruses are made of protein. This free protein nourishes the patient and brings his health back very quickly. It is as if we took the virus away from the patient and returned it to him in the form of a kabab sandwich.”
The entire hallway erupted in laughter. Was he trying to be funny or was he trying to give us a heart attack?
“Patients who undergo the treatment are forbidden from eating meat because we are afraid that they will be overloaded with protein. Instead we make them run around the track to burn the extra protein. That is why our patients who get treated with that machine are not emaciated and wasted like other hepatitis and AIDS patients. They are very healthy and gain some muscle mass during the treatment.”
Our segment of the week just wrote itself.
I started to assign tasks to the producers and writers and went into my office to recollect my thoughts. Minutes later, Hend came in.
“There is a sort of mutiny in the office,” she said with a big smile. “Some of the producers don’t want to go with the segment.”
I went into the editorial room right in the middle of a heated discussion. “What’s wrong, people?” I asked.
“We don’t think we should do this segment,” my team said.
“But why?” I asked.
Their answers showed me how effective propaganda can be even in the place that is fighting it.
“They are too confident,” one producer said. “I know the whole thing sounds stupid. But Bassem, this is . . . the army. They will never announce something like this without being a hundred percent sure.”
Many agreed with her.
“What if we made a big deal out of it and then it turned out to be true? We will look really bad then; plus, the army never lies,” another producer said.
The army never lies . . . just shows how deep this brainwashing can run.
“I just got off the phone with my parents,” a third producer offered. “One of our relatives is infected with hepatitis C. He is very happy with the army invention and can’t wait to begin the treatment in a few months. When I told them we are going to talk about it in the show, my parents were furious. They shouted at me, saying, ‘Don’t you even mention the army in your show. This is the army, they can’t be wrong.’”
We were not making fun of desperate Sissi lovers anymore. We were not satirizing the hysteria that made people believe that Sissi was as infallible as a medieval pope. If we did this segment we would be making fun of men in uniform. For Egyptians that was unforgivable.
I brought the discussion to a halt. “Okay guys, I don’t want you to think of me as Bassem the TV host. Now I am Bassem the doctor. Let me talk to you about viruses.”
For the following thirty minutes, I used a whiteboard to explain what a virus is, what its life cycle is, and why the army’s “achievement” was absolute nonsense. They seemed convinced and went back to work. But I knew that this would not be the end of it. My nineteen years of medical education didn’t go to waste, see.
The next two days we were pinned in front of our monitors collecting material about the new “invention.” It seemed there were actually two devices: a system for diagnosis and a system for treatment. The treatment device was, as I said, appropriately named CCD: Complete Cure Device. This looked like a miserable school project—a makeshift ATM that was executed quite badly. The “general” who made the announcement earlier posed proudly next to it with other members of the team. He explained how this device worked like a dialysis machine: the blood of the patient passed through the machine, and voilà!, it came out free of the viruses.
General Abdel Atti, now identified as the head of the research team, became the star of all the prime-time talk shows. He explained that this machine contained two “elements” with hidden secrets from the days of the pharaohs, which were able to purify the blood of the viruses.
Prominent doctors from university hospitals came to the defense of the new “cure.” Hepatologists, cardiologists, and internists who were working under the “general” came out to say how wonderful this invention was. “We have been working on this for twenty-three years,” claimed one of them. “We had the results a long time ago but we didn’t want to announce it because we feared that it would be stolen from Egypt.”
Really? So you had the cure for AIDS right around the time when the whole world was screaming out for relief? Well, thank goodness you kept that shit to yourself—the world needed to see an Oscar-winning performance from Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club.
The steamed-up general made an appearance at a conference, cameras flashing and microphones peeking out from under his white mustache. He belted out, “I was working in a lab in America. I discovered that invention twenty-three years ago. They offered me two billion dollars to sell the rights to them. I refused and I said my only condition was for this cure to be in the name of an Arab and a Muslim like me. Then the all-mighty Egyptian military intelligence were able to smuggle me outside of the United States. I came here to work for my country, and for the welfare of my people.”
This was turning into a very bad sequel of Mission Impossible. Who said you needed to be a Scientologist to be that delusional?
The general repeated those claims on another TV show that evening, with the exception that he was offered only $20 million this go-around. I mean, what’s a couple of zeros, right?
But that was not all. He also announced a new way to diagnose HIV infection. He claimed to be able to diagnose your condition remotely. Sounds like a Star Trek movie, right? Well, wrong. They showed the other miracle device, but it was nothing more than a TV antenna connected to a handle. Yes, a TV antenna that you hold toward the patient. The antenna would just point at and follow you if you had the virus.
This brought to mind a famous scandal in 2008 that involved the all-mighty British Army. A swindler called Jim McCormick sold fake bomb detectors to the British Army in Iraq. He cashed in around 60 million pounds sterling ($80 million U.S.) selling around 6,000 detectors for the price of 10,000 pounds each. The real cost of one device was only around 15 pounds.
Why are all armies stupid? Especially with money?
Now that same fake bomb detector was in the hands of the con artist doctor general in a promotional video made by the army’s moral affairs department. He demonstrated how that bomb detector could find out if someone had the virus or not. He pointed it toward one of the patients, telling him, “Congrats, you used to have AIDS, now it is gone.”
Apparently, if the antenna didn’t point to you, you didn’t have HIV.
He then went on to explain how sensitive this detector is. “Even if the patient is in another room, the device will still be able to detect him,” he announced proudly. “If there was a trace of the virus on my finger, the device will point at my finger. If I wipe my finger with a tissue, the device will leave my finger and like a hound dog follow the tissue.”
Doctors who were trained and educated in prestigious medical schools went out to defend this hoax. They explained how the DNA of each virus had its own electromagnetic wavelength unique to it. The bomb detector could be adjusted for each virus’s wavelength and could detect it very accurately.
“Even if the patient was in another room, the detector will point to the patient with the wall separating them,” said one doctor, a real fucking doctor, working under that con artist Abdel Atti. This occurred during another prime time talk show. There were two doctors from the team working under General Abdel Atti who went on praising the genius of the general. “You know,” one doctor said, “the other day I was in the lab and suddenly I found the machine pointing at me. I was freaking out. But then I remembered that earlier in the day I was greeting General Dr. Abdel Atti, and there must have been some residual virus on his white coat. When he took off the jacket, the antenna pointed to the jacket. This is how accurate our machine is.”
We were howling at the videos in the editing room, thinking it could not get any better, when yet another video surfaced. It seems that all of the doctors working on the military team were having a collective orgasm over their fake medical achievement. They couldn’t stop calling all of the talk shows to demonstrate how incredible this machine was. “With the same principle of detecting a virus through its electromagnetic waves and hence being able to destroy it, we were able to utilize this principle in curing other diseases,” one elated doctor said in a phone call with a TV anchor. “We can also use it to fight bacterial infection.”
“Really?” asked the anchor.
“Yes, we have also tried it on many patients with other conditions and they were healed. We have seen patients being healed from lupus, eczema, psoriasis, and diabetes.”
“Oh my god,” shouted the anchor, “so can it also heal cancer?”
“Of course it can heal cancer,” asserted the doctor.
Of course! Why not? Just throw cancer in the mix. Because AIDS, psoriasis, diabetes, and cancer have so much in common and we never knew it. And this has been in the works for the past twenty-three years, but only now are we choosing to reveal it. Aren’t we smart?
This turned into a flat-out propaganda hit job by the army, and the military medical team continued to sell the device even more, and it seemed like they never ran out of diseases to cure. “We have noticed that patients with heart conditions and hypertension after being on our treatment for two months stopped their medications because they didn’t need them anymore,” said the cardiologist on the team.
This was a miracle in the making. A machine that cures viruses, bacterial infections, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and heart conditions. You really don’t need to sell it harder to us! But for some reason the military medical team decided to turn this invention into one of those two-for-one infomercial deals with a “But wait—there’s more!” special.
“We have also noticed that patients with sexual impotence had major improvement in their sex life,” added the same doctor.
That’s it, people. This was all we needed. If you say a treatment could also give you a boner, that’s all that was needed to sell it, even to healthy people. They might as well have run those interviews as replacements for ExtenZe commercials!
This machine was now named the “Kofta” machine. Kofta is another word for “meat” or “kabab,” specifically the kind of meat you eat on a skewer in Mediterranean restaurants. This name change happened because of the genius of General Dr. Abdel Atti, who earlier had said that the protein DNA of the virus could, through the treatment, be returned to the patient like a kabab sandwich (or kofta).
The Friday of our show people waited to see how we would deal with “Kofta-gate.”
We did not disappoint. The audience laughed and howled at every single joke. At the end of the segment I told the audience, “This was all fun and games, but this is so funny that we should actually be serious about it.”
I went on to say that this was a scandal, one sponsored by the “most competent institution in the country,” an obvious reference to the army. I told the audience that this “cure” was no trial drug. “They said they will cure everyone in June. This is called a promise,” I added. “When you make this promise to sick people and you don’t deliver, that is a crime in itself, and someone has to be held accountable for that.”
The theater was dead silent. The audience clung to every word, as they were thinking, What? Can we actually hold the army accountable? That’s unheard of!
I went on, “If you think that we will let this go, think again. If you think that we will just be silent until this is forgotten, we won’t. Here on this program, we will remind people every single week about this promise until it turns out to be real, or someone is held accountable.” The theater exploded with applause.
I was taking this personally because the doctor in me was angry; I hate people being cheated when they are sick. I didn’t realize that by speaking out about basic science that we would get even more heat. This was a scandal, and we thought that by doing our job and setting things right we would be praised. But this was the army. The army doesn’t give a shit about what is right and what is scientific; they care about their own image even if it’s at the expense of the people. Years later I met the scientific advisor of the interim president, who resigned in protest over this scandal. He too had his share of heat. He told me that he met the head of Sissi’s office. When he voiced his frustrations about what happened and even brought evidence that this machine doesn’t work, he was told: “It doesn’t matter if the machine works, what matters is the uniform behind the machine, and this uniform should be respected at all costs.”
When I heard this story I was hardly surprised at how all hell had broken loose at the time.
When this episode aired, it set a trend in social media like never before.
“Kofta-gate” was the talk of the town. We realized that if we didn’t talk about the machine, it would become another hoax that would be put to sleep. We made it a point to remind people of the “promise” every episode.
The talking heads in the media lashed out against me. They accused me of being a pessimist who was bringing down the morale of the country by laughing at its army.
“If the army says it works, then it works,” one anchor would shout on his program.
“You are just jealous of our wonderful army. And to those people I say, die with your viruses,” another anchor said with a smirk.
“The cure works,” a third anchor would announce, “the security guard at my apartment building has been cured by it.”
I didn’t know if they were in denial, or if maybe I’d lost my mind and there actually is a new kind of medicine being taught now in medical school and the cure was actually real? I met doctors who were not affiliated with the military medical team, who confirmed that the machine worked.
People had to realize the fallacy of inventing a machine that could cure every known medical malady to man, right?
A shocking fact was revealed over the next few days. The celebrated General Dr. Abdel Atti was not even a doctor. Oh, surprise, surprise. He was a lab technician. He was also a felon accused and convicted of running a sham clinic, where he treated people with herbs without a medical license. His “clinic” was closed down and there was a one-year imprisonment sentence delivered against him.
People wondered how a guy like that could rise in the ranks to make general in the “most efficient and competent establishment” in the country.
But the denial continued.
An anchor proudly announced how Sissi was very happy with the invention, that when he saw it he cried tears of happiness.
It didn’t really matter if this was a real invention or not. People just wanted to believe. Months later, when I had to escape the country, a famous TV anchor met me in Dubai and told me that when asked about the AIDS invention in a private meeting with media people, Sissi answered firmly, “The army never announces anything unless we are one hundred percent sure about it.”
We kept reminding the audience every week about the approaching June 30 deadline, which was four months away.
The deadline passed but it didn’t matter. The army, the media, the overexcited doctors just stopped talking about it. Sissi supporters who were attacking the show for spreading negative energy simply ignored the whole thing. And like that, it was gone.
I felt that what we were doing in the program was amounting to nothing. Yes, people were avidly following us, laughing at every joke and cheering on every bold statement. But what was the use if no one was held accountable for that scandal? This is when I started to lose faith in change. This is when I saw how people were treating the program as simple comic relief, a way to vent, that’s all. People who believed us were helpless, and people who loved Sissi no matter what were happy in their own ignorance.
During this whole debacle—I didn’t think of North Korea, which I usually did when drawing parallels to our regime. Instead I couldn’t help but think of Gambia. Gambia is a small country on the western coast of Africa. In 1994 an army general called Yahya Jammeh took over the country through a military coup, and in 2007 he announced that he had discovered an herbal cure for AIDS. He also announced that hundreds of people were healed. For years this was an undisputed fact in Gambia. WHO workers who objected to that cure were evicted, and those who ridiculed the cure were labeled as part of the “imperial conspiracy” against Gambia. President Jammeh would appear on television with a leather-bound Quran and a long string of beads in front of a group of people with HIV. “In the name of Allah you will be cured in thirty days,” he would say, raising the Quran above their heads. The British publication The Guardian documented those early days when President Jammeh was rounding up sick Gambians to cure them: “Waiting outside Mr. Jammeh’s treatment chamber, the patients themselves said they did not need laboratory results to tell them they felt better. ‘It feels as if the president took the pain out of my body,’ a patient would say.”
Many poor Egyptians stopped taking their hepatitis C treatment. “Why spend the money? The army will heal us for free,” they collectively believed.
Reports of hundreds of Egyptians with deteriorating health conditions came to light after the army failed to deliver on its promise. They dared not submit complaints against the army.
The television anchors that sold the idea of the cure are still around today, screaming and kicking and finding another bullshit conspiracy to distract the people with. No one was ever held accountable and, as usual, the army and Sissi were untouchable.
Every time I read about another hepatitis C patient who was in a deteriorating condition because he waited for the army cure which never came, I go back to The Guardian report about Gambia and the promise of the thirty-day cure. The last few lines in the report went as follows: “Amadou Jallow, 25, who quit his job at a tourist hotel after his mother was diagnosed with AIDS. In his savings account is 8,000 dalasis (about £150)—enough, he says, to last him the 30 days Mr. Jammeh promises it will take to heal his mother. ‘I’m just afraid that, what if my account runs low?’ he says. ‘But by then I think she will be cured.’”