Action4Canada - May 04, 2022


Empower Hour： Majed El Shafie's Torture


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

172.53665

Word count

1,695

Sentence count

2

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the persecution of Christians in Egypt and how Christians are persecuted as a minority in the country. I also talk about my own experience of being tortured by the police and how I managed to escape.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 i was born from a muslim family back home in egypt when i was born i was born i found big huge
00:00:06.080 library in my bedroom full of books about freedom of religion about human rights uh many of you
00:00:12.080 doesn't know that there is many christians today is persecuted in egypt they are in prison between
00:00:18.080 six thousand to seven thousand you know christians egyptians they are in prison right now just
00:00:23.360 because they are christian many of you know that maybe you don't know that you cannot build that
00:00:27.600 church in egypt you can build bar discotheque but not a church you know in canada anybody is is free
00:00:34.800 to build a church a mosque a temple all of this persecution that happened to the christian
00:00:41.040 minority make me wonder as a muslim young man why this is happening to the christians let me put it 1.00
00:00:46.800 this way you do not persecute somebody unless you are afraid from the truth that they can we have
00:00:53.920 to ask for justice we have to create a human rights organization underground to fight for the
00:00:59.440 minority rights to fight for the christian's rights in egypt we started this organization underground
00:01:05.440 young kids uh only maybe seven people in two years time we become 20 28 000 in one organization
00:01:14.960 we build churches underground as i said by the law you cannot build the church
00:01:18.560 uh we we establish a newspaper to ask the egyptian government to give us our rights and equal rights
00:01:25.760 as a minority this all led to august 15 1998 i was in my office in downtown cairo and i heard knock on
00:01:37.760 my door 1 30. i went to open the door somebody asked for a name i told him nobody here by this name
00:01:44.480 you have the wrong address after i closed the door by two seconds
00:01:49.040 five soldiers two officers they came they broke the door they they kidnapped me from my office to
00:01:55.040 a police station school is only police station behind the egyptian parliament and they interrogated
00:02:00.320 me there and they said we know who you are we know the organization that you build the book that you
00:02:06.880 wrote the church that your buildings all around the country the one thing we don't know who is the rest of
00:02:13.760 your team we know that you are the head of the group but we don't know who else working i told them i
00:02:19.440 don't know which team and which organization and if you know everything about me why are you asking
00:02:25.600 next day they transfer me to a prison it's called abu zaba prison for the people who doesn't know
00:02:31.440 abu zaba prison we call it in the middle east hell on earth is where the people go there and they never 0.99
00:02:37.600 come out in a matter of fact there's only maybe five names of people came out of this prison alive
00:02:43.600 and i'm one of the five 25 of the space of this prison is underground it's like graves or basement
00:02:51.600 that's where they keep the believers and they torture them and i went there for seven days for
00:02:57.760 me it was like 700 years every day the torture level increases the officers that torture you
00:03:06.000 they're always wearing a mask so you cannot see their face they always call each other
00:03:10.080 by numbers not by not by name so you don't know the reading there is always military doctor standing
00:03:16.160 behind you this military doctor is his job not to make sure that you don't have the pain
00:03:20.960 his job that you're conscious to the pain you are if you lost your conscience he wakes you up
00:03:29.360 so you are in more pain day number one they shave the hair of my head and they have two big containers
00:03:35.760 of cold very cold and very hot water and they will dip my head one like one minute here and one minute
00:03:43.280 they're exchanging now the torture will be for three four hours non-stop they give you rest between
00:03:48.800 for 20 minutes and after that they carry on for another three four hours until the end of the day
00:03:53.840 and they will come at the end of that and then they ask you if you speak if you give them the
00:03:58.720 information and in this case they just want the name of my friends and i will not betray my friends
00:04:03.520 i will not kill my friends day number two they hang me upside down they beat me with everything in their
00:04:10.800 hands they bury me with cigarettes they they heard me they will beat me for three four hours non-stop
00:04:17.280 with the build and they i couldn't walk in the end of the day so they took me to my dark cell
00:04:25.280 underground and they told me tell us the name of your friends and i said no i will not they told me do you
00:04:30.080 know what will be your torture next day if you didn't speak today i told them i'm listening they said we
00:04:34.320 will release three dogs to attack you these are dogs being trained by the egyptian authority to 0.53
00:04:40.960 to attack the believers to attack humans and they they close the door i mean what you do if you are 0.78
00:04:47.280 at my place you're underground you're beating you're tortured you're lying down and put off your own 0.94
00:04:53.920 blood and you know next day you will face three dogs will attack and that was my prayer to the lord
00:04:59.360 in this i told him lord i want to thank you for your gift on the cross i want to thank you that you
00:05:05.040 died for our pain and our sin and our disease and i want to thank you that you rose again to give us
00:05:09.920 the way the truth and the life almighty god i don't regret my belief in you i will do it again 0.98
00:05:21.360 but my only request to you kill me before tomorrow morning 0.89
00:05:25.520 i don't know if i can handle this pain and next day i woke up i prayed in jesus name that he will 0.97
00:05:34.400 take my soul give them the body i don't care about the body from ash to ash from dust to dust i really
00:05:39.920 don't care much
00:05:44.000 i woke up next day
00:05:45.040 and it was a dark room and they opened the door when they opened the door there is a red light at
00:05:55.440 the corridor and it was a dark room and i can hear the dogs getting closer and closer and closer and
00:06:03.760 closer and i prepared myself for pain i prepared myself for and i can hear them getting closer and
00:06:10.800 closer until i know that they wasn't my room i can smell them their breath touching my hand but i
00:06:19.280 couldn't feel any pain i couldn't feel any agony so i start to remove my hand just slowly away from my
00:06:29.440 my face and that's what i saw all three dogs sitting around me officers and soldiers start to
00:06:37.040 beat the dogs with the belt so hard for them to move to attack but they didn't the dogs did not
00:06:44.960 attack and i remember the officers and the soldiers the the officers told the soldier maybe something
00:06:50.240 wrong with the three dogs go get me another set of three dogs and they went to bring the another set
00:06:55.280 of three dogs and another three dogs sit in the same position who is one little different the middle
00:07:01.280 dog took step forward that he licked my face officers and soldiers didn't know what to do
00:07:05.600 they never saw anything like this they took the three dogs they closed the door they get the same
00:07:10.560 message that i got day number four officer number 27 he came he opened the door very angry very upset
00:07:19.600 he was a big huge man like you know was big strong man officer number 27 officer number 27 he acted
00:07:28.480 in two actions number one he slapped my face and he was a strong big man so when he slapped my face i hit the wall
00:07:35.280 really because officer number 27 when he slapped me and he tortured me he thought that i would i would
00:07:41.200 spend the rest of my life in pain in shame in agony unable to talk unable to laugh unable to live
00:07:49.280 and i'm here to tell you that office number 27 is mistaken and today i'm standing with action for canada
00:07:56.960 even laughing about it because officer number 27 and the people like him that try to take away our rights
00:08:06.160 can hurt our body but no one can touch our soul no freedom is a bulletproof the second thing that officer
00:08:16.640 number 27 that he took me to another dark room there was a piece of wooden cross shape and he tied my neck
00:08:22.560 my hand my waist my leg i was tied naked on the cross and he came with a sharp knife make cut in the back
00:08:30.240 of my left shoulder to the bones and he put salt and lemon in the open
00:08:39.440 i woke up i found myself in a police hospital the egyptian authority wrote a report i was in a police
00:08:46.640 hospital like who's a hospital and for three months i was unable to walk i was unable to move and the
00:08:54.880 egyptian government during this time wrote a report that i'm mentally ill and that's how they play this
00:09:00.720 game they call you mentally they call you names to discredit to destroy your repetition so if they kill
00:09:08.960 you right away they will make out of you a martyr a hero so they put me in house arrest uh for uh another
00:09:16.720 year before they transfer me to the court martial military court and the american military court no
00:09:24.400 lawyer no nothing is just a congru court and they charged me with three charges that i tried to make
00:09:30.640 revolution against the egyptian government that i tried to change the official religion of egypt from
00:09:35.440 islam to christianity and listen to the third charge that i love and i worship christ