In the past 24 hours, Egyptians have deluged U.S. President Barack Obama’s Facebook page with comments protesting a recent development in Egypt’s presidential elections. The outpouring of comments comes as a result of Egyptian presidential candidate Hazem Abu Ismail, who represents the Muslim fundamentalist Salafis, having been disqualified from the election due to the discovery that his late mother was a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Last year, following the revolt that toppled then-President Hosni Mubarak, a rule was enacted for presidential elections wherein candidates must not possess citizenship for any other country other than Egypt, but their parents must not be citizens for any other countries, as well. An Egyptian electoral commission has disclosed that Abu Ismail’s mother had “used an American passport for travel to and from” Egypt. According to the documents, Abu Ismail’s mother became a naturalized citizen in October 2006.
Abu Ismail has denied the allegations and declared the claims to be a conspiracy against him to invalidate his presidential campaign. Meanwhile, legions of his supporters have flooded President Obama’s Facebook page with comments ranging from warnings against the United States for participating in the conspiracy to pleas earnest urging the U.S. government to confirm that Abu Ismail’s mother did not in fact possess U.S. citizenship. Several comments simply have an as ASCII-type graphic that simply display’s Abu Ismail’s first name:
The comments are being left in posts that are largely irrelevant to the Egyptian elections, such as one post containing a video of singer Janelle Monáe expressing her support for President Obama. Many of the comments were left in Arabic, but several were also in English.
Honest American people we are seeking your help to stop a fraud against our presidential candidate in Egypt, and to ask your president to let Egypt practice the real democracy without any kind of falsification
USA government has lied too many times about Vietnam, Iraq , Afghanistan, and Palestine . We Egyptians will not allow your government to lie to us about our presidential candidate “Hazem Salah Abu Ismail”-just because he said “Egypt will never be suppressed by Israel or USA anymore; and he will only accept mutual respect with USA.
USA authorities in compliance with Egyptian military are trying to disqualify our candidate from the elections by a very silly lie which is that (his mother has obtained the American nationality before she died). Almost 10 days now and nobody until this moment showed us any official document to prove it( is it that hard to prove it or they are just playing a very dirty political game to distort the image of our candidate after the huge increase of his supporters all over Egypt and the world)
According to Egyptian law “A Candidate running for presidential elections must be of pure Egyptian parents- none of his parents can hold any other nationality at anytime)
Honest American people we are seeking your help to stop this fraud, and to ask your president to let Egypt practice the real democracy without any kind of falsification.
As you can see, the comments are considerably more grave than the “sarcasm bombing” embraced by American protestors against anti-choice politicians.
[Via BBC.]