With all of the protesting occurring in Egypt, a Mississippi State University graduate student has tried to make his voice heard.
Wael Badran, biological sciences graduate student, is originally from Port Said, Egypt. He has lived in the U.S. for the past 40 years while Egypt has been under the rule of Hosni Mubarak for about 30 of those years. His hometown is the site of the alleged Sept. 6, 1999, assassination attempt on the president that eye witnesses claim is untrue, Badran said.
After the protests began Jan. 25, he said he contacted various media outlets, senators and the White House to voice his concerns over the way the issue has been covered in the news.
The most upsetting thing so far has been the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement claiming the Egyptian government was thought to be stable after about half a million protesters had assembled, Badran said.
“This is very insulting to the Egyptian people,” he said. “This is not the opinion of the American people but […] opinion of the administration.”
The corrupted government has been responsible for using security forces to detain people indefinitely in prisons and has kept the country under martial law for over 30 years, Badran said.
Most of the democratic world, the U.S. included, has supported this presidency, and it greatly upsets him, he said.
“This is a country that has been under an oppressive regime for more than 30 years.  The people have the right to uprise and demand [their rights],” he said. “The [Egyptian] president is obstructing this.”
People in Egypt are not against Americans, but they would not accept Americans standing against how the country should be run, he said.
 Barbara Spencer, associate dean for graduate studies in the College of Business, research and outreach, teaches a special topics class called Culture and Business in Egypt. She and her students were planning on visiting Egypt before the protests began.
“When we started looking at going to Egypt, and just started reading things, everything looked positive,” she said. “It [seemed like] a great place to go right now, positive towards Americans, and everything was calm and peaceful. We didn’t see anything negative at all.”
After talking to people from the area, they learned tension had been building for a while, but it had not been in American media much. They believed Egypt to be a good place to visit because it is the most powerful state in the Arab world from a business perspective, she said.
Spencer said her students still wanted to go before the protests got too large for travel to be safe.
Since Egypt is one of the top cotton producers, it would have been interesting for the students to visit since Mississippi is a cotton state too, Spencer said.
Badran said he understands the fear of the government becoming an Islamic Fundamentalist government similar to the Iranian revolution. This is untrue of this revolution, though, he said. There is no political or ideological group leading the protests. It is the Egyptian people as a whole who are calling for Mubarak to step down.
It is people who are tired of working for too little pay, many of them young and educated, Spencer said. It is important to realize no one religion is organizing things.
“If I had to give an analogy to this, I would say it is something like the American Revolution,” Badran said.
He said People are concerned with the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power because of religious ideologies. Today, they just are a political group. He said the current ruling party of Germany is a similar example.
“It is the Christian Democratic Party,” he said. “[They] don’t call it a religious group, but it is a political party with a religious background.”
The party lacks the support it would need to get a member elected, but the Mubarak regime is perpetuating the idea of the Muslim Brotherhood being an extremist group to the media.
Badran said the official reports say about 350 persons have been killed and about 6,000 injured in the uprising. This death toll includes all of Egypt, and not just Cairo.
Of those 6,000 injured, some have been arrested upon their arrival to the hospital before they have even received medical care, he said.
He said does not understand how people cannot take sides after hearing those types of stories. He does not wish for America to get involved as they did in Iraq but just to not support Mubarak.
“The people will get what they want in the end. This is what history tells us,” Badran said. “This is the message I want to get to the American people: If you have something, or you can do anything, to help these people get what they are seeking, please do it.”