Malak and the Coup in Egypt

This is Malak Jaafar, one of the BBC Arabic anchors.

I really like her, she always puts the men guests in their proper place, and one day I am going to devote an entire post to pictures of Malak, so we can admire how very pretty she is!

I have to say, though, when it comes to the 'coup' in Egypt, when the army kicked President Morsi out, Malak is not quite impartial. Whenever she is questioning representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, she rips them to pieces. Then, she'll turn to their army/leftist/secular opponent, and ask tough questions of them, too; but tough questions that will spur them to saying more bad things about the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Here's an example:

Muslim Brotherhood guy: now the army has closed our television channel!

Malak: as you said before in English, it’s "fair game"; the Brotherhood closed its opponents' media when it was in power, so now the opposition does the same to it.

MB Guy: we never closed anything! We only threatened.

Malak: Alright, so you only threatened the media. 

Malak turns to another guest: What do you think about the fact that the Brotherhood representative in front of me takes no responsibility for having done anything wrong and does not admit it made any mistakes?

MB Guy interrupts: of course we did NOT make mistakes! 

(I think Malak at one point did manage to get the MB guy to admit some mistakes, but when asked for clarification, of course those 'mistakes' ended up not being real mistakes. More like when you're asked at a job interview what your negative qualities are, and you tell them airily, 'oh, I'm just such a perfectionist!')

That was a few days ago. Yesterday, Malak was at it again with another slew of Brotherhood and anti-Brotherhood guests. The new MB guy was very upset because some MB supporters have been killed during protests. He said: whenever Shias are killed in Egypt, the BBC covers it right away! Whenever Christians are killed, the BBC is on top of it. You only pay attention to minorities, but when Muslim Brotherhood members are killed, you don't talk about it in any depth at all.

I think that was the one time during a at-times fierce debate that the MB guy got the better of Malak. I guess she didn't have any answer, so she just said okay, and asked a new question. And the MB guy knew he had 'scored', and looked at her with the typical smirk of the Arab man.