By Abigail Ronck
Five men are smoking tobacco through hookahs at a Bay Ridge café Friday morning, completely uninterested in Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Cairo streets. The footage, say these Egyptian immigrants, is entirely a misrepresentation. The network, they believe, vilifies Hosni Mubarak and falsely claims that two million protesters are gathered in Tahrir Square. The max capacity, they say, is 300,000.
The Meena House Café is dimly lit with green light. There are couches along the walls, covered with red zebra-print fabric. There is a “no smoking” sign on the wall—which refers to cigarettes. The men refuse to be on camera or photographed because their wives don’t know they are here, they say jokingly. Each of them has lived in the United States for anywhere between 12 and 20 years.
“Mubarak is our president,” says George Maher, the café’s owner. “He’s not that bad. In every other country Arab nations have gone to war. He has protected us. That’s enough.”
Dressed in sweatshirts and winter coats, Ahmed El Ysed and Wael Morcos visit the café daily. Today they are watching the Egyptian satellite channel, ESC. Morcos, a pharmacist from Long Island who works in Brooklyn, says many of the protesters in Cairo are young college graduates who went to school for free in Egypt. They forget this, he says.
Their complaints do not stop there. Both Morcos and Maher claim the protesters are being paid $100 a day, plus food and blankets, by the Muslim Brotherhood. All the men in the café are Christians save for El Ysed, who is a Muslim.
If they were to return to Egypt with American passports, they say, they would endure the hostility felt by protesters dissatisfied with America’s involvement in Middle East relations. They say it will no longer be safe to walk the streets with your wife if Mubarak steps down.
“While there may be three million people who don’t like him, 90 million do,” says Maher, who is looking for a picture of the president to put in his café’s window.
Louis Imbert and Melanie Brisbon contributed reporting.
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