Let’s not forget about Baher Mohammed

The justifiable happiness over Al Jazeera reporter Peter Greste’s “deportation” (i.e., release) by Egyptian authorities earlier this week has been understandably tempered by the worldwide horror over ISIS’s latest display of inhumanity. It should also be tempered by the knowledge that Greste’s two Al Jazeera colleagues, as well as dozens of other journalists who have failed to sufficiently hew to the Sisi government’s media narrative, are still stuck in Egyptian prisons right now. One of Greste’s colleagues, Mohamed Fahmy, may be mere days away from his release; Fahmy held dual Egyptian-Canadian citizenship, and he’s now renounced his Egyptian citizenship as a legal precursor to deportation. But the third member of the AJ3, Baher Mohammed, is an Egyptian citizen, period, and as such there’s no place to which he could be deported even if Cairo wanted to deport him (which frankly they probably do, as they’d like to be done with this controversy). There’s a real fear that he’s going to be stuck in prison serving out his bogus sentence, with Sisi and his people hoping that the rest of the world eventually forgets about him. The AJ3 case won’t really be over until he’s released as well, and the Sisi government won’t be able to pretend that it’s anything but a military dictatorship until it frees all those whom it has imprisoned for the crime of Doing Journalism.