Jon Stewart Risks Jail in Egypt by Satirizing President Morsi, Provokes Diplomatic Incident

The US embassy in Cairo’s twitter feed is known for its informality and irreverence, and tweeted out a link to Jon Stewart’s interventions on the charging of satirist Bassem Youssef for making fun of Morsi. Egypt’s government reacted with fury and managed to get the tweet deleted. Shame on the US embassy.

Gee, you wouldn’t think Morsi had just gotten on his knees and begged for hundreds of millions of dollars from US taxpayers.

Here is part 1 of the offending Daily Show video: : (“If insulting the president and Islam were a jail-able offense here, Fox News go bye-bye.”)

And here is part 2: Stewart points out that Muhammad Morsi would not be president without the young activists and writers like Bassem Youssef who brought down dictator Hosni Mubarak.

As I said on Monday, the real problem here is that the Egyptian parliament (or at least for the moment its upper house) hasn’t bothered to abolish the law on political libel that Mubarak used against his foes, including against the Muslim Brotherhood.