BRANDED

With whitewash products inundating the market,  grassroot-marked blood stains leave their indelible imprints on a  consciousness, to be never quite erased. 

Yet, survival tactics include keeping schtum: imperatively a more salutary notion and far preferable to being gagged.

Here, a simple yet most eloquent Facebook status expresses much of what is deemed by only too many to be better left unsaid ..

  AMtr 29 December 2013 "The Egyptian State's 'war on terror' will never succeed so long as it criminalizes its opposition and brands them terrorists. They have criminalized their opposition and are breeding a new generation of Islamists who will lose faith in the principle of nonviolence and likely take up arms again through the formation of violent splinter cells -- if not under the main guise of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is what happened under Mubarak.

Nasser tried to kill Political Islam by driving it underground. Instead it proliferated and counted much of Egypt in its ranks only 20-30 years later.
You cannot kill an idea or send it into a black hole. Fact: Political Islam as an ideology exists in this country, best try and work with moderate political Islamists instead of pushing more and more of them to all out warfare against the state as their only hope.
Sad day, in a week of near straight violence. I'm bracing myself for even more on New Years Eve and Coptic Christmas Eve. May all victims rest in peace."

Individuals may appear  targeted when finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time including those who through human instinct alone find themselves rising to defend another fellow human being seen to be subjected to unnecessarily brutal treatment.
Authorites may well  have many believe that everyone can be branded if only so that they can do away with each and every one who does not succumb to tightly clenched control and moreover the abuse thereof.

Good lies passive until some evil prods it to utter, if not act, as shown here in another status. We take courage as a nation from such unwitting impulses of felt expression that Truth in time inevitably shines through regardless of multiple cloud formations that endeavour to obscure it.

ShelS 2 January"As many of you know, I have deliberately kept myself out of the FB political scene and away from the futile discussions of the 'wiz or a-gain-ist' syndrome that have plagued us as Egyptians for a long time now - but can no longer stand silent against 'injustice' in the name of 'justice' - really sorry and very saddened on a personal and public level. I know of these innocent people from close quarters -as friends of friends- and am devastated by what has happened to them. I am sharing K. Amer's post of N kamal's status update so that you too be moved by their story and pray for their freedom from arrest - may God Almighty give them the courage to endure the miserable conditions they are suffering and give their family, friends and loved ones the strength to endure their absence. May their appeal grant them their freedom and may they be able to join the warmth of family and friends soon."

Cutting to the chase.. perhaps we would be forgiven for seeing ourselves as all 'potentially peaceful terrorist citizens': Anything anyone tries to defend regardless of what it is.. if it does not bow to autocratic deep state rule appears to be depicted as a form of terrorism and can therefore be dealt with by elimination if not extermination:

Be 'branded' a terrorist or activist with terrorist penchants (regardless of whether it be justifiably so or not) and suffer the consequences. 

However even more abhorrent is that actions to do away with such branded entities only too often appear equal to the actions of the so-called terrorists. However, being the so-called self-promoted tolerant body of society these actions find themselves framed within a jaggedly dire edge.  

Belonging to a pack becomes both a risk and a safe-guard depending on how the wind blows. 

Although citizens are told they must belong or suffer the consequences of being ostracised at best, incarcerated and eliminated at worst, figurative wandering off alone is many a citizen's only refuge.