Filed under: NBA
Late last month, when the protests that would revolutionize Egypt first began to roil, Alaa Abdelnaby got a call from his agent. The agent wanted to know if his client was interested in hitting the U.S. television talking-head circuit to discuss what was unfolding in the country considered the heart of the Arab world.Who better than Abdelnaby, after all? He was born in Egypt, kept an apartment in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city, and lived in northern New Jersey, where he was reared and went on to some fame in the United States as an NBA power forward and first-round draft pick from a Duke team that finished the 1990 NCAA tournament as a runner-up to the national championship.
"I thought about it," Abdelnaby, now a college basketball analyst for CBS and Westwood One, told me Saturday by phone from New Jersey.
But after his mother cautioned him, his father went even further, and Abdelnaby recalled how he kept his Alexandria apartment's windows closed "because you never know who is listening," he decided to keep his thoughts private -- until now.
"Because," he explained, "of my family back there."
Some of his family on his father's side was in the government, he said. ("Not on a high level where they were robbing and stealing," he said, "but nonetheless they're ... painted with the same broad brush.") Other parts of his family were on the outside looking in.
Yet, all were living under President Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship that Human Rights Watch -- an independent global watchdog organization on human rights - stated recently continues to suppress political dissent, arbitrarily detains thousands of people without charge, muzzles media and uses deadly force against migrants and refugees attempting to flee.
Hence, Abdelnaby's reticence.
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