By: Andrea Shea King and Kristinn Taylor
The Radio Patriot
NOTE: This article by Kristinn Taylor and yours truly appears at Big Peace, where it is attracting considerable comment.
Top: Unidentified woman protests BP.
Below: Tighe Barry, left, and Medea Benjamin, right, protest Big Oil.
The duo are in Egypt this week working to bring down the Mubarak government.
Photos by Code Pink, May 24, 2010
Two women who traveled from Portland, Oregon to Cairo last week to participate in Code Pink’s latest Hamas-aid trip to Gaza ended up getting rescued by a big oil company–the kind Code Pink usually protests as killing the planet, when the leftist group isn’t hobnobbing with terrorists and undermining U.S. allies like Egypt.
The Oregonian reported Monday night about the travels of Donna Boyd, a 55 year-old nurse, and a female friend who arrived in Cairo on Friday, the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Day of Rage’ protest against the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak.
Boyd describes the chaos of trying and failing to get to her hotel at Tahrir Square, the center of the protests.
“They were on a bridge crossing the Nile near the heart of the protests when the taxi suddenly stopped. They got out, looking toward the National Democratic Party building. “There was smoke and tear gas in the air,” Boyd said. “The building was on fire. People were chanting. The building was coming down. There were lots of people. Men and women. Police were everywhere, in full riot gear. They were just standing there.”
They were close to Tahrir Square, but there was no way they were going to make it to their hotel amid the fiery demonstrations. So, the driver took them to the Marriott on the other side of the Nile.
After spending the next day playing tourist because Code Pink’s trip to Gaza had been canceled, the liberal dilettantes found that playing revolutionary turned out to be a bit too real.
“They were all out on the streets with weapons,” she said. “They had clubs and swords and pipes. We didn’t know what was going on. We ended up at Tahrir Square because they took a wrong turn.”
They bailed out of the taxi and fled across the river to their hotel. They decided to leave on Sunday.
Boyd and her friend went to the airport as planned but found a “smash of humanity…trying to get out of Egypt.”
Fortunately for the two Code Pink dupes, workers from Shell Oil took pity on the women and treated them “like royalty.”
They found a group of other Westerners and stayed with them. Turned out they were a group of Shell Oil employees who had chartered a flight out of Egypt.
In the end, the two women left Cairo on that flight to Amsterdam.
“We were treated like royalty,” Boyd said.
Shell put the two women up in a hotel in the Netherlands, where they plan to stay until Wednesday when they have a flight home.
There is no mention in the Oregonian article of what, if anything Code Pink did to help the women. Nor was there mention of whether Code Pink would be refunding the $1,000 per person the group was charging for the trip to Hamas-controlled Gaza.
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