It is not strange that the Egyptian media would refer to me as being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood; since they have labeled the Ikhwan as a terrorist group, it is necessary to label any Islamist opposition figure as a member of the Ikhwan in order to criminalize Islamist opposition. They cannot yet prosecute you for simply being a Muslim who opposes dictatorship, so they must declare you to be a member of the group they are allowed to prosecute.
Why they insist on referring to me as a leader is slightly more complicated. First of all, it is because the strategy I advocate disturbs them more than the conventional Ikhwan strategy; they believe (accurately) that it is more dangerous to the coup than the approach the Ikhwan is currently adopting. Therefore, if I am a leader of the Ikhwan, it implies that the Ikhwan are actually much more of a threat than they really are.
Secondly, this is just how intelligence agencies think, and the way they want us to think; that there are, and must be, pivotal leadership figures, personifications of revolutionary ideas, and so on.
This is important to them because if they can successfully elevate the importance of an individual, they can more easily destroy the popularity of his ideas by simply destroying the man himself; either by discrediting him, imprisoning him, or killing him. They do not want ideas to live independently among the population, they must be anchored to an individual; an individual who can be destroyed.
If I alone am carrying the flag of Open Source Revolution, if if I fall, the flag will fall, and the threat to their power is vanished.
This is precisely why I have never accepted the concept of “leaders”; it is a trap. Any living man can be destroyed, either by his external enemies or by his own sins and flaws and ego. Ideas have no ego, and their flaws can be collaboratively solved by the input of others, or by trial and error.
It is important to power for us to always focus on individuals instead of ideas, because few men are ever as good as their ideas, and it is much easier to destroy a thinker than a thought. Fame is the prerequisite for defamation, and acclaim is usually a prelude to attack.
The oddity of making news stories from Facebook posts should indicate the degree to which the regime is troubled by the strategy of system disruption and the targeting of multinationals; and they are terrified that this idea will take root among the revolutionaries without a leader they can destroy.