How scary it is to be an anti-Muslim Brotherhood journalist in Egypt

The New York Times has a pretty chilling first-person op-ed by Ibrahim Essa, a well-known TV journalist in Egypt, who hosts a TV show critical of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Essa writes that his job has become increasingly difficult, with Brotherhood-supporters surrounding TV studios and threatening Essa and other journalists with their pictures hung up by nooses "like wanted criminals from old Westerns":

During this period, I learned to be brave in the face of death, and since then, I have not feared anything else. Since the start of my career, I have faced accusations of blasphemy and death threats. I have been fired; seen publications I’ve edited get shut down; and watched as copies of my novel “Assassination of the Big Man” were seized.

Last week, as I waited for the police car to escort me to the studio and for the fully armed officer next to me to shield me from a potential attack, I found history repeating itself on a grander, more dangerous scale. It’s as if terrorism will never end, and my fate is to face death because of what I write and what I say. Sometimes, when I set out for work and say goodbye to my wife and children, I feel like a soldier waving to his family from a train as he heads toward battle.

@eScarry