There is a weapon not stored in armories, doesn’t require United Nations protocols, isn’t accounted for in balance of power, nor is it listed in treaty provisions, and it operates in the space between a person's eyes and his understanding of himself! And Ramadan, with all its spiritual weight and its dense presence in front of the screen, is the perfect season to operate it at full capacity!
Old colonization needed fleets. This just needs high-resolution color technology and an appropriate soundtrack. The former occupied lands visibly and was resisted. This one conquers standards, is loved, and rebroadcast!
What is broadcast in these weeks is not an advertisement in the conventional commercial sense.
Advertisement shows a product. But this shows a whole world with its inhabitants, climate, white teeth, and uncrowded sea!
The homes there are naturally spacious, and the laughter is complete as if it were a natural right! Then it puts thirty seconds between you and it, repeatable every five minutes, throughout thirty days!
You are not only invited to buy; you are invited to grasp your absence!
A white villa, a family untouched by life's harm, chocolate in a box whose design alone costs more than a week's salary!
The actor doesn't sell you luxury; he sells you proof that he lives in another layer of existence. And the advertisement only works with your presence as an outsider. Luxury without a poor spectator is just decor in a closed room.
Behind this screen are numbers not lit up by the same music. Three out of every ten Egyptians are classified as poor according to the latest official stats, and independent analysts talk about sixty percent when adding those on the brink. Fourteen million Egyptians live outside their country, not on a journey by choice, but in organized migration through which they transfer approximately thirty billion dollars annually to bridge gaps not covered by budgets. And Egyptians' consumption of red meat has decreased from nineteen kilograms annually a decade ago to less than half of that today. All of them, every night, sit in front of the same screen that opens the doors to artificial paradise for them.
The issue isn’t that the advertisements lie. Complete lies are easy to condemn. The issue is that they tell a partial truth and claim it as a whole, and this is harsher than lying because it leaves you without an argument. The white villas exist. The smiling families exist. The sea whose serenity isn't disturbed by a bill also exists. But what's omitted is not just an unsettling scene, but the actual proportions of reality. If the face of the mother distributing dates to her children as if they were pills of medicine appeared, perfume advertisements would become meaningless. Therefore, the solution is for it not to appear. The solution is that we all agree that what we see is all there is.
You can accuse a liar. But what do you do with someone who tells the truth yet hides what makes it only partially true?
And this is the person for whom the screen opens the doors to artificial paradise every night. A man named Mahmoud, or Ahmad, or any name that necessity chooses, returns after a day of fasting to a room that overlooks nothing. He sits in front of the screen because he has nothing else to do. And the screen tells him, with all nicety and professionalism: There is a world you do not belong to, but you can look at it for free.
Social psychology names what is produced afterward “relative deprivation”. You suffer not just because you are hungry, but because you see others satisfied in high definition every five minutes throughout the month. This pain is neither measurable nor listed in statistics. But it accumulates until it becomes a quiet certainty: Poverty is my nature, not my circumstance. And when a person believes that, something dies within him that is difficult to revive.
The screen in the poor's home is not a luxury. It is the last thing that remains when the world shrinks. And that is precisely why whoever enters through its doorway has an exceptional privilege. And with that privilege comes a share of the responsibility to define: What is normal? What is enough? Which life deserves to be seen? An advertisement that ignores this question not only miscalculates its audience; it silently produces a tacit conviction that those watching do not belong to the world being watched within.
There is a fundamental difference between selling a dream and selling exclusion. The first extends the ladder, and the second pulls it away. The danger isn’t in the luxury itself, but in making it the sole standard. Because when classism is entrenched visually and becomes the only visible thing, it becomes stiffer than any written text and more difficult to question than any announced law. And the broken viewer is the best viewer: he does not criticize, does not demand, and does not leave. He stays there staring at the artificial paradise and enjoys its glow on his room walls.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to a society isn't that it be impoverished. Poverty is a circumstance, and circumstances have history, reasons, and the possibility of change. The more dangerous thing is for a society to be convinced that what it does not possess is the norm, and that its absence from the picture proves its absence from entitlement.
And that certainty, once entrenched, needs no prisons or bans. It only needs an open screen, appropriate music, and rebroadcast!
