Interviews With a Sandmonkey

Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey

There’s a new interview in Egypt Today with Mahmoud Salem, who Tweets as @Sandmonkey, and was one of the most influential bloggers of the Egyptian uprisings with his blog “Rantings of a Sandmonkey.”

Rantings of a Sandmonkey is popular in a large part because it is almost always contrarian. It rarely took the obvious position and took delight in pointing out contradictions and logical absurdities.

“A lot of times I would take positions I don’t believe in specifically to present the other point of view and force people to actually deal with the situation,” he says. “Many people had the ‘This is the truth’ mentality. I wanted to break that by asking: How do you know?”

And here’s one of the early interviews with him (on MSNBC) after he revealed his identity last February:

And here he is more recently commenting on the arrest of Hosni Mubarak: