Though it made for a good set-up to Dangerfield-esque jokes about bad sex lives, the Egyptian necrophilia story that zoomed around the Internet yesterday is probably not true. We say probably because even the doubters have been unable to provide conclusive evidence yet. But they — the Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy and readers of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, for example — point out that the story is entirely predicated on an opinion column written by a loyalist of Hosni Mubarak who presumably has a motive to embarrass the Islamists who have taken control of Parliament in the wake of Mubarak’s downfall. On Twitter, Murphy elaborated on the skepticism about the story among People Who Know Things About Egypt:
Nadia abou el-Magd, an “Egyptian Arab Independent journalist in Egypt,” according to her Twitter page, has also chimed in:
If the story really is a sham, an apology from the newspaper that published it, Al Ahram, is certainly in order — to the media, to Parliament, but most of all, to the crestfallen Egyptian necrophiliac community.
