As you’ve probably read, popular Egyptian comedian Bassam Youssef, sometimes called the Egyptian Jon Stewart for his political satire, was recently arrested, interrogated, and released by Egyptian authorities. Here our own Jon Stewart comes to his counterpart’s defense (broken into two parts by Comedy Central’s website):

The New York Times has more information and videos here.

According to a CBS report, since being released, Youssef said that his interrogators had been fair and said that he would not scale back his comedy but on the contrary intended to “take it through the roof.”

Bassem Youssef is more than a little like Jon Stewart, by the way. He basically does the Egyptian counterpart of Stewart’s The Daily Show. Just take a look:

Finally, here’s an interview with him on CNN. As you can see, he speaks very fluent English:

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