#NEWS Tamer Hosny, Egypt's answer to Justin Timberlake, attacked by demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square

BY Helen Kennedy
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, February 9th 2011, 3:59 PM

YouTube;Getty

Egyptian pop star Tamer Hosny was attacked in Tahrir Square Wednesday a week after he called for an end to the protests.

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The Arab world's King of Pop - who had publicly dissed Egypt's pro-democracy protests - went to Tahrir Square Wednesday to apologize.

First he was run out with catcalls and punches and had to be saved by the army.

Then he started to cry.

"I want to die today," Tamer Hosny said, blubbering on the video burning up Twitter and YouTube. "I thought I was saving the people."

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Hosny, 33, an Egyptian singer and film star who is a major superstar in Arab pop, said he was misled about the protests by state media and had written a song for the revolution.

He said the demonstrators misunderstood his intent.

Probably that was because last week, according to Arab music blogs, he called in to Egyptian TV telling the demonstrators to go home and calling President Hosni Mubarak a father figure.

"You have been quiet for 30 years, now you people do this?" he is quoted as saying.

The protesters who have chanted for two weeks against Mubarak began calling the singer "Tamer Hosny Mubarak."

When he took a microphone and tried to address the crowd, they chanted so loudly against him that he had to give up.

Al Jazeera reported the army had to fire warning shots in the air to get the booing crowd to back off and let Hosny leave.

After the video of him crying made the rounds, prominent Egyptian blogger Mahmoud Salem, a Northeastern University grad who tweets from Cairo as "Sandmonkey," quipped,

"One of the great victories of the revolution is that it destroyed Tamer Hosny."

Hosny was supposed to be on a U.S. tour this week, but canceled when revolution roiled his homeland.

In another development Wednesday, union workers began joining Egypt's anti-government protests, calling strikes that were seen as less about Mubarak and more about lousy pay.

Workers walked off the job at the South Cairo Electricity company, the state museum and five of Cairo's 17 public bus garages. Workers also demonstrated at a silk factory and an industrial fuel plant.

In some places, unrest turned violent.

In the southern province of Assiut, some 8,000 protesting farmers blocked the main highway and railway to Cairo with barricades of flaming palm trees. They were angry about bread shortages.

Slum dwellers in Port Said set fire to the governor's headquarters to complain about a lack of housing.

With News Wire Services

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