Tahrir Square Meets OWS: Egypt youth visited but what they found was not quite an American Tahrir

The Atlantic ^ | October 25, 2011 | Thanassis Cambanis

[2ndDivisionVet]

NEW YORK -- It was supposed to be a master class in revolutionary activism: two stars of the Tahrir Square uprising visiting Occupy Wall Street to swap tactics and sass. It ended up more like an undergraduate teach-in.

For Egyptian activists Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher, the visit to Zuccotti Park was an exhilarating -- if surreal -- break from the punishing workload of fighting the military dictatorship back home.

"Where is the tear gas?" Maher asked with a smile, but he seemed genuinely puzzled by the cordial relations between the Wall Streeters and the cops.

Maher and Mahfouz both have been arrested before by Egypt's notoriously abusive police, and Mahfouz recently was hauled before a military court martial for allegedly insulting her country's military rulers.

Mahfouz had a question of her own. "Where are the organizers?" she asked. "There must be organizers." No one knew. She ended up chatting at the welcome table with a young man wearing a straw hat.

"How do you sustain yourselves? How do you keep yourself energized?" he asked. "That's our main problem."

"You need a message," she told him.

She inscribed an Egyptian flag ("From Tahrir Square to Wall Street") with black marker and presented it to the hundreds who gathered to hear her and Maher.

Mahfouz, 26, spent years protesting when most Egyptians stayed home, and became a phenomenon with her self-produced YouTube editorials. She lambasted rulers with homespun humor, and exhorted people to join her at protests. Eventually they did, in the millions.

Maher, 31, worked with virtually every activist group in Egypt, and founded the April 6 movement, which was instrumental in organizing textile worker strikes in 2008. His grassroots political organization boasts the kind of street muscle and labor ties that Occupy Wall Street still only hopes to build....

[2ndDivisionVet]

She finally found the SEIU, ACORN, Soros, Obama and communists?

What, exactly, do these American trust-funders and upper middle class kids have to protest against? I'm still scratching my head.

[JimRed]

What, exactly, do these American trust-funders and upper middle class kids have to protest against?

They might have to (HORRORS!) pay off their own student loans!

[2ndDivisionVet]

Whoever wrote the law that keeps them from charging off student loans in a bankruptcy must be laughing his head off now.