I replied back with the story of another comrade, who was entering the MOD sit-in and was being searched by a Salafi sheikh. When the latter found in the student’s bag the flag of the Revolutionary Socialists, Marxist books, as well as issues from The Socialist newspaper, he told the young student: “Come in son, May God be with you!”

These were just two stories, among many, witnessed by our comrades during the controversial MOD sit-in which lasted for a week, during which it was subject to attacks by knives, swords, firearms, machine guns, fired by plainclothes thugs working closely with the army, and was finally suspended by a crackdown by the military police and army’s special forces last Friday, resulting in the arrest and torture of hundreds.

The sit-in started by a group of supporters of the disqualified Salafi presidential candidate Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, who marched on the Ministry of Defense Friday night, 27 April, and decided to stage a sit-in calling for the dissolution of the Presidential Electoral Committee, which they blamed for the disqualification of their candidate, but the SCAF-controlled committee has also been the target of the revolutionaries’ wrath from all shades of the political spectrum.

If you think Islamophobia is on a worrying rise in Europe, you should have seen the Egyptian twittersphere during that week of sit-in, with liberals and leftists reacting in the most disgustingly way.

There are those who by default will stand against anything Islamist, anything with a beard or niqab, and will avoid them like a plague. Hence their position varied from neutrality, as if this fight between the Islamists and the army is happening on another planet; or praying that the two sides by some miracle will finish one another off; or support the army’s crackdown on those Islamists.

And of course you got the usual “مش وقته” chorus, which always comes up whenever there are clashes with the police and the army, shouting “It’s not the time for this, we have other important matters.” And usually those “important matters” are elections, or another SCAF-sponsored milestone in the political process.

But the “Islamists” are NOT a unified homogeneous block. We are talking about millions of Egyptians from different backgrounds and provinces who are part of the Muslim Brotherhood and the different Salfist groups. It’s even wrong to lump “Salafists” all in one basket. Let’s remember that young Salafis took part in the January 2011 uprising contrary to virtually all the Salafi celebrity sheikhs’ pro-Mubarak position. Many of the workers I have been bumping into during strikes from 2007 onwards have beards that almost reach their bellies and are followers of Salafi sheikhs. The latter had prohibited strikes and demonstrations, yet their poor followers obviously were moving in a different direction. Already the salafi movement is splintered, and the dismal performance of Abu Ismail in the crisis, including disowning repeatedly his supporters, is bound to create a disillusioned base. Isn’t there a critical mass that could be won to the side of revolution? Of course there is, and the revolutionary socialists have to play a role in influencing this base as much as they can, according to their capabilities and political weight.

There is nothing more farcical than the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is an iron fist organization whose members are following the Supreme Guide’s orders blindly. The organization has been marred with factions and splits for years along generational and class lines. Despite refraining from mobilizing an entire year following February 2011, there is not a single time a serious clash happened with the state without stumbling on a group of young MB members who attended the protests or the clashes contrary to the group’s line. And I personally witnessed that on several occasions.

What do you do as a revolutionary socialist in the midst of this? One should not stop exposing the hypocrisy and the counterrevolutionary politics of the MB leadership, but we should not give up on trying to attract the youth and those in the MB who are sincerely pro-revolution once again to the revolutionary camp and even winning them to socialist politics, something that I’m also increasingly witnessing. And that’s not going to happen by sitting on Twitter and ranting about the MBs like many leftists are doing, but by physically being present on the ground in the events they organize, and continuously argue and debate with their young members. And when a fight breaks out with the state, you don’t withdraw and say may God burn them both, you have to take sides. But you take sides, while still maintaining your organizational independence and fight under your own red banner and shout your own chants.

The MOD sit-in presented a step forward for the revolution, not a regress, despite the army’s onslaught that saw several comrades detained, and brutally tortured. We have taken the fight to a new level, breaking a great taboo, which is staging sit-ins and direct actions in front of the headquarters of the counterrevolution itself; as well as reaching out to and earning the respect of the most revolutionary wing of the Salafist movement. I salute the bravery of all the comrades who took part in the sit in and in resisting the army’s crackdown.

All Revolutionary Socialist activists and sympathizers are now out of prison, but there are hundreds of Islamists, independent activists and ordinary citizens who are still languishing in custody and await military prosecution. We must do our best to stand by them and secure their release. We will continue to organize against SCAF and we should be more than keen to reach out to the Islamist cadres who are willing to join this fight. The polarization within the Islamist movement will only increase with every betrayal and compromise the Islamist leadership brokers with SCAF, with every confrontation with the state, with the growth of a revolutionary left that could provide an alternative for the disillusioned youth, and more importantly with the escalation of the strike wave. But in all cases, we must be vigilant enough to remain organizationally independent, move under our own banners, with our own literature, and compromise none. Sometimes with the Islamists, never with the state.

Wolfgang you are a racist, and you are the last one to talk about “freedom.” You send your troops to the Islamic World, and help out the Americans in their dirty war in Afghanistan. You treat foreigners and immigrants like shit in your country. You even have legal clauses that allows you to carry out “preemptive detentions” against demonstrators (like those you conducted against the anti-G8 protesters). No wonder then that your Ambassador to Cairo, Bernd Erbel, would come out in praise of Mubarak’s regime recently saying:

Egypt is a country that enjoys enough freedom and democracy to overcome any negatives that take place in the Egyptian Society. The European community respects Egypt ’s special status in dealing with its internal problems as a strong country that aces its challenges in a constructive manner and on the highest level.

And no wonder that your Orientalist chairman of the German Chamber of Commerce in Egypt would come out praising the son of the dictator, Gamal Mubarak, saying:

There is a Pharaonic tradition that the son assumes power after his father. There are many countries that speak a lot about democracy and elections and have now disastrous conditions like Kenya and Brazil…

That’s the “freedom” you understand indeed.

So the first mass scale rebellion came from the immigrants in France, and now Denmark. There’s no reason to say similar events cannot happen in Italy and Spain on that scale. After all, these are countries where Arab and African immigrants are eating shit.

And don’t you ever think for one moment that those rioters’ violence in Denmark is random. They are targeting cars they will never afford, schools they don’t have access to or treated like shit at, and the list goes on. In other words, they are targeting symbols of wealth, power and economic repression in a racist/classist country… not the fucking cartoons… it doesn’t matter what the trigger was… the trigger could be an extremely trivial event.. (remember the French May ’68?)

I posted previously about the Egyptian January 1977 Bread Intifada, with a special focus on the violence (that the media has always depicted sensationally), and why it was explainable if not justified. But there’s wide variety of sociological literature on riots, and it’s always useful to look at examples from other countries.

Conservatives tend to take a criminological approach to riots. Encyclopedia Britannica defines riot, for example, as an “offense against public order involving three or more people and the use of violence, however slight. Like an unlawful assembly, a riot involves a gathering of persons for an illegal purpose. Unlike an unlawful assembly, however, a riot includes violence.”[1] Ralf Conant’s book on the prospects of revolutions in the US expressed concerns for the growing instability in the American society in the 1960s. When defining the act of rioting, he stresses the spontaneous nature of the participants’ behavior, in addition to the lack of “premeditated purpose, plan, or direction, although systematic looting, arson, and attack on persons usually occur once a riot is under way.”[2] However, a task force report submitted to the American National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, set up to investigate the ghetto riots, tried to challenge the official conception of riots. The academics and lawyers, who were members of the task force, were neither radicals, nor did they advocate riots as a means of changing the status quo. They had the same concerns for the “stability” of the American society, but they advocated a new approach and means of social control that could address the grievances behind the riots. The report criticized some of the conventional theories on the subject. First, such theories “tend to focus on the destructive behavior of disaffected groups while accepting the behavior of authorities as normal, instrumental and rational.”[3] The report pointed out the “destruction”, or the violent behavior, of the forces of the state, can be, and usually is, more “destructive.” Second, these theories “tend to describe collective behavior [i.e., riots] as irrational, formless and immoderate.”[4] The report refuses such assumption; instead it argues that the rioters:

… show a considerable degree of structure, purposiveness, and rationality. Nor is “established” behavior necessarily guided by rational principle. While the beliefs underlying a riot may frequently be inaccurate or exaggerated, they are not necessarily more so than, for example, commonly held beliefs about racial minorities by dominant groups… [concerning] the causes of crime… [and] threats to internal security, and so forth. A measure of irrationality, then, is not a defining characteristic of collective behavior generally or of riots in particular; rather, it is an element of many routine social processes and institutions and forms of collective behavior.[5]

Moreover, continues the report, the so-called “inappropriateness” of riots is relative, depending upon whether there are alternative channels for action or not. The actors use rioting as a means of expressing their political demands in absence of the “normal channels.”[6] It is wrong to view the rioters’ violent behavior as “abnormal,” or as resulting merely from “tensions.” One should not attribute the whole phenomenon to psychological factors and neglect the political dimension. Violence of marginalized groups cannot be compared to the more severe systematic violence of the state. In addition, the rioters usually believe that the use of violence could pressure the state to concede to their own demands, and actually that was true in several cases.[7]

The radical literature, on the other hand, emphasizes the resistance side of riots, and their importance as an expression of defiance to the system. Studying the dynamics of the ghetto riots in the US, Herbert J. Gans considers riots in general as a form of rebellion. Incidents of looting and property destruction, included in the riot, are not impulsive acts, as “in most cases, people destroy or loot only the property of those who have exploited them.”[8] Gans compares the rioting situation to a carnival, not because of the irrationality of the rioters, rather:

They are happy at the sudden chance to exact revenge against those who have long exploited and harassed them. The rebellion becomes a community event; … people feel they are acting together in a way that they rarely can. But, most important, the destruction and looting allows ghetto residents to exert power.[9]

When studying the 1992 Los Angeles riots, triggered by police racist brutality, Alex Callinicos refuses both the idea portrayed by the media about the mass irrationality of rioters, and “race” being the factor behind it. Instead he focuses on the class dynamics of riots. Callinicos examines the economic context of LA, and the impoverishment that hit the city as a result of the austerity measures taken by Regan and Bush (the daddy), better known as “Reganomics.” These measures affected the working class from all ethnicities, not only the blacks. The rioting was of multi-ethnic nature, coming as a reaction of the urban poor against impoverishment and police oppression. The main target for the looting and property destruction was the Korean businesses. However, Callinicos denies “ethnicity” as a factor in making such businesses a target. It is the socioeconomic role played by Koreans merchants that made them a target for the anger and discontent of the masses in LA. The vast majority of Koreans act as entrepreneurs providing “valuable retail access to the ghetto for [big corporations]… without putting whites at risk.”[10] Callinicos is clear about that the “Korean merchants are not the chief exploiters of the black and Latino poor… [b]ut Asian shopkeepers are the only visible, directly accessible representatives of the system responsible for the poverty and degradation suffered by the mass of blacks and Latinos.”[11]

So back to Denmark. To cut a long story short, until the European governments start respecting the rights of immigrants in their countries and treat them equally, and until they stop sending their troops to our region, and until they stop supporting our dictators— expect more embassies torched down in the Middle East and more riots in Europe.

1 Encyclopedia Britannica On Line.
2 Ralph W. Conant, The Prospects For Revolution: A Study of Riots, Civil Disobedience, and Insurrection in Contemporary America (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press 1971), 22.
3 Jerome H. Skolnick. The Politics of Protest: A Task Force Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Simon And Schuster 1969), 335.
4 Ibid., 335.
5 Ibid., 335-6.
6 Ibid., 336-7.
7 Ibid., 340-1.
8 Herbert J. Gans. “The Ghetto Rebellions and Urban Class Conflict,” in Robert H. Connery, ed., Urban Riots: Violence and Social Change (New York: Colombia University 1968), 43.
9 Ibid., 43.
10 Alex Callinicos, Race and Class (London: Bookmarks 1998), 55.
11 Ibid., 55.

Western leaders, known for their anti-Muslim racism like Blair, Nicolas Sarkouzy, and others, have been in the habit of paying visits to the government-friendly Azhar Sheikh whenever they visit Cairo, or have troubles with Muslim Communities in their countries. They can all count on Tantawi’s support, who never lets them down.