Occupy Wall Street received a surprise visit Monday from several leading Egyptian activists, including 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. She is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, which is the group credited with helping to organize the January 25 protests that eventually toppled the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.
While the months succeeding Mubarak’s ouster have not been smooth (I recently read of resumed violence by Muslim Egyptians against the country’s Coptic Christian minority, despite unity between the two groups during the protests), Egypt’s transformation is far from complete. I believe Planet Waves has observed before that having the Uranus-Pluto square heat up via revolutions in what is considered the cradle of humanity seems like a pretty telling sign — and the world is a lot smaller than it was in that infancy. Said Mahfouz in New York yesterday, “Many of U.S. residents were in solidarity with us. I am here to be in solidarity and support the Wall Street Occupy protesters, to say to them, ’the power to the people,’ and to keep it on and on, and they will succeed in the end.”
Meanwhile in California, Occupy Oakland was rather brutally raided by police. Authorities say about 75 people were arrested, after police fired teargas and “beanbag rounds.” And as if cued up by Jen Sorensen’s Slowpoke cartoon we ran yesterday, Greg Palast investigates the story behind Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to pull out of a fundraiser for the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City after it learned the event was honoring the protesters at Occupy Wall Street.
She is SO Beautiful. So inspiring. Thank you for this post. Very Much.
Thank you for publishing this. Asmaa Mahfouz coming to the United States is a big, historic moment. She is our modern day Lafayette.