CAIRO — A brutal police killing. A wave of public anger that sends citizens rushing into the streets, clashing with the police. Journalists under attack. A president who justifies draconian measures by invoking the threat of saboteurs and terrorists.
That was the Arab Spring in Egypt almost a decade ago.
But in recent days those momentous events have been revived in the minds of many Egyptians as a strikingly similar dynamic has played out in the United States, with familiar images of flames, tear gas and anguish, even if the context is very different.
“OK, now I’m really having Egypt flashbacks,” Ashraf Khalil, an Egyptian-American journalist who covered the Arab Spring and later wrote a book about it, remarked as he posted a photo of a masked protester in America gripping a silver drum, his clenched fist held aloft.
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For other Egyptians, many of the most shocking images from America’s upheaval — a lone protester standing defiantly before a phalanx of riot police, a police vehicle smashing through a crowd of protesters, a police station going up in flames — bring to mind nearly identical events and images that occurred during the 18 days of protest that culminated in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.
The hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #Minnesota have trended on Egyptian social media in recent days, and the sense of solidarity has spread across the Arab world.
In the opposition enclave of Idlib, in northern Syria, two artists painted a mural of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of a white police officer set off the American protests, on the shell of a bombed-out building. “I can’t breathe,” read a slogan on the mural.
Source: In Egypt, Images From American Protests Evoke a Lost Revolution
