Quote
March 01, 2013
136 notes
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It is the latest Internet phenomenon that has the world laughing, but in Egypt the Harlem Shake has caught the imagination of revolutionaries who are using it as a new way to challenge the country’s new Islamist rulers.

“It’s a funny way to protest how [the Muslim Brotherhood] have taken control of the country,” said law student Tarek Badr, 22, who was one of more than 100 thrusting their hips in front of the political movement’s Cairo headquarters on Thursday. “People won’t be silent. They will protest in all ways and this is a peaceful way.”

Organizer Noor al Mahalaawi, a 22-year-old engineering student, and three friends started a group that they have dubbed the “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle”.

The group intends to stage innovative weekly protests in front of the party headquarters, which will be posted on its increasingly popular Facebook page.

“People are very supportive,” Mahalaawi said. “It’s a change from violence to sarcasm and it’s peaceful. There has been enough blood, enough arrests, enough trials.”
He said the message to the party was that many Egyptians “do not like their way of rule… with human-rights violations every day.”

After their Harlem Shake ended, participants took up the new revolutionary chant: “The people want the fall of the ‘Murshid’ [the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood].”
An impromptu conga line snaked through crowd shouting, “Leave, leave, leave.”

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— Charlene Gubash, “How The Harlem Shake Is Being Used To Push For Change In Egypt,” NBCNEWS.com 

Tags: Charlene Gubash Harlem Shake Egypt dance protest

Photo
January 23, 2013
44 notes
thesmithian: Was the nation divided between those in favor of the old regime and those in favor of the Islamists? Or was it the case that millions of young Egyptians who had taken to the streets to oppose Mubarak were voting “no” to Mubarak’s Shafik, rather than “yes” to Morsi? As the prominent newspaper editor Hassanein Heikal has said at dinner parties and onTV: “It was not that people knew what they wanted and were voting for it. They simply knew what they didn’t want, and they were voting against it.” Many of my own friends—who identify themselves as liberal, secular, “revolutionary”—voted against the possibility of a return to the life we had known. more. +++++ art: Egyptian artists in Cairo

thesmithian:

Was the nation divided between those in favor of the old regime and those in favor of the Islamists? Or was it the case that millions of young Egyptians who had taken to the streets to oppose Mubarak were voting “no” to Mubarak’s Shafik, rather than “yes” to Morsi? As the prominent newspaper editor Hassanein Heikal has said at dinner parties and onTV: “It was not that people knew what they wanted and were voting for it. They simply knew what they didn’t want, and they were voting against it.” Many of my own friends—who identify themselves as liberal, secular, “revolutionary”—voted against the possibility of a return to the life we had known.

more.

+++++

art: Egyptian artists in Cairo

Tags: Egypt voting politics youth of color