re: #8 Bob Levin

Okay, do you think they were paid or not?

I think the whole story stinks to high heaven. My current line of thinking is that this some NDP official still running the same Mubarak era playbook. It has all the hallmarks of a grand conspiracy type lie. There is a “single player” behind the embassy attack. The people who took part in it were well paid and treated lavishly before going out to do this unnamed agents dirty work. There was an elaborate preparation for the attack, including multiple meeting points, a briefing the day before which included distributed talking points. This sounds a lot like how the government explained the jan25 protests.

I really doubt that the vast majority of the protestors there were organized in any traditional manner, much less paid for their efforts. Israel is not well liked in many segments of Egyptian society, and the new government put up a wall to protect the embassy. Some people didn’t like that so they tore the wall down. Things escalated from there because there were no riot police to stop them. The army was guarding the embassy with some soldiers and a few tanks. There was nothing to stop the mob short of turning machine guns on them, which the army won’t do.

The fact of the matter is the government doesn’t have day to day control of the streets. They can stop sit-ins or large protests which last several days. But they don’t have the forces to stop any one mob.