Everyone and their mother is lining up to condemn the protest at the Israeli embassy on Friday night. April 6 is disowning it, suggesting Habib al-Adly and Mubarak thugs and agents provocateurs are behind it. Al-Jazeera’s correspondent Abdulfattah Fayed talked at length on air about how “these people” with their burning tyres and molotov cocktails were not the kind of revolutionary known to Homo Niloticus. A BBC Arabic presenter just gave a hard time on TV now to a spokesman for coalition of Tahrir activist groups. Many of the Twitterati, and the Analati, have been on fire in Orientalist flabbergast that the rabble turned their attentions to where the Anal-Twatterati don’t want them and disappointment that the people took their eye off the ball in the campaign to make SCAF bring Democracy Now. 

I was there last night and while it’s very possible there were some plants there, there’s no way you can define the event in that way. Most of the people gathered were not “politicised” as the guy on the BBC said tellingly, but that just gives the action a more populist sheen. The attack  on the Giza police station and street clashes later seemed to have offended Al-Jazeera’s Islamists-N-SCAF-Are-One!/Don’t-Touch-Me-SCAF narrative and if there were any Mubarak under-the-table antics it would most likely be on that score, but the other underlying factor here is the continuing animosity people feel towards various security apparatus that have not necessarily changed, just taken a breather. After a few hours the protest descended from carnival atmosphere into pitched battles with police with their shitty teargas, which may represent the soft end of coercion but sure pisses people off. Police vans were on fire and tried to ram into crowds. It was like Jan28 all over again. Which raises the question, was everyone who was involved in the three weeks of the uprising an April 6 member, a Brother, or any other denomination of official activiste? They were not and it was those nots who were there last night.

Secondly, scaling the wall to take the Israeli flag down was a populist repeat of the event a few weeks ago. In Version 2.0 it’s no surprise at all that the situation escalated to occupying the flat immediately below the top two floors where the embassy is. The protesters stood waving flags then chucking insignificant documents out of the windows of that flat for ages to joyous crowds below. The trouble with the police began because of the ridiculous wall that was placed around the building, which is of course a ridiculous place to have the embassy in the first place. When the army trucks came, the protesters ended up on the top of them waving flags and making anti-SCAF slogans.

In other words, signs are this was a spontaneous event. It was also hardly a surprise to anyone. It’s not a surprise because the government’s reaction to the border incident where Egyptian soldiers on Egyptian territory were killed by the allegedly highly professional army iyyaha was so ridiculously unimpressive. It was a Mubarak era response of either fibbing or incompetence, or both: Would they/wouldn’t they withdraw the ambassador – while Washington warns Egypt to respect the treaty. Within hours of last night’s spontaneous popular event – Israel tells America to tell Egypt to respect the treaty.

I don’t say any of this to justify or not justify the “Storming of the Embassy” (which it wasn’t), but to say that 1. no one owns or controls the movement created by Jan25 and 2. such incidents are the  result of the inadequate political and security responses of the state.