An independent Egyptian government responsive to the will of its people would certainly also reject Mubarak’s close cooperation with Israel to maintain the blockade of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, though I thought it unlikely that any Egyptian government would want to go to war with Israel. I do not think I was wrong. However, I totally failed to anticipate that the regime itself would play the foreigner card.
Starting particularly on February 2, the day the regime commenced its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to dislodge the pro-democracy movement with attacks by armed thugs, state media attempted to whip up a frenzy of anti-foreigner sentiment by claiming foreigners had organised and funded the protests against Mubarak. It must be emphasised as strongly as possible that the notion of foreigners provoking the revolution or underwriting it financially is utterly absurd.
The only foreign influence here is the inspiration of the Tunisian example. Egypt's revolution is as home grown as any revolution in the history of the world - let alone the history of Egypt. But propaganda is as propaganda does. For a while at least, the state media campaign seemed to have had some success. One night we overheard one of our friends having angry phone conversations about politics with a relative who was upset by reports of a Mossad agent trained by Hamas fomenting unrest in Egypt. This seemingly bizarre concatenation may actually have been an accurate interpretation of Omar Suleiman's speech from the night before...
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Abu Atris @'Al Jazeera'
Since 2005, the 
