It’s early in the month, so most of you probably haven’t hit your NYT article max: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/world/middleeast/deadly-protests-over-church-attack-in-cairo.html?_r=2&ref=world

There were city-wide protests by Christians a few nights ago, but Alexandria has been peaceful and there’s anti-sectarian graffiti up all over the city.  So far, I’ve heard foreigners and remnants of the Mubarak regime blamed for instigating the violence in Cairo - essentially, that the people who stand to gain from stirring up religious conflict are likely responsible for it, and that they’ve planned it in advance. The army, for its part, declared that it doesn’t single Christians out for violence, and the press seems to agree. Al-Akhbar, one of Egypt’s national newspapers, ran a headline yesterday that asks, “Who opened fire on the protestors?” and, helpfully, provided part of the answer: “The revolution has enemies that infiltrate the protests to spread chaos and undermine relations between the people and the army.”

For class, we watched a clip from a movie where the main character goes to the Egyptian parliament and makes a speech denouncing Egypt’s negative nancies, arguing that like waste water leaking into drinking water gives Egyptians immunities to disease, that the police bake cakes for prisoners on their birthdays and don’t practice torture, etc. At one point, he announces that “A great leap forward has occurred in Egyptian media. The news is reported on four days before it happens!” A lot of people think that the Mubarak government was behind the terrorist attacks of the past decade, including the bombing of a Coptic church here in Alexandria about a year ago, and that’s what’s going on in that joke. There’s a consistent trend toward conspiracy theories, which, in this case, are apparently less frightening than the idea that Egyptians are killing Egyptians without outside encouragement.