May 4 was president Mubarak’s birthday, and an opportunity for the Egyptian oppositional movements to call for a second day of protestation. Among many other reasons for that, the cost of living, the lack of job opportunities. And the recent agreement for the exportation of Egyptian gas production to Israel when Gaza population is in lack of everything because of the Israeli embargo.
The call for the strike has not been a great success, even after the Muslim Brotherhood joined the movement. An explanation could be the threats exerted by the Egyptian authorities who asked for instance the private phone companies to cancel some 250 000 lines whose owners were not very well known.
Indeed, those lines have been used in order to call strike. Thus, the real meaning of the last events may lay in the rising importance of IT facilities in public mobilization. In spite of the arrest of a rather large number of well-known political bloggers, calls for the strike spread on the web through new outlets like Facebook groups for instance.
IT facilities, like other artefacts of globalization, are already part of day-to-day culture of the Arab youth who are inventing new forms of social protestation and demonstration: wearing black garments for instance, writing on banknotes and, of course, playing protest rap songs like that one.
A short translation of the lyrics with the original post in French.
And more songs following that link.
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