http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/da ... f3531f5428'
Like the hundreds of adolescents surrounding him, 23-year-old Ibrahim claims to have spent the last three days hurling rocks at — and surviving lethal attacks by — the security forces that have not only “prevented the Islamic population from defending their honor,” but, worse yet, chosen to “align themselves with the American pigs, rather than remain loyal to their own religion.” As the four young men each grab a corner of the cloth and rush off with a flagful of ammunition, they pick up on the chant roaring over the scene, a holdover from the 2011 revolution, mutated to fit the occasion, “The people say anything but the prophet.”
Misguided as their efforts may be — like most protesters at the scene, Ibrahim believes “The Innocence of Muslims” is a Hollywood production that, like any local or international film released in Egypt, and presumably elsewhere, passes through several rounds of censorship and receives official state approval from its own government before seeing the light of day — there is little doubt over the severity of the situation, and its potential fallout. Already, yet another wall has been erected by security forces at the head of the street leading to the embassy in order to keep groups of Egyptians from murdering each other and deepening an international crisis, and the downtown stretch between Tahrir and the US Embassy is back to looking like a war zone, developments which don’t seem to have had any effect in sobering up infuriated protestors.
“What do you mean ‘smart’ course of action?” one protester roars at Egypt Independent’s suggestion. “The film has already been made; it exists. Our only course of action is war, because this was an act of war.”
“This is our prophet, our religion. Or are you not Muslim?” he challenged.
“We want a formal apology from [US President Barack] Obama, we want the filmmakers executed, and we want all copies of the film destroyed,” another protester cut in. “All those tapes must be burned.”
Apparently, not very far. “You try to talk sense to these people, and you’re likely to get hurt,” fumes Tarek Farouk, a 27-year-old and one of the few maintaining a frontline of their own, one that separates the crowds in Tahrir from the ones throwing rocks and chunks of glass and metal over the wall and at security forces. Desperate to end the violence, Farouk and his colleagues have tried pleading with, and physically preventing, people from crossing over to confront the state security forces, but it’s a losing battle.
Behind him, the stream of airborne rocks is endless, young men cheering every time the shattering of glass is heard, riding on each other’s shoulders to make their insults more audible, taking apart the neighborhood around them in the hopes that its broken pieces would serve as ammunition once they run out of rocks.
“What do these people know of the prophet?” sighs Farouk.
To his left, his colleague asks, “What prophet? You think any of these people care about religion?” He turned to Egypt Independent and added, “You’d think these were the most pious people on Earth, but we were here for dawn prayers and we can tell you not a single one of them stopped throwing rocks long enough to pray.”
The crowd erupts shortly afterwards, its attention drawn to the two foreign men being quickly escorted from the scene by a small group of Egyptians. One of the men has had his green t-shirt torn; his left shoulder and part of his chest are exposed. Within seconds, hundreds of protesters have descended upon them, some laughing, others clearly enraged, thumping the foreigners on the head, piling on top of them and trying to wrestle them to the ground while bystanders shout for help and the prevalence of common sense. “You’re beating random foreigners, you dogs!” one woman in a burqa sceams. For several moments, the foreigner men are completely obscured by a flurry of fists and bodies, until enough individuals come to their aid and manage to extract them from the cluster. The small group escapes and is chased out of sight, with those left behind clearly struggling to come to terms with what they had just witnessed. One woman breaks down into tears, men mutter in disbelief, and an adolescent admonishes nobody in particular, shouting, “I know those men — one is Italian, the other is Dutch. They have nothing to do with this, they’re not even Americans.”
“So what if they were?” one older man bursts, before repeating the question again at a louder volume. “Have we all gone crazy?”
An answer can be found at the wall, where Hassan Eid, a protester who claims to have been “suffering” at the scene “for the past 10 days” — despite the fact that the violence began on Tuesday night — continues to bark orders at his rock-throwing comrades.
“People who say this is crazy have no honor, or religion,” he asserts. “What is so crazy about protecting your honor, and protecting what is most sacred in all our lives? This is not crazy. This is a new age, under a new regime. And this is our new way of protesting.”
Much has been said about the middle men and interlocutors who promoted and distributed such films, and of course the various Islamist parties who incited such protests in the first place. Much less has been discussed regarding the nature of those societies which spawned them. If the "supply" is anemic or nonexistent in the first place, then no amount of pushing and prodding will produce anything. But of course, we have the opposite case in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, etc. Namely, a demographic surplus of young, angry men without either a job or much of a hopeful future to speak of. This causes no small amount of frustration and consternation, and a mental compensatory mechanism will kick in for a quite a few of them. Complementary to that is a driving need to prove something to themselves, to demonstrate their prowess and honor for the rest of society to perceive and perhaps appreciate. Or to put it in another way: antagonistic anarchism for anarchism's sake. For the Chinese, it seems to be spastic outbursts of vandalism and trollish poster boards. For the Arab youths, we have on the positive side the overthrow of the Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Saleh regimes, and on the negative side, well............
As mentioned before, thinking retroactively of banning the film to prevent such things from happening is futile, because the underlying bubble of youthful anger and antipathy has been swelling anyways, ever searching (and thirsting !) for a cause to project itself over. If not for the film, some other peripheral issue would served just as well. Of course, that we have the machinations of those Islamists only made things worse...
And some of them didn't like Mohammed.......... 
