Potemkin mob

The violence in Cairo escalated Wednesday when the protesters were attacked by mobs of "pro-government demonstrators". As is so often the case with such events, however, there is less here than meets the eye. As CNN reports (found via TYWKIWDBI), there's abundant evidence that the pro-Mubarak goons were in the pay of the regime -- it's a tactic that has been used against protesters before -- or were simply ordered into action, and police IDs were even found on some of them.

Nevertheless, it's a clever tactic by a regime which is rapidly running out of options. By painting the conflict as being between two opposing groups of civilians, it exploits the media tendency to present any pair of opposing positions as vaguely equivalent in legitimacy regardless of the reality of the situation (such as the media-supported impression that there are "debates" within the scientific community about the reality of evolution or anthropo- genic global warming). In this case, a mob of a few thousand becomes one "side" of a "conflict", with the other being a mass of a million who have many millions more throughout the country behind them. Kudos to CNN for digging a bit deeper.