On February 2, 2011, as thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo to protest the three-decades-long regime of President Hosni Mubarak, men with swords, whips, clubs, stones, rocks, and pocket knives rode camels and horses into the crowd and throughout the rest of central Cairo, attacking civilians and killing nearly a dozen of them in the process.
The “Battle of the Camel” came after more than a week of protest. In the days and hours before the attack, police began to disappear from the streets of Cairo and armed vigilantes set up checkpoints to ward off potential criminals.
In Tahrir Square, families picnicked, young people played instruments, and protestors chanted anti-Mubarak slogans.
Then the men on camels attacked.
Later, following the fall of Mubarak, twenty-four former government officials were charged with manslaughter and attempted murder for allegedly sending the men on camels into the city and telling them to “kill the protestors if they had to.” An Egyptian court, however, acquitted all of the officials of any wrongdoing and refused the prosecutor’s attempts at an appeal, calling the state’s witnesses unreliable and evidence against the officials weak.
While investigators found that the mounted attackers were ordered into the square by government officials loyal to Mubarak, the camel riders themselves claimed to be “good men” who were trying to safeguard their jobs and reopen Cairo to tourists. “Look at us here,” one of them told a reporter, “we are poor, we have horses and camels to feed, we have no money. But we are good people. You don’t see houses and shops burned or with their windows broken [in our neighborhood].”
Flash forward nine years and move west to the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin. On Sunday evening, August 22nd, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a black man, seven times in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. The shooting occurred in front of Blake’s three children and was also caught on camera by a civilian across the street.
With the United States reeling from video footage of repeated police shootings and killings of unarmed black citizens, the Blake incident set off another storm of protests, lootings, and fires in a yet another American city.
The following day, the governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers (Democrat), ordered 125 members of the Wisconsin National Guard to reestablish peace in the city, but that night, hundreds of demonstrators defied the temporary curfew of 8 pm and marched through Kenosha. Police fired tear gas into the crowd, and the protestors responded by throwing water bottles and lighting off fireworks near the line of officers. Someone burned down a furniture store, while others knocked over lampposts. Windows were smashed. Dump trucks burned.
More protests followed. On Tuesday, Gov. Evers requested more National Guard members, and counter-protesters started arriving “to protect the buildings.”
One of those counter-protestors was a 17-year-old boy from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse. Like many of the counter-protestors, Rittenhouse arrived in Kenosha with a gun: an AR-15 style rifle. He would claim in a video taken before the night’s fatal incidents that he was in Kenosha “to protect this business and…part of my job is if somebody’s hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle, to protect myself obviously. I’ve also got my med kit.”
Throughout the night, Rittenhouse would be put on camera several times. He was involved in a confrontation between protestors and counter-protestors near a gas station; he claimed to have been pepper-sprayed in the face by a protestor; he was among the people at a car dealership whom were thanked by law enforcement officers for showing up on the streets of the city with rifles and whom received water from the officers as well.
At 11:48 pm, gunshots rang out in Kenosha. Video captured Rittenhouse making a phone call and then fleeing the scene, calling out to someone, “I’ve shot somebody.” As he ran, the crowd started to give chase. Someone in a white shirt caught up to him and threw a weak punch at the side of his head. He fell to the ground, and as members of the crowd came closer, he raised his rifle and began to shoot.
The footage of the event (see link above) clearly captures the damage done by his shots.
The crowd fled, and Rittenhouse stood up and walked quickly towards a line of police officers with his hands up. Despite leaving bodies in the street behind him and the crowd yelling to the officers, “That dude just shot someone right here,” Rittenhouse walked past the police officers and, somehow, was able to sleep in his own bed that night.
In both Tahrir Square and Kenosha, deadly violence came not from protestors seeking a change, but from counter-protestors loyal to the status quo.
Hopefully, Rittenhouse won’t be acquitted of the six criminal charges the state has levied against him, but in a country where the criminal justice system is so obviously rigged against the interests of black America, I’m not sure I have enough hope for that.