Has anyone ever heard of a winning soccer team's supporters storming the field and attacking the losers? It has happened in Egypt this week. Cairo was playing Port Said in Port Said. Cairo is the better team and usually wins, but this time Port Said turned the tables. Its supporters should have been celebrating; instead they attacked the Cairo supporters killing at least 74 while police and security watched.
Pieced together from several sources, the real story behind this soccer riot is more insidious. Security at the stadium let in hundreds of "Port Said supporters" armed with clubs, knives, chains. At the end of the game (which Port Said had been expected to lose but won), they attacked the Cairo supporters — in the stadium, on the streets, and even at the train station as they tried to return to Cairo.
Why did this happen? Because soccer fans in Egypt are well organized groups — they take the game very seriously — and Cairo supporters had played a significant role in the Tahrir Square demonstrations that toppled the Mubarak regime. It was payback time. Aware of the circumstances, shouldn't the U.S. be calling for the generals in Cairo to step down and install the newly elected representatives as the legitimate Egyptian government? It is what the latest demonstrations in Cairo are about — accelerated power transfer to a civilian government comprising the winners of the recent elections.
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