From Al Arabiya:

Alleged members of an Egyptian black-clad youth group, who stanchly oppose Islamist President Mohamed Mursi, have been detained and banned from travel by Egypt’s state security prosecution on Saturday... Hundreds of apparent supporters of the Black Bloc Egypt emerged in January in the forefront of anti-government protests in Cairo, Alexandria and the Suez Canal cities...

Its slogan is “chaos against injustice” and it says it has one enemy only – the Muslim Brotherhood group from which Mursi hails.

Yes, anarchists were at the front of the Arab Spring (at least in Egypt), just as they were at the front of the Occupy movement.

But the Black Bloc, of course, is not an organization or a "youth group." As David Graeber puts it in his great new book The Democracy Project (which I should, at this moment, be finishing my review of instead of Slogging):

There is a widespread impression that "the Black Bloc" is some kind of murky organization, given to ultra-militant anarchist ideologies and tactics. Actually, it's a tactic that activists—usually anarchist—can employ at any demo; it involves covering one's face, wearing fairly uniform black clothing, and forming a mass willing and able to engage in militant tactics if required, which in the Anglophone world could mean anything from linking arms to form a wall against police, to targeted damage to corporate storefronts.

Collaring and imprisoning people affiliated with anarchists and other activists in black isn't just a Muslim Brotherhood thing. We, of course, have had our own drama in the Northwest regarding last year's May Day Black Bloc moment and the subsequent fallout, which included police kicking down the doors of "known" anarchists and detaining them for not answering questions about other people's political opinions. (That kinda sounds like something an Islamist government might do, doesn't it?)

And last year's window-smashers are still haunting Seattle. Cienna posted about the "chastened" SPD's cross-examination in front of a city council committee earlier this month, and interim SPD chief Jim Pugel has said the police department has preordained some kind of confrontation: "It is inevitable that we are going to have to use force. It is inevitable that police are going to have to detain people."

Meanwhile, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that downtown Seattle businesses, via their Downtown Seattle Association, "will have staffers at the police special operations command post on May 1."

So who's afraid of the big Black Bloc (which doesn't actually exist)? Apparently, authorities from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Seattle Police Department to our fair city's downtown business club.