Exiting Gaddafi’s Jamahiriyya 53 Libya’s legitimacy, many exiles received assurances by regime officials that they could return safely home. Saif al-Islam also coaxed the youth to reestablish ties with their homeland by sponsoring luxurious group trips to Libya, akin to Israel’s birthright trips for Jewish Americans. In 2007, during Gaddafi’s and Saif al-Islam’s campaign to reintegrate themselves into the world community, a law banning Amazigh names was struck down, and the government hosted the Paris-based World Amazigh Conference for the first time (Alunni 2020). However, this was accompanied by subsequent mob violence and attacks against Amazigh figures inside of Libya and the mysterious closing of the Tawalt website in 2009, most likely due to regime intimidation and pressure. In response to Gaddafi’s reintegration into the global community, Hamid and fellow exile Abdullah established a social movement network called Gaddafi Khalas!, or Enough Gaddafi, in 2008. M., a member of the Enough Gaddafi network, explained that they used their English-language skills and technological savvy to launch a website and a “new form of opposition, the next wave of opposition.” We staged protests, and [published] different reports on violations going on, in particular focused on Abu Salim victims and the massacre and the families of those individuals on social media, bringing up the violations of the past forty-two years. We tried to bring that to light, to look back at a lot of the violations that happened in the 1980s against college students, and put it into the foreground the international community should not be dealing with Gaddafi because he’s a criminal. This group also held a protest against Gaddafi’s 2009 visit to the UN headquarters in New York. By this time, Gaddafi had turned into a bloated, incoherent megalomaniac. Sashaying in jird cloaks in front of the camera, his rambling speeches and eccentricities appeared laughable to outside observers. But his buffoonery masked a poignant cruelty that lay hidden behind a thick curtain of censorship. Regime control over the media and the Internet was hugely effective in isolating Libya from the rest of the world. Assuming that the Libyan people were too complacent, cowed, or brainwashed to resist Gaddafi, it seemed during my early graduate studies as though pundits had written Libya off as an example of unshakable authoritarian entrenchment. But although violence seemed to have succeeded in stamping out mortal threats to Gaddafi’s rule within the nation’s borders, the repression that had forced many of Libya’s bravest and brightest abroad had also produced an anti-regime diaspora that remained steadfastly loyal to the homeland. It was these dissidents and professionals who would come together and help to bring about his downfall in 2011. At the same time, public efforts to condemn Gaddafi in the years preceding the Arab Spring were rare. Protests, such as those initiated by Enough Gaddafi and Libya Watch, were small and led by a minority of exiles. Furthermore, in spite of the notable presence of anti-regime members in the United States and Britain, neither host-country diaspora produced civic https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press