Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 113 solidarity between conationals for the Arab Spring. As Noueihed and Warren (2012: 180) write, [Gaddafi’s] now-infamous pledge to go “zanga zanga, dar dar” or from “alley to alley, house to house” to “cleanse” the “rats” and “cockroaches” carried echoes of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when Hutus described the Tutsis in similarly insect-like terms. Saif al-Islam’s calls for dialogue and a “general assembly” were ignored by both the opposition and the outside world, while his rambling speech threatening “rivers of blood” prompted Western politicians to fall over each other in their rush to distance themselves from Libya’s heir apparent . . . Even though Gaddafi promised an amnesty to those who gave up their weapons, threats of “no mercy” to those who resisted suggested that a terrible vengeance would be visited upon Libya’s second city [of Benghazi]. Thus, the revolution created shared anti-regime grievances between revolutionaries in exile, reformists who had treated the regime as a bargaining partner in recent years, bystanders who had eschewed home-country politics in the past, and students abroad on state-sponsored scholarships. As a result, regime repression and revolutionary backlash in Libya produced a newfound alignment that paired a “diagnostic frame” attributing the Gaddafi regime as the problem with a “prognostic frame” naming the armed revolutionary movement under the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the only legitimate solution (Benford and Snow 2000; Snow and Benford 1988). These conditions motivated mobilization among a wide cross-section of Libyans in the United States and Britain and produced a newfound sense of nationalistic solidarity among conationals. As M., a second-generation exile and member of the Enough Gaddafi! network, explained, It was incredibly unfortunate, the severity of the crisis, but it left a very clear line for us. There wasn’t any doubt if Gaddafi was doing this or he was not doing this – like in Syria, where there’s a lot of doubt floating around regarding who did what, and what was going on, who’s the good guy or the bad guy. We were lucky enough to have all of that very black and white. The severity of his actions made it very clear. Whether or not [others] had been supportive of Gaddafi before, it changed a lot of people afterwards, not to mention those who had already been affected. Dina from California also attested to how important Saif al-Islam’s threatening reaction to the uprising was in discrediting the regime. A young professional from Southern California, Dina had spent time working in Libya during Saif’s “liberalization” period before being imprisoned for a brief but terrifying time over government suspicions that she was a spy. She said, Many people actually, at the beginning of the revolution, did not expect Saif to react in the way that he did. People forget that, but that’s still really an important part of the whole puzzle – the way that he came out so strongly in those first days. His hatred was just so shocking. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press