172 Voice for Rebellion and Relief a number of times, but had essentially no outside support. So too were southerners in places such as Aden coming under constant attack. In light of these disparities, organizers in the diaspora often expressed frustration that they and their fellow Yemenis lacked a concrete way to help their compatriots beyond holding protests and lobbying from afar. As Shaima from Birmingham lamented, Even though I want to help Yemen, I just don’t know how I would. Here, we’re educated, we have resources, we have activist resources. So what I want to know is how we can use these resources and get them over to them. I don’t know how! . . . Even if you’re not educated to a certain level, there’s opportunities here. It’s about just being able to pick it up and move it. But how do you do that? This dilemma was echoed by respondents across the diaspora. Omar from Liverpool too reflected on their movement’s inability to tangibly help the revolution after the Friday of Dignity Massacre. We were more saddened on an individual level. But we thought, they died, what can we do? We can’t do anything particularly for them. All we can do is give them our emotional support. It brought their reality of the revolution home to us more than anything. The diaspora was very much on the back foot. We didn’t quite know what to do, to be honest with you. Other participants expressed skepticism about the utility of protests. For example, Afrah of Liverpool mentioned, I think even sometimes it’s not even about getting [a] reaction. I think we felt a bit better. We felt that at least we’ve done something, we worked on something. Because sometimes we’re looking at the news and thinking, what can we do? We live so far away from it. We want to show and let them know that we are there, we are listening and we are proud, so I think it’s as much to make us feel better as well as [showing] our support. This gap in their response left many respondents feeling that the diaspora had failed to meet its mobilization potential. As Ahlam of New York lamented, “At a point you realize, what is there that you can do, you know?” Hany of Sheffield surmised, It was good in the sense that it’s woken a lot of people up. It’s good in the sense that it brings out this new talk, how we can improve Yemen, as opposed to just complaining. It gave us a platform to talk about and deal with issues now. But I don’t think it’s manifested as much as we have wanted. There’s a lot more that we can do – and that we need to do. In all, by the end of the Arab Spring period in Yemen, activists from the United States and Britain were both proud of the work they had undertaken and deeply perplexed about why they could not do more. 5.7 conclusion This chapter explained how and to what extent Libyan, Syrian, and Yemeni groups across the United States and Britain contributed to the Arab Spring https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press