On July 13, 2011, visitors of the Adbusters magazine website were greeted with the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET Twitter hash tag and a message that read: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” This was a public call to flood into Manhattan’s financial district on September 17, setting up tents, kitchens, and barricades. As the editors of the anti-consumerist magazine who launched the movement put it, this was a “Tahrir moment on Wall Street." This paper examines how "Tahrir Square" became a potent frame of reference in both media and activist discourses around the Occupy movement in the U.S. It does so through a discourse analysis of approximately 40 news articles from the American mainstream press collected between the months of October and November of 2011. Findings suggest that the media used two recurrent discursive frames, what I refer to as “This is Tahrir” and “This is not Tahrir,” to make sense of the Occupy movement. I begin with a close examination of these frames and then discuss how they helped challenge two predominant tropes in understandings and representations of modern social movements: Historicism and Eurocentrism. In both frames, there is an attempt to compare the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring – measuring it against what took place in Cairo’s largest public square. I argue that this was a rhetorical tool -used by opponents and proponents of the Occupy- to evaluate its authenticity, legitimacy, and significance. Ultimately, the use of “Tahrir” as a spatial frame may signal two crucial points: First, a shift in the assumed directionality of political change and development, from the West to the rest, which reframes the Arab world as a locus of political agency. Second, the emergence of “Tahrir” as a metonymy not only for the Egyptian revolution, but for the Arab uprisings in general. The paper concludes by examining the implications of both these shifts and a reflection on whether, two years on, they still hold.