Should Egypt Aid Be Pulled Over Morsi Remarks?

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By Anne Cohen January 16, 2013

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on the White House to withhold aid to Egypt over President Mohamed Morsi’s insulting comments about Jews

In a statement released on January 15, the anti-Semitism watchdog asked the government to make a consignment of F-16s and other military hardware bound for Egypt conditional on Morsi’s promising to curb anti-Semitism in the country.

“America must signal that it will not be business as usual with the government of the Arab world’s largest and most powerful nation, while they continue to characterize Jews as ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, ‘war mongers’, and threaten anti-Semitic Jihads,” Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Founder and Dean and Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement released January 15.

This request comes in the aftermath of the release of a 2010 video that shows Morsi making anti-Semitic remarks in 2010 when he was a Muslim Brotherhood leader.

In December, the Simon Wiesenthal Center listed the Muslim Brotherhood as number one on its 2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs. (http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277%7D/TT_2012_3.PDF)

The center also called for the U.S. government to put an end to what they see as a double standard in the Middle East. “On the one hand it is apparently willing to reward an unrepentantly anti-Semitic government in Cairo, while at the same time it continues to refuse to use its clout to force Israel’s admission to the global anti-terrorism forum the U.S. itself launched in 2011,” center officials added.

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

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