Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Should Egypt Aid Be Pulled Over Morsi Remarks?

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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.