On Tuesday Egypt urged the U.S. to exercise restraint in dealing with those racially charged demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, Reuters reported, adding that this was exactly the kind of language Washington has been in the habit of using to caution Egypt as it was busy bashing the heads of Muslim Brothers protesting in its streets a year ago.
As you may recall, President Barack Obama’s White House “urged security forces to exercise maximum restraint and caution” in dealing with demonstrations by Mursi supporters last year.
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Mind you, this is as close to biting the hand that feeds you as you can get – Egypt receives close to $3 billion annually from the U.S. and the fact that someone in the Egyptian government decided to dish out ever so sarcastically, means they Egyptians have had it up to here with the White House.
Washington was extremely vocal when Egyptian security forces killed hundreds of Muslim Brothers after the army had removed President Mohamed Mursi last summer. And Washington has been on the patronizing side when it doubted just how democratic President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s rise to power has been.
Except that, while saying all that, the U.S. has also continued to provide military and civilian support to al-Sisi.
The Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s statement on the unrest in Ferguson said, and you just knew they were rubbing their hands together and laughing hysterically even as they issued it, said Egypt was “closely following the escalation of protests” in Ferguson, unleashed by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white policeman on Aug. 9.
But then deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Tuesday hit back at Egypt, “We here in the United States will put our record for confronting our problems transparently and honestly and openly up against any other countries in the world. We would call on other countries to do the same. And unfortunately, we haven’t always seen that, so we’ll keep calling on them to do so.”
