The White House has condemned anti-Semitic remarks by Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian president, who once described Israelis as the “descendants of apes and pigs”.

Mr Morsi’s slurs, which emerged in recordings from 2010, were termed “deeply offensive” by Jay Carney, Mr Obama’s press secretary, who said concerns had been raised with Egyptian officials.
Mr Carney urged Mr Morsi, who has promised to respect Egypt’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel, to promptly state publicly that he respects people of all faiths.
“This type of rhetoric is unacceptable in a democratic Egypt,” he said during a briefing at The White House, adding: “It is counter to peace.”
The intervention from Washington came amid growing controversy over the three-year-old comments, in a speech and subsequent television interview, which were unearthed by researchers.
Mr Morsi, then a Muslim Brotherhood opposition politician, urged Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists.
He also described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
Last October, weeks after being elected Egypt’s president following its revolution, Mr Morsi was recorded apparently saying “amen” in response to an Imam telling an audience to pray for God to “deal with the Jews and their supporters” and to “disperse them and render them asunder”.
Jewish groups have sharply criticised the remarks and said they raised troubling questions about the future of America’s delicate relations with Egypt’s new leaders.
Israeli officials have anonymously said that the comments are seriously concerning, but have so far avoided public responses in an effort to prevent increased tensions.
Mr Morsi, who would be crucial to any Middle East peace deal, also described Zionists as “hostile by nature” and said “all the talk about a two-state solution and about peace is nothing but an illusion”.
A spokesman for Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, said that a group of senior congressman visiting Cairo this week, including Senator John McCain, would reiterate concerns about the comments with Egyptian officials.

A video disseminated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) should blow a giant hole in the fantasy the Obama administration refers to as their Muslim “outreach” initiative. Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is shown in 2010 delivering an anti-Semitic diatribe, during which he referred to “the Zionists” as “bloodsuckers,” “warmongers,” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.” He also called for “military resistance within the land of Palestine,” further noting that the PLO “was created by the Zionist and American enemies.”

The tape is a compilation of excerpts from two different interviews given by Morsi on March 20 and September 23 in 2010. MEMRI discovered the footage, translated it, and combined it into the aforementioned video. Morsi was a member of the Guidance Office of the Muslim Brotherhood when he delivered the remarks. “The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine,” he said March 20. “There is no place for them on the land of Palestine. What they took before 1947-8 constitutes plundering, and what they are doing now is a continuation of this plundering. By no means do we recognize their Green Line. The land of Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, not to the Zionists.”

He was sure to include the United States in the mix as well. “We must confront this Zionist entity. All ties of all kinds must be severed with this plundering criminal entity, which is supported by America and its weapons, as well as by its own nuclear weapons, the existence of which is well known. It will bring about their own destruction. The peoples must boycott this entity and avoid normalization of relations with it. All products from countries supporting this entity —— from the U.S. and others —— must be boycotted.”

Such a boycott must be quite selective. Beginning January 22, Egypt is scheduled to receive the first installment of 10 F-16 fighter jets and 200 Abrams tanks from the United States as part of a $213 million foreign aid package originally promised to former president Hosni Mubarak. Morsi hasn’t cancelled it. Neither has the Obama administration, despite Mubarak’s ouster. Such seeming indifference by Obama has engendered increasing criticism, with the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) circulating a petition that has garnered more than 150,000 signatures. “A Shariah dictatorship on Israel’s border —— armed with American weapons —— is a deadly threat to Israel and America,” it reads. “All U.S. funding to Egypt must be cut off until we can certify that aid to Egypt will help the national security interests of the United States and Israel.”

This is what Morsi thought of such security interests on September 23, 2010. “These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities…We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion… No reasonable person can expect any progress on this track. Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war. This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know —— these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs… [Zionists] must not be given any opportunity, and must not stand on any Arab or Islamic land. They must be driven out of our countries.” The description of Jews as the offspring of apes and pigs is favored imagery of genocidal clerics all throughout the Muslim world and is drawn from the Koran.

This is not the only belligerent statement made by a member of Egypt’s new leadership recently. Essam el-Erian, deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and a Morsi advisor, called on Jews to return to Egypt because Israel is a criminal entity. “It is better for Jews to live in a country like Egypt rather than in a country contaminated by occupation,” he contended. “Every Egyptian has the right to come back to Egypt no matter what his religion. Egyptian Jews should refuse to live under a brutal, bloody and racist occupation stained with war crimes against humanity.”

After receiving much criticism, el-Erian clarified his remarks. “Jewish occupiers of the territory of historic Palestine are an obstacle to the Palestinians’ right of return,” he said. “Anyone who can read the future can see that this project has a decade, less than a decade to go, and it is our faith that the people of Palestine can then return to Palestine. There will be no such thing as Israel. Instead there will be Palestine which will be home to Jews, Muslims and Druze and all the people who were there from the start,” he added.

El-Erian’s initial remarks drew the ire of Mohamed Abou Samra, a leading figure in the Islamic Jihad movement. According to Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, Samra sees a different future for Jews naive enough to take up the offer to return to Egypt. “We shall fight them vigorously if they return, especially the Egyptian-Israeli Jews. Islamic Sharia says they deserve to be killed.”

Samra needn’t have worried. Sharia is now the law of the land in Egypt. On December 23, Egypt’s Sharia-based constitution was finally approved after a second round of voting. Western media apologists had sought to highlight the widespread bitterness of the opposition, and the fact that only 32 percent of the voters turned out to vote. Yet 64 percent of Egyptians who did vote approved the document, suggesting Morsi and Sharia law have firm footing in the worlds’ largest Arab country. Thus Morsi’s commitment to Sharia, highlighted during his May 13, 2012 speech, promising that “I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [Sharia], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts,” has come to pass.

In other words, it would seem Morsi is the kind of man who follows through on what he believes. And what he believes about Israel and the Jews ought to make it clear that arming him and his Muslim Brotherhood followers with additional weaponry is a fool’s errand. Yet as of today, it is an errand the Obama administration intends to fulfill. Michel Rubin, a Middle East regional expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explains why. “Obama lived for years in an ivory tower, where political correctness was a religion,” he contends. “By ignoring reality, Obama’s policies have become untethered from reality.”

Yet reality has intruded. The videos released by MEMRI cannot be easily dismissed —— unless a mainstream media that has shown a remarkable incuriosity regarding anything that interferes with the “Arab Spring narrative” is willing to once again give President Obama a pass. One might be forgiven for wondering if the administration’s fallback position here will be the idea that Morsi has “evolved” since 2010. In one sense they would be right. Morsi has indeed evolved. He and his Muslim Brotherhood associates now represent far more of a threat to Israel and the Middle East than they ever have. It remains to be seen if Obama will further enable them with military hardware. If he does, Americans should brace themselves for a possible future of war between Egypt and Israel —— with both sides using weapons supplied by the United States.

Arnold Ahlert is a columnist for FrontPage Magazine.