President Morsi and the Americans

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

No sooner does one American official turn his back and leave Cairo than another American appears there. From Clinton to Burns, to Clinton again, and then Panetta. This is understandable, because America wants to be reassured that Egypt remains within the Arab-Israeli-American alliance, that Egypt remains a satellite orbiting the American “sacred,” maintaining the Camp David Accords, and continuing to fulfill its security commitments toward Israel.

But it is not understandable that Egypt’s new president should open his doors to American visitors and meet with them, when they are beneath his rank. He is an elected head of a republic, while they are unelected officials. The president had already answered a Saudi summons before this, even though he knows full well that Saudi Arabia represents the head of the Arab chorus serving the United States and Israel.

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…out of respect for Egypt, its revolution, and its leadership. The president is required to respect his own position, to strengthen Egypt’s standing, and not to leave himself as a subject passed around among American officials.

We do not harbor hostility toward the people of the United States of America, but their successive administrations insist on opposing and holding in contempt the Arabs and the Egyptians, buying off their whiskers, so to speak, with money so that they remain under the boot. America supports Israel with all the strength it possesses; it was America that supplied Israel with the newest types of bombs in 1973 to strike the Egyptian air-defense system and inflict defeat on the Egyptian army. It is America that persists in enslaving and subjugating the Arabs and plundering their wealth, and so on. And it is America that supports the Arab despots who subject the Arab citizen to the worst suffering, and that fuels strife among people — between Sunni and Shia, between Iran and the Arabs, between Turks and Arabs, and among the Arab states themselves. America is an unending evil, from which the Arabs get nothing but destruction, ruin, corruption, and bloodshed. It hands out money to its clients and agents in a number of Arab states, such as Mubarak’s Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority, but through its policies it destroys every genuine development effort, so that the Arab may never stand on his own two feet.

For this reason, President Morsi must understand fully that judging the policy of an Arab regime stems, first, from its closeness to or distance from America, and from its stance toward the Zionist entity. And if Egypt’s doors remain open to the Americans, the Egyptian street, which rose up in defense of its own dignity, has already gained enough experience to know it. The Arab elites will not fail Egypt going forward, just as they did not fail it before.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “الرئيس مرسي والأمريكيون” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.