Ambassador of Egypt’s response to the New York Times’ editorial
The New York Times May 19th editorial “In Egypt, Deplorable death Sentences” starts with yet another outright fabrication.It claims that an Egyptian court has sentenced Mohamed Morsi and others to death. Had the editorial board chosen to apply basic standards of journalism, they would have disclosed that the judge actually set a date in early June to pronounce his sentence. Until that time, any reports as to what that sentence may be amount to nothing more than conjecture. Faithful to what has become its established policy, the Times again goes out of its way to absolve the Moslem Brotherhood of their crimes. At a time when the Brotherhood’s official media outlets are openly instigating their followers to violence and terrorism, this newspaper makes the claim that the Moslem Brotherhood “renounced violence in the 1970s” without providing a shred of evidence to that effect, and brushing aside the ample evidence to the opposite that has surfaced in recent years. In January of this year, the Moslim Brotherhood’s official website posted a statement in Arabic calling for a “long, uncompromising Jihad” against Egypt, while the Brotherhood-controlled TV called for the assassination of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Soon thereafter, terrorist attacks in North Sinai killed more than 30 and injured nearly 100. The Times editorial makes a clumsy attempt at reinterpreting these calls as an “invitation to continue to demonstrate peacefully”. I wonder how they would defend similar Moslem Brotherhood calls to target Westerners.