Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) called on American leaders to emulate Egypt’s military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi–a man who orchestrated a coup d’etat and has presided over the killing of more than a thousand dissidents.
Gohmert made the remarks on Wednesday in a speech from the House floor denouncing radical Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I hope one day that our top leaders in this country will have the courage of president el-Sisi in Egypt and they will reflect, as general el-Sisi has, the will of the people of their country,” Gohmert stated.
Sisi did not, however, come to power through democratic means. In 2013, he overthrew the only leader to ever be fairly elected President of Egypt, the former Muslim Brotherhood chair Mohammed Morsi. A Pew poll taken in early 2014 showed Egyptians were roughly split on whether they approved of Sisi’s junta, though almost three-quarters said they were dissatisfied with the direction of their country–a number that had steadily increased throughout Morsi’s rule and after his ouster.
Sisi did win an election in 2014, but many observers said it was completely rigged in his favor. Officially, he won 95 percent of the vote.
“If the story is properly written about Egypt, and one day it will be,” Gohmert continued, “they will see that in the last six years, that besides Israel, the country that has been most fearless in standing up for freedom and against radical Islamic terrorism, unfortunately, has not been the United States because of our leadership. It has been the nation of Egypt.”
Gohmert failed to note that political protest is effectively banned in Egypt, and there are thousands of Egyptians who are currently being incarcerated for their beliefs.
“Egyptian authorities have, by their own estimate, imprisoned at least 22,000 people since the July 2013 coup,” Human Rights Watch noted, despite its close ties to the State Department and Washington’s close ties to Cairo. “The Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, which has documented arrests by name and date, has put that number at 41,000,” it added, noting that at least 1,000 Egyptians who demonstrated against Sisi were slaughtered by the Egyptian military weeks after its takeover.
The US gives the Egyptian military about $1.3 billion in annual aid.
