RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brotherhood seeks to rally anti-Sisi support

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, John Kerry, met with the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in Geneva. De Mistura must have been happy to hear Kerry praise his efforts and that Washington hoped the Russian peace plan for Syria “could be helpful.”

However, the experienced diplomat probably listened more intently to another thing Kerry said. “It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” the secretary of state remarked.

Media outlets immediately noticed that Kerry had made no explicit mention of the need for Assad to leave office, long the position of the Obama administration. Instead, he stepped back and resorted to that tiresome American habit of appealing to the reasonable in foreign officials — as if the man responsible for the carnage in Syria had any interest in “putting his people first.”

Amnesty International has condemned the continuation of capital punishment under the new Saudi leader.

Obama’s detour to Riyadh to pay tribute to the dead King Abdullah and congratulate the new King Salman may have succeeded in resetting his relations with the Saudis.

Before his arrival in Riyadh, he let it be known that he would not discuss human rights violations with the new king. Instead, “The best way to deal with Saudi Arabia was [is] by applying steady pressure even as we are getting business done that needs to get done,” he explained in a CNN interview. The progressive media (CNN, NPR, BBC and their ilk) chose not to worry about his callous disregard for human rights; and, perhaps to distract attention, came up with the non-story of Michelle Obama’s uncovered hair, supposedly in defiance of the Saudi law. “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability,” Obama elaborated. “Balance” is the key word here.