SOME EGYPTIAN PROTESTERS PAID TO DEMONSTRATE
Egypt’s prime minister says some of the thousands involved in days of protests near the U.S. Embassy got paid to participate.
Prime Minister Hesham Kandil said “a number” of those involved in the tense, sometimes violent protests, which began Tuesday, later confessed to getting paid to participate, according to the state-run Middle East News Agency. He noted, too, that some of the demonstrators were acting on their own and weren’t paid to vent their anger against the United States over an inflammatory anti-Islam film that was privately produced in that country.
Kandil did not say whether the government knew or suspected who paid the demonstrators.
Muslims have been livid over a 14-minute trailer for “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure film that mocks the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer, child molester and ruthless killer.
Two months after the film’s trailer was posted online on YouTube, and days after it got attention in Egyptian media, Cairo residents first expressed their ire Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, with protests targeting the American embassy.
Outpourings soon spread like wildfire across the Muslim world. As a result, Western diplomats found themselves and their missions under siege.
The region has been on edge after those initial volatile Cairo protests and the killings of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other American officials at the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
Relations between the United States and Egypt have cooled since the overthrow last year of ousted President Hosni Mubarak and the election of President Mohamed Morsy, the country’s first democratically elected leader. Before he became president, he was a leader in the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the popular Islamist movement.
When protests in Cairo began Tuesday, police and Egyptian troops formed defensive lines around the embassy to stop demonstrators from advancing. But they did not prevent protesters from scaling the embassy fence and placing a black flag atop a ladder in the American compound.
Police arrested a handful of protesters at the time, but the failure of Egyptian authorities to take action sooner has been widely questioned, as has initial response from Morsy.
Morsy initially focused his criticism on the anti-Muslim film as an unacceptable slap at Islam. But after speaking with U.S. President Barack Obama, Morsy on Thursday directly criticized the violence.
“Those who are attacking the embassies do not represent any of us,” he said from Brussels, Belgium, where he was visiting the headquarters of the European Union.
Discussing Egypt’s relationship with the United States, the prime minister, Kandil, said Egyptian officials believe that Washington is “sincere” in wanting to foster “good relations,” adding that Egypt’s chief goal is to create “balanced relations,” the MENA report said.
“Relations between countries of the so-called Arab Spring and the West have not yet taken complete shape,” Kandil said, stressing this is particularly true of Egypt.
As this relationship evolves, the prime minister said his country is committed to protecting U.S. diplomats and their missions.
The thousands of protesters represent a fraction of the Egyptian capital’s total population of roughly 11 million people.
Short URL: http://thejewishreporter.com/?p=4951
Posted by Gary
on Sep 17 2012. Filed under Breaking News, Middle East.
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