“A spokesman for President Mohamed Morsi said on Wednesday that inflammatory comments that he made about Jews before taking office had been intended as criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but had been taken out of context. The spokesman said that Mr. Morsi respected all monotheistic religions and religious freedom. It was Mr. Morsi’s first public response to news reports that as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood he had made anti-Semitic statements about Jews and Zionists. A recently resurfaced video of a speech that Mr. Morsi gave at a rally in his hometown in the Nile Delta nearly three years ago shows him urging his listeners “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” In another video of a television interview he gave the same year, Mr. Morsi criticized Zionists in recognizably anti-Semitic terms, as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs….……….”


Nothing was taken out of context: it is what he said. Morsi said it some time ago, before the presidency was even a dream for him. I posted on this last month. But to put it in perspective: calling Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs” is common among most of the Muslim Brotherhood and all Salafis. Egyptian-Qatari Muslim Brother cleric Yusuf Al Qaradawi once famously added in a video clip that Hitler was “God’s instrument to punish the Jews”. Everybody does it; that is almost everybody who is Muslim Brother and Salafi. I am not sure where it came from: I have not seen it in the Holy Quran or Hadith. Somewhere along the way these fundamentalist baboons created this term to refer to the Jewish people.

(FYI: This reminds me of a true story. When I first came to study in the USA as a teenager, I had colleagues and a few friends at my school back East who were Jewish. We used to kid each other. They used to ask me what we thought of Jews back home. I used to tell them that we thought they had tails, but it was something I made up. I had never heard of this “descendants of apes and pigs” thing. That was before the fundamentalist virus spread across our region and into our once-tolerant societies. The term must be something exclusive to these clowns. ).
Cheers
mhg