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as-Safir, Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, September 23, 2002 

Cairo: Storm against the US ambassador

Eric Mueller comments: I HAVE searched in vain for the English original of this Reuters-UPI story, on various websites. So I’ve retranslated it from the Arabic text reproduced in “as-Safir.” It seems an indication of what official Washington means when it talks about “spreading democracy” in the Arab World. Arabist Eric Mueller is this website’s expert on Middle Eastern affairs.

CAIRO — THE American ambassador to Cairo, David Welch, has stirred up a storm of controversy in the Egyptian street after an article he wrote was published two days ago in the newspaper al-Ahram.

In this article the ambassador criticized the doubts expressed by Egyptian publications and prominent personalities as to who was responsible for the events of September 11, 2001 and he called for the imposition of limitations on articles carried by the press.

A number of Egyptian Islamicist and leftist intellectuals have joined forces with writers for the government newspapers in a campaign aimed at gathering the largest possible number of signatures on a petition against Welsh, demanding his expulsion from Egypt.

In a statement published in the opposition press, the intellectuals expressed their astonishment at the “brazen interference by the American ambassador in the internal affairs of an independent country.”

The signatories demanded that Welsh be considered “persona non grata and expelled from Egypt.” They denounced the US ambassador’s article, saying it was, “replete with distortions and full of arrogant language, as if he were addressing slaves or the subjects of a banana republic”

The statement continued, “it is strange that an ambassador of a foreign country, regardless of which country that might be, whether America or even Micronesia, would try to dictate to free Egyptian journalists and intellectuals a particular way of thinking and writing, and tell them that they must believe all the opinions expressed by America and its information media, even if they might be pure lies.”

Related item:

 Time To Get The Facts Right, By David Welch (Ambassador of the United States of America