Secretary General of the Muslim Brotherhood Mahmoud Hussein criticised the United States State Department Friday for “supporting the military coup” calling on them to “uphold their advocated principles in terms of democracy and freedom.”
The statement comes in light of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s statements during his speech to a forum on enhancing private sector businesses and diplomatic security agencies on Wednesday in which he said that the “the best antidote to extremism is opportunity.”
“Those kids in Tahrir Square, they were not motivated by any religion or ideology,” Kerry said, but instead “by what they saw through this interconnected world, and they wanted a piece of the opportunity and a chance to get an education and have a job and have a future, and not have a corrupt government that deprived them of all of that and more. And then it [the revolution] got stolen by the one single most organised entity in the state, which was the Brotherhood.”
Hussein responded that “Kerry should assign a translator to explain the Muslim Brotherhood’s stance during the revolution,” adding that “their parliamentary and presidential wins came through fair elections supervised by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and praised by former United States president Jimmy Carter.”
Hussein said that even the most “liberal of opponents to the Muslim Brotherhood commended the Brotherhood’s actions during the revolution, and if it was not for their bravery during the Battle of the Camel on 2 February, 2011, the revolution would have failed.”
Hussein was born in 1947 in Palestine and took the position of Secretary General in succession to Mahmoud Ezzat, who is the Brotherhood’s current Supreme Guide.
Leading Brotherhood member Amr Darrag said on Thursday that the “military coup is the one that stole the 25 January Revolution and trampled popular will,” calling Kerry’s statements “reprehensible and fundamentally wrong”.
“Now, it has become clear to all that the US government is behind the attempts to abort the Arab Spring in all countries that have gone that route,” he concluded.
