Moving Away From Peace

The Center for Security Policy posted an article today about a recent foreign affairs decision by the Biden administration.

The article reports:

Is the Biden Administration holding Egypt aid hostage in exchange for freeing a bloodthirsty Muslim Brotherhood leader?

The Biden Administration is currently withholding $130 million in security and counterterrorism assistance to the Egyptian government, unless 16 unnamed prisoners, among whom may be included a virulent anti-Semitic jihadist cleric, are released from Egyptian prisons.

That was the reveal in a recent floor speech by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week. Cruz has been locked in a rhetorical battle with the Biden Administration for weeks in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, centered around nominee Barbara Leaf, currently proposed for state department assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. Cruz has sought to force answers to questions about the conditioning of Egyptian security aid on the release of the unnamed prisoners.

“Not a single name. None of them. Congress doesn’t get to know who those 16 people are,” Cruz said during the speech, which featured a large poster board blow up of Leaf’s 1000-word response to Cruz’s questionnaire, “The answer from Ms. Leaf to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is, not to put too fine a point on, go jump in a lake.”

Cruz called the Biden Administration’s action “extortion” and wondered aloud about the nature of the prisoner list, noting that the list of names is available to Congress in a classified form, but one that remains hidden from the public.

There seems to be some information about who the prisoners are in a recent Senate report:

One possible clue as to the identity of these prisoners may be language buried within a recent Senate appropriation report, which calls on the secretary of state to consider conditioning aid on the treatment of Egyptian prisoners Ola al-Qaradawi, Hosam Khalaf, Salah Soltan, Abdelrahman Tarek, and Mohamed El-Baqer. Cruz noted that it is currently unknown who was responsible for the insertion of those names into the appropriations report.

Soltan’s is by far the most interesting name, as he is a well-known Muslim Brotherhood cleric and Hamas supporter. Soltan played a key role in leading U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations during his time in United States and has a long record of issuing blood-curdling anti-Semitic calls for violence. He is also known for praising Osama bin Laden, and even being an associate of the late Al Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki.

Soltan is currently in an Egyptian prison convicted of incitement to murder. He was formerly a U.S. resident, but his application for naturalization was denied after Soltan appeared at a Hamas rally in Turkey.

This is the kind of thing that happened when Barack Obama was President and spoke in Egypt. He brought members of the Muslim Brotherhood into the country from exile and seated them in the front row. He planted the seeds for the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt, which was later overthrown.