PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SUPPORT FOR THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD "PUT EGYPT RIGHT IN IRANS HANDS!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By KAREEM FAHIM and MAYY EL SHEIKH
Published: February 5, 2013 CAIRO —
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic three-day trip to Egypt, the first in three decades by an Iranian leader, started pleasantly enough on Tuesday. Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, greeted Mr. Ahmadinejad with a broad smile during a red-carpet ceremony at a Cairo airport. The two talked about the crisis in Syria and how to improve the relationship between their own countries, which has been in a deep freeze since the Iranian revolution in 1979.
“Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East,” Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Tuesday.
“We are ready to further strengthen ties.” Then things got testy. During an afternoon visit to Al-Azhar mosque and university, Egypt’s seat of Sunni scholarship, Mr. Ahmadinejad was publicly upbraided at a news conference by his hosts, who accused Shiites of interfering in Arab countries, including Egypt and Bahrain, and of discriminating against Sunnis in Iran, a Shiite-majority country.
As a spokesman for Al-Azhar scolded his guest using divisive sectarian language, an aide to Mr. Ahmadinejad cut in. “We didn’t agree on this,” he said, as the Iranian leader nodded and replied: “We agreed on unity, brotherhood.”
READ MORE http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/irans-president-visits-egypt-in-sign-of-thaw.html?_r=0
