Global media is reporting on comments in Egypt by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in which he said he and the U.S. government had “no problem” with Islamists coming to power. According to an AFP report:
Tuesday, 10 January 2012 U.S. president Jimmy Carter gave the thumbs up on Tuesday to Egypt’s parliamentary elections, saying the people’s will was “expressed accurately.” “We have been very pleased,” Carter told reporters during a tour of a polling station at the Rod al-Farag girls’ secondary school in a working class district of the Egyptian capital He said the election ? a three-staged process launched in November to choose the first parliament since mass protests forced former president Hosni Mubarak to quit ? had been peaceful despite “some problems.” “But in general the will of the people has been expressed accurately,” he said on the eve of the end of the polls. The Carter Center is one of the few monitoring group to have had a license to witness the election, and the former U.S. president will hold a news conference on Friday. Carter arrived in Egypt on Monday to join a Carter Center delegation of 40 witnesses representing 21 countries deployed in Egypt since mid-November, the statement added. Egypt’s two main Islamist parties have scored a crushing victory in the seats declared so far, reflecting a regional trend since Arab Spring uprisings overthrew authoritarian secular regimes. Asked about Islamists coming to power, Carter said: “I have no problem with that. The U.S. government has no problem with that either.”
An earlier post discussed conferences involving the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood that were financially supported by PaL-Tech, Inc., a Virginia consulting company that provides training services to U.S. Government locations around the world. PaL-Tech is headed by Omar Kader who is described by an online biography as first-generation Palestinian-American who was associated with Jimmy Carter as an election monitor overseas and who has served as the Executive Director of two major Arab-American organizations. Mr. Kader is also a board member of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), associated with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and which has long argued that that the U.S. government should support Islamist movements in foreign countries. CSID has received financial support from the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Institute of Peace.