US media is reporting that according to a US State Department spokesman, the recent Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood delegation to the United States had their trip organized and funded by Georgetown University. According to a Breitbart report:
January 30, 2015 An official U.S. State Department transcript revealed that Georgetown University had ‘organized and funded’ a recent trip for members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to the United States.
While in the United States, the Brotherhood operatives met with top State Department officials in the Obama administration.
A reporter asked State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, ‘Members of Muslim Brothers were in town, and few days ago they met – had meetings in this building. Do you have any like – any details about the meeting, the nature of the meeting, the purpose of the meeting, and whom they met?’
Psaki responded:
Well, State Department officials meet – recently met with a group of visiting Egyptian former parliamentarians whose visit to the United States was organized and funded by Georgetown University. Such meetings are fairly routine at the State Department, where we regularly meet with political party leaders from across the world. The Georgetown group included former members of the Freedom and Justice Party (Muslim Brotherhood), among others. So this was a meeting – we meet on a regular basis with a range of groups, and obviously, as I mentioned, this was a group sponsored by Georgetown.
Psaki added that the meeting between the Muslim Brotherhood officials and Obama administration officials ‘was attended by a deputy assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor, and other State Department officials.’”
Read the rest here
The GMBDW reported last week that the State Department had hosted an Egyptian Brotherhood delegation for a meeting to discuss their efforts to oppose the current government in Egypt. As that post pointed out, another event was held and hosted by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) at which the Brotherhood delegation also appeared. As our profile on CSID explains, the organization was founded in 1998 in what appears to have been a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign affairs analyst” and who has at least a dozen past or present affiliations with global Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas organizations.
For a profile on John Esposito, go here.