Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Ivanka Trump, daughter of the US president and wife of Middle East “expertâ€Â Jared Kushner – he who has supposedly produced a Middle East “peace planâ€Â to be revealed after Benjamin Netanyahu wins the Israeli elections – has just given her support to a regime which has locked up women political prisoners, “disappearedâ€Â others, and whose army forcibly carried out virginity tests on female protesters during the Tahrir Square revolution. Well, what more do you expect from the Trump menagerie?
Her tweeted praise, encouragement and support went to Egypt – and especially to its president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who gained a presidential victory last year with the support of 97.08 per cent of the Egyptian electorate. Ivanka obviously drew the necessary conclusions: this was a free and fair election and showed only how much President Sisi’s people loved him after his military coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president in 2013. By extraordinary chance, the very same Sisi (just four days after Ivanka’s tweet) is in Washington today – yes, today: Tuesday – to meet with her father, Donald Trump.
And why should she not have tweeted forth, when she had read Sisi’s speech on Women’s Day, in which the Egyptian president promised to protect Egyptian women from physical violence, help them achieve “greater participation†in the labour market and “technological empowermentâ€. He ended with the…