A prominent Egyptian editor has threatened that Americans could be slaughtered in the streets in an extreme example of the growing xenophobic rhetoric by media outlets who back the country’s army chief, General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.
Speaking on a major TV talkshow, Mostafa Bakry speculated that the US government planned to assassinate Sisi, who ousted Egypt‘s first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, last July after mass protests against his one-year rule.
Bakry’s comments come as the US is reportedly poised to unfreeze millions of dollars in aid to Egypt after the successful completion of a referendum on a new constitution, and follow praise of Egypt’s post-Morsi transition by US the secretary of state, John Kerry.
“There is a plot to kill General Sisi, and the security services know it well,” said Bakry – a pro-regime journalist known for his provocative behavior – on a major television talkshow. He then suggested that a similar US-backed plot had led to the assassination of Pakistani politician, Benazir Bhutto.
Such a scenario would lead the Egyptian people to rise up in a “revolution to kill the Americans in the streets,” he said.
Warning the US president, Barack Obama, and his “puppets,” Bakry cautioned that “we will enter their houses, and we will kill them one by one”.
Egypt’s flagship state newspaper, al-Ahram, has several times in recent months used its front page to air claims that the US government has joined forces with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood to divide up Egypt into smaller countries, and to spread chaos within its borders.
The Brotherhood also often uses xenophobic rhetoric to smear its opponents. In its propaganda, the US is conversely portrayed as both a supporter and instigator of Morsi’s overthrow.
_____________________________________