courtesy MEMRI-TV

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which last month listed President Mohamed Morsi and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as number one on its Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs, which was widely reported internationally, including in the Arab media, today called on the Obama Administration to link the consignment of F-16’s and other military hardware to Egypt, to a commitment by President Morsi to curb the vicious anti-Semitism, which both he and senior figures in the Muslim Brotherhood have publicly articulated.

"America must signal that it will not be business as usual with the government of the Arab world's largest and most powerful nation, while they continue to characterize Jews as 'descendants of apes and pigs', 'war mongers', and threaten anti-Semitic Jihads,” charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Founder and Dean and Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "Today Egypt is asking the U.S. and the international community for $12 billion to keep its ailing economy afloat.”

“Now is the time for American leadership to demand an end to Egypt’s public anti-Semitic posturing. The mainstreaming of Jew hatred in the Arab and Muslim world will not only end hopes for any Middle East peace deal, but puts Jews in jeopardy around the world," they added.

Center officials further pointed to the bitter irony of a dangerous double standard that is of Washington’s own making. “On the one hand it is apparently willing to reward an unrepentantly anti-Semitic government in Cairo, while at the same time it continues to refuse to use its clout to force Israel’s admission to the global anti-terrorism forum the U.S. itself launched in 2011.”

"It is past due for the Obama Administration to use its clout to demand full membership for America’s one reliable ally in the Middle East, whose experience and expertise in combatting terrorism is unparalleled,” Center officials concluded.

Also read related: SWC's Huffington Post op-ed,  Bigots Threaten to Push Us Off the Other Cliff  where, on January 10, 2013, Rabbi Cooper wrote, "... we look to President Obama to use his clout to demand that Morsi curb the hatred. For now, the Egyptian leader should be reminded he has 12 billion reasons to cooperate. That is the amount of aid he is asking from the United States, the World Bank and the European Union to help prop up his nation's ailing economy."