Ivanka Trump, daughter of the US president and wife of Middle East “expert” Jared Kushner tweeted praise, encouragement and support for Egypt's 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 chancejust four days after Ivanka’s tweet Sisi was in Washington to meet with her father.
Sisi’s speech on Women’s Day, the Egyptian president promised to protect Egyptian women from physical violence, help them achieve “greater participation” in the labour market and “technological empowerment”. He ended with the words: “Egypt is in the process of building its renaissance and it is in need of the efforts of its daughters, side by side with its sons.
The Sisi speech was obviously good reading in the White House office where The Ivanka decides policy. It was, she enthused, “important” because it called “for major reforms aimed at empowering Egyptian women”. And she added: “We look forward to working with the Egyptian government to advance these efforts.”
Last year’s Human Rights Watch report on Egypt, which pointed out “the [Egyptian] government has failed to adequately protect women and girls from sexual and gender-based violence and, in some cases, even punished them for speaking out .On May 9, activist Amal Fathy posted a video on her Facebook page in which she criticised the government’s failure to protect women. The next day, pro-government and state-owned media outlets initiated a smear campaign against Fathy and then on May 11 authorities arrested her.”
Six months ago, a Cairo criminal court sentenced her to two years imprisonment for “publishing false news”. Other women’s rights groups and their leaders – Mozn Hassan and Azza Soliman – await trial for their activism. Not a smidgeon of information about 69 Egyptian women arrested because they had demonstrated peacefully or were women rights activists or wives of detainees. Not a word about more than 150 women on “terrorist lists” up to the end of last year, nor 500 Egyptian female students chucked out of their universities for political reasons. And no institutional memory on Ivanka’s part, no little history book recalling for her how Sisi’s army forcibly conducted virginity tests on young women during the Tahrir demonstrations in 2011.
Note that Ivanka did not look forward to “working with the Egyptian government” to open its prisons and release the 60,000 political prisoners held there. Did Sisi not tell American television audiences two months ago that there were no political prisoners in Egypt? No torture; no police beatings and no rapings in police cells; no sexual abuse of women prisoners. Nope.
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