Sun 15 September 2019:
US President Donald Trump yelled out “where’s my favourite dictator” at the G7 summit, when he was waiting for Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to arrive at a meeting.
Trump stunned a diplomatic delegation at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz for last month’s G7 meeting in France last month with the comment, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Sources told the financial daily that he made the comment in a loud voice which was heard by several people in the gathering of Egyptian and American officials.
Trump has voiced support for Sisi, the former general who rolled back a democracy in Egypt in 2013 and unleashed a brutal police state that has jailed all critics of his regime – from leftists to Islamists.
Sisi also oversaw the brutal suppression of two sit-in camps in 2013, leading to the killing of around 1,000 protests and has jailed tens of thousands of suspected critics without trial in horrific conditions.
Despite Sisi’s abysmal human rights record, Trump since becoming president in 2017 has voiced strong support for the Egyptian dictator.
“We understood each other very well. He’s a very tough man, I will tell you that,” Trump said.
“But he’s also a good man, and he’s done a fantastic job in Egypt. Not easy.”
“Egypt has made tremendous progress under a great leader’s leadership. It’s what it’s all about. And your staff also, who I’ve gotten to know – fantastic people. So I want to thank you and I want to congratulate you.”
Human Rights Watch has condemned the decision by France to invite Sisi to the G-7 summit.
“It was a striking choice for France to invite Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi to attend the 24-26 August G7 summit in Biarritz, for which the chosen theme is ‘the fight against inequality,'” the group said in a statement.
“The number of Egyptians under the poverty line has clearly risen according to official Egyptian 2018 statistics, while the World Bank estimates that ‘some 60 percent of Egypt’s population is either poor or vulnerable’ in 2019″.
But an explosive expose into the inner-workings of the White House by Bob Woodward claims that Trump compared the experience of speaking to Sisi as “like a kick in the n*ts” and referred to the Egyptian president as a “f***ing killer”.
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