Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Tex.) ripped the Obama administration Thursday for the news that it was going ahead with delivering F-16 fighter jets and other weaponry to Egypt, whose president Mohamed Morsi has been recording making harshly anti-Semitic comments.
Gohmert said the deal would reportedly give Egypt more of the state-of-the-art fighter jets than Israel, which he called "insane."
The deal that includes 16 F-16s and 200 Abrams tanks was struck in 2010 with former president Hosni Mubarak, and Gohmert and others said the deal should have been re-considered in light of Morsi's past anti-Israeli rhetoric.
"As a West African told me when I was over there a couple years ago, he said, 'We were so excited when you elected a black president,'" Gohmert said. "'But please, tell people in Washington, stop getting weaker. The world sees you getting weaker! Don't do that. You put us in jeopardy.' We're putting ourselves in jeopardy when we're sending jets and tanks to a leader whose only two enemies, he said in the past, are Israel and the United States."
The Free Beacon reported that the State Department maintained in a January 8 letter to Inhofe that the arming of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood serves the U.S.’s "regional security interests."