During a with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi made a false claim that Jews have never been persecuted in Egypt, despite the nation’s dwindled Jewish population now numbering in the single digits.
"You spoke about the crisis, and you spoke as a Jewish person,” Sisi said to Blinken via an interpreter.
“I am an Egyptian citizen, and I was born and brought up in a neighborhood where we had Jewish neighbors,” Sisi said. “And Jews who used to live here in Egypt [had] not ever suffered from oppression and persecution.”
The Jewish secretary of State met with Sisi as part of a diplomatic visit to Cairo to rally support for Israel following Hamas’ attack last week. Blinken has been vocal about his Judaism, referring to his family’s history of surviving the Holocaust as helping to shape his responsibility to preserving human rights.
