US media is reporting that Mohamed Soltan, the son of the notorious anti-Semite and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood figure Salah Soltan, has been meeting at the ‘White House and State Department following his release from an Egyptian prison. According to the New York Times report:
Mohamed Soltan knew he had one thing going for him when the Egyptian police came to his door: He was a United States citizen, raised primarily in Ohio.
It did not mean much in the moment. The police had come looking for his father, Salah Soltan, an outspoken member of the Muslim Brotherhood. But when they found only Mohamed Soltan and three friends, the police arrested them instead, along with tens of thousands of others thought to be Islamists or liberal dissidents who were rounded up after the military takeover here two years ago.
But his American citizenship helped embolden Mr Soltan, then 25, to carry out a hunger strike for 16 of his 21 months in prison, shedding more than 160 of the original 272 pounds on his 5-foot-11-inch frame and risking organ failure in the belief that the United States government might come to his aid.
His citizenship brought special torments from jailers seeking to break him, like when he was locked in a room overnight with a dying man screaming in pain and then left alone with the corpse for most of the next day.
And his citizenship is also what finally secured his deportation home to the United States, on May 30, thanks to pressure from the White House, Mr Soltan and American diplomats say.
Now Mr Soltan is trying to parlay his ordeal into a new role as an advocate for the tens of thousands of Islamists, leftists and liberals still languishing in Egyptian prisons.
In recent meetings at the White House and the State Department, Mr Soltan has cited his unique experiences as both a child of the American Midwest and a political prisoner in Cairo to argue that Egypt’s mass incarcerations are hurting Washington’s interests, by radicalising previously non-violent youth into anti-American militants.
‘I was fortunate enough to have had the experience of freedom and democracy here in the United States, so I was able to translate my anger into the hunger strike,’ Mr Soltan said in a telephone interview from Washington. But tens of thousands of other young inmates ‘are more likely to go the other way.’”
Read the rest here.
The GMBDW reported in May that Mohamed Soltan had been released from a prison in Egypt and was returning to the United States.
Although some news reports identify Mohamed Soltan as the son of Salah Soltan, most of the mainstream reporting fails to make this identification and none that we reviewed delved either into his father’s background nor that of Mohamed Soltan himself. As we have frequently reported here, Salah Soltan (aka Sultan) is a notorious anti-Semite who is close to Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and is or was a member of several important US and European Muslim Brotherhood organizations. Although as reported, his family is denying that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a US blog has documented Mohamed Soltan’s support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood while he was living in the US including a beaming photograph of him together with his father and Qaradawi. In April 2014, we reported on a demonstration held by the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in support of Mohamed Soltan.
(NOTE: The GMBDW presents the above information on Mohamed Soltan for purposes of context and not to endorse or approve of any ill-treatment he may or may not have received as the hands of the Egyptian authorities.)
