After 16 Egyptian security officers were killed Sunday at a border checkpoint, the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t hesitate to point its finger at Israel. From the BBC:
A statement on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website said the incident “can be attributed to the Mossad”.
It said Israel had carried out the attack in an attempt to undermine the government of Egypt’s Islamist President, Mohammed Mursi.
The allegation was echoed by Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that governs Gaza.
“Israel is responsible, one way or another, for this attack to embarrass Egypt’s leadership and create new problems at the border in order to ruin efforts to end the [Israeli] siege of the Gaza Strip,” the group’s prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, was quoted saying by the Reuters news agency…
Israel quite firmly called the accusations “nonsense.”
Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, denied the accusation, saying: “Even the person who says this when he looks at himself in the mirror does not believe the nonsense he is uttering”.
From time to time, the Brotherhood feels the need to burnish its anti-Israel credentials. It has accused unnamed saboteurs of attempting to undercut the new Islamic government and has suggested that Egypt reconsider its truce with Israel. This latest incident provided another opportunity to claim that Israel wants to undermine Egypt’s new president, a former Brother, before he has time to settle in.
The perpetrators of the border attack remain unnamed and unaffiliated, but their deaths quickly became a rallying cry for Egypt’s anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters.
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