Unfortunately, Lily Brull (responding to my 9/7/12 letter in the AJP, “No $1.5B to Muslim Brotherhood”) is off the mark (“Miller got it right on $1.5B for Muslim Brotherhood,” 9/21/12). It’s not the amount of money that’s at issue. What I object to is her characterizations of the identity of the donor and especially of the recipient.
When we provide billions in foreign assistance to Israel, for example, do we consider that a gift to Likud? Of course not; it’s government-to-government aid. What Brull and Ken Miller refer to is a loan to the government of Egypt — and it continues a decades-long, bipartisan tradition of providing assistance to Egypt as well as to Israel. To refer to these transfers as “gifts to the Muslim Brotherhood” from President Obama implies that Mr. Obama is supporting an Islamic fundamentalist agenda. This is a deliberately misleading assertion meant to alienate Jewish voters by portraying the president as a weak supporter of Israel.
— Robert Varady
