The conversation at a Virginia hotel not far from Washington’s Reagan National Airport quickly grew heated as a group of influential Egyptians sought to convince a dozen Americans that the removal of elected president Mohammed Morsi in 2013 and his replacement by Field Marshal Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was a plus for Egypt’s political evolution and US interests.
Some members of the Egyptian delegation — invited to Washington by Hands Along the Nile Development Services, a group that promotes people-to-people ties with Egypt, and several US faith-based organizations — accused American think tank staff and human rights advocates of having a double standard for labeling the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president this year as a “revolution” but Morsi’s ouster a “coup.
