Elections

Hillary Says We ‘Can’t Cozy Up To Dictators,’ But She Had No Problem Calling Mubarak A Friend

REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh.

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Jonah Bennett Contributor
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Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton doesn’t want America getting friendly with dictators, except she’s really good at doing that.

Clinton tweeted Wednesday that, “We can’t cozy up to dictators; we have to stand up to them.” But in 2009 as secretary of state, she described authoritarian then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his wife as “friends of my family.”

Clinton’s tweet was a dig at Republican nominee Donald Trump, who is on his way to meet Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Both Trump and Nieto have exchanged insults.

Her tweet doesn’t seem cognizant of the fact that she described Mubarak — the brutal and iron-fisted president of Egypt — in the most endearing way possible.

Clinton was questioned in a March 2, 2009, interview about an annual Department of State report on human rights that blasted Egypt for serious abuses. She was asked whether that report had anything to do with a request that Mubarak visit the U.S.

“No. It’s an annual report,” Clinton said while in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt. “It is not in any way connected. We look forward to President Mubarak coming as soon as his schedule would permit. I had a wonderful time with him this morning. I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”

Mubrak ruled Egypt for almost three decades before his reign ended unceremoniously in 2011. While serving as “president,” he wielded virtually unlimited power, and was functionally equivalent to a dictator. He presided over political suppression and police brutality. While it doesn’t seem as though he personally tortured anyone, he simply handed that responsibility over to the Ministry of the Interior.

Clinton has exhibited this same sort of hypocrisy elsewhere, according to an exclusive investigative report by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock. Bill and Hillary Clinton have received a minimum of $100 million from Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These states have intimately been involved in perpetrating human rights abuses and atrocities. In particular, these states have run roughshod over basic labor rights. They highlight the tension between Hillary Clinton’s vocal support for female and LGBT rights on the one hand, and enthusiastic acceptance of funds from various Persian Gulf states engaged in the exact opposite on the other.

“The fruit of Clinton’s own policy basically empowered the old regimes,” Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and co-founder of the Muslim Reform movement, told TheDCNF in May.

“The ‘global establishment’ has suffocated the peoples of these countries for generations,” he added. “And Hillary Clinton is part of the global establishment of monarchs, autocrats and dictators.”

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