January 4, 2013

(JTA) — In 2010, Mohamed Morsi, now Egypt’s president, called Israelis “descendants of apes and pigs” and said peace talks with Zionists were a waste of time.

Morsi’s statements were presented in a compilation prepared this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and posted on the institute’s website. It shows parts of interviews Morsi gave that were disseminated or broadcast by Lebanon’s Al-Quds TV.

“Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war,” Morsi is seen saying on one video. “This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”

Last August, Morsi, who became president last June, told Reuters that Egypt would honor the international treaties it has signed, a statement construed as a pledge to preserve Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. 

In the 2010 interview, Morsi is seen saying that peace talks “are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion.”

He also said, “Resistance should be the practice of the Muslims and the Arabs outside Palestine. They should support the resistance fighters and besiege the Zionist wherever they are. None of the Arab or Muslim peoples and regimes should have dealings with them.” 

In the televised interview, he said: “The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine. There is no place for them on the land of Palestine. What they took before 1947-8 constitutes plundering.”

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