Gingrich derides trial of Egypt NGO workers“This is intolerable. This resembles Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis.”

Gingrich derides trial of Egypt NGO workers“This is intolerable.This resembles Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis.”.(AlArabiya).White House hopeful Newt Gingrich likened Cairo’s apparent plans to put 19 Americans on trial over charges of illegal funding of aid groups to the Iran hostage crisis, as an Egyptian military delegation abruptly cancelled its scheduled meetings with U.S. lawmakers in Washington.“The Obama administration is appeasing the elements that oppose us,” Gingrich said, deriding the Arab Spring for bringing “radical” Islamists to power in Egypt after the overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak. “In Egypt you now have Americans being held hostage,” told a rally in Minneapolis ahead of Republican nominating caucuses there Tuesday, according to AFP.“This is intolerable. This resembles Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis.”
Some 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days after the U.S. embassy in Tehran was stormed and occupied during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
The crisis undermined the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and the hostages were not released until moments after President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, was inaugurated.
Gingrich, who often compares himself on the campaign trail to Reagan, said Obama’s foreign policy mirrored Carter’s “weakness.”“If I were president, the message to the Egyptian government this evening would be quiet, firm, unequivocal; and I suspect that by sometime tomorrow morning all the hostages would be on an airplane coming home,” the former House speaker said.
Meanwhile, an Egyptian military delegation abruptly cancelled its meetings with U.S. lawmakers to return to Cairo on Monday after warnings from both Congress and the White House that Egypt’s crackdown on NGOs could threaten the annual U.S. military aid.
A spokesman for the Egyptian Embassy confirmed that the delegation had cancelled its meetings this week with U.S. lawmakers, but gave no reason, according to Reuters.
The U.S. senator who wrote the conditions placed on U.S. military aid to Egypt this year warned that “things will be a lot worse” for Egypt when Congress makes aid decisions for 2013 if Cairo does not demonstrate a commitment to democracy.
Senator Patrick Leahy, Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign aid subcommittee, suggested that he would not favor continuing U.S. military aid to Egypt, even with conditions, if it continued its crackdown on local and U.S.-funded pro-democracy groups.
“I’m not going to ... say, keep on funding this, funding money that reflects the assumption that they are committed to democracy, if they are not,” Leahy told Reuters at the Senate.Leahy said he had to “really fight the administration” of President Obama to get those conditions placed on the aid for fiscal 2012, which began last October and ends Sept. 1.“Now everybody is glad it was done that way because it gives us, to the extent we have any leverage, that's where the leverage is,” Leahy told Reuters.Read the full story here.