Regret this

We’ve been following the Egyptian government’s harassment of Bassem Youssef, the Arab world’s most popular television comedian, “for the supposedly criminal use of satire in jokes about President Mohamed Morsi and his Islamist political party,” as Robert Mackey and Kareem Fahim put it in this New York Times post. We posted the video of Jon Stewart’s critique of the Morsi government here. In an update Mackey and Fahim posted a tweet addressed to the American embassy, the Daily Show and Youseff himself expressing the displeasure of the Egyptian government in the U.S. embassy’s tweet of a link to the Stewart video: “It’s inappropriate for a diplomatic mission to engage in such negative political propaganda.”

The U.S. embassy has now scrubbed the Daily Show link from its Twitter feed, as Mackey and a colleague noted here. And that’s not all. Here’s the rest of the story:

We have to take Morsi’s word for it at this point, but the circumstantial evidence tends to support Morsi’s crowing.

Via Andrew Johnson/NRO.

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