Did a US report really applaud Sisi’s war on terror?

On May 16, a wave of virtually identical stories appeared in Egyptian newspapers, ranging from state-owned flagship Al-Ahram, privately owned Youm7 and the Wafd Party’s newspaper, Al-Wafd, each claiming that US-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation had published a lengthy report on Egypt’s war on terror. According to these stories, the report found that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind terror attacks in Sinai and that the Egyptian military had the support of the Egyptian people and had put Egypt back on the right course.

News of this report came as a surprise to The Jamestown Foundation, an organization based in Washington DC that produces publications focusing on terrorism and other global issues.

How the story spread

Although several publications, such as Al-Watan and Sada al-Balad, ran the story under reporters’ bylines, Al-Ahram and other sites make it clear that the story originated with official state news agency MENA.

The Jamestown Foundation’s board recently traveled to Egypt to meet with senior government officials, which appears to have put the foundation’s work on MENA’s radar. However, the foundation has not recently published any lengthy reports on Egypt’s war on terror.

The most likely source for the MENA story is a compilation of the foundation’s reports on Egypt, which was assembled May 5, but includes writings dating back as far as 2011. The compilation consists of 13 reports written by both independent scholars and analysts affiliated with the foundation.

Read extremely selectively and without attention to the context in which individual reports were written, the collection of briefings and situational analysis could, with a bit of imagination, be said to support most of the statements echoed by MENA.

For example, the most likely source of the assertion that the Armed Forces has the support of the Egyptian people is an August 2013 report by Jamestown Foundation fellow Michael W. S. Ryan. It mentions that opinion polls taken in late July and early August 2013 indicated that around 70 percent of the population supported the military at that time.

MENA appears to have taken that statement of fact to be the official opinion of The Jamestown Foundation at present.

Several of the reports are critical of elements of Egypt’s anti-terror strategy, noting the military's heavy-handed approach to dealing with Sinai residents and its tendency to propagate conspiracy theories to explain insurgent activity. Such passages did not make it into the MENA story.

In several cases, it appears that when reports contained excerpts of statements from the Egyptian military, or quotes from officers, MENA assumed that the foundation was endorsing those statements.

One report in the collection, however, did not require much embellishment. A December 2014 article by Adel al-Adawy, a UK-based graduate student who has penned pro-regime articles for a variety of publications and think tanks, does actually make several of the assertions reported by MENA.

For example, to construct his argument in support of the military, Adawy cites media reports alleging that the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas funded Sinai-based militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdes. Adawy also lauds the close cooperation between the military and intelligence services, as well as between the government and religious institutions. He concludes by saying the the international community “ought to fully support Egypt in its fight against terrorism.” All of these points were noted by MENA, perhaps justifiably.

Amusingly, most of the reports in the Jamestown Foundation compilation, including Adawy’s, rely heavily on local publications for their source material — in some cases, the exact same publications that went on to misrepresent the nature of the work.,