Cairo embassy calls out Muslim Brotherhood on Twitter

The U.S. embassy in Cairo used Twitter to snap at the official account representing the Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday in the midst of ongoing tensions in the region.

The Muslim Brotherhood used their English account to express sympathy for the staff of the Cairo embassy in a tweet that quoted the group's deputy head, Khairat El-Shater, saying that he hopes the relationship between the United States and Egypt can recover from the “turbulence” of events on Tuesday, which included a protest mob storming the embassy and burning the American flag.

The account bio reads: “Our Tweets represent the official opinions of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The embassy’s official Twitter account shot back a terse reminder that embassy staff also monitors the Arabic accounts representing the Brotherhood.

Ahram Online, the English website of an Egyptian daily newspaper, reported that the Brotherhood's Arabic-language Twitter account and official website at the same time were praising the protests under the headline “Egyptians rise to defend the Prophet.”

The Brotherhood’s English Twitter feed responded to the embassy that they needed more specifics about “exactly the Arabic feed of concern.”

.@ikhwanweb Thanks. By the way, have you checked out your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those too.

— US Embassy Cairo (@USEmbassyCairo) September 13, 2012

.@usembassycairo we understand you're under a lot of stress, but it will be more helpful if you point out exactly the Arabic feed of concern

— Ikhwanweb (@Ikhwanweb) September 13, 2012

The embassy has not continued the conversation, but a subsequent tweet noted several hours later, in response to questions over the Twitter scrap, that the exchange has not been taken down. The Brotherhood responded to questions about the Arabic headlines by tweeting: "We condemned both movie as well as violent protesting in all our statements Arabic & English, but ppl [have right] to peacefully protest."

The movie referenced, an anti-Islam film posted to YouTube, has been implicated as one trigger for the protests on Tuesday.

Embassy staff and the management of the official Twitter feed have been at the center of a diplomatic crisis since the release of a controversial statement ahead of protesters storming the embassy on Tuesday.

According to Foreign Policy magazine, Larry Schwartz, a senior public affairs officer at the Cairo embassy, oversees the embassy’s Twitter feed.

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