Congressman Louie Gohmert Fueling Anti-Americanism?

by Stuart Shapiro

Suffice to say we are not very popular in Egypt right now.  Remarkably, some supporting the recent military coup are arguing that we are in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood in trying to undermine the country.  Ridiculous, right?  Well Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) has been making this accusation for a year and it may be resonating halfway around the globe:

“I guarantee you nobody in Egypt really knows who Louie Gohmert is or what he’s about. So they could very well point to this and say ‘Look! He’s a member of Congress. This must be serious. There must be something to it,’” said Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It doesn’t help in a political environment where everyone is already angry at us to be fueling conspiracy theories against us. In that way it enables an overall level of hostility toward the U.S.”

Shadi Hamid, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, conceded that he hadn’t even heard of Gohmert until TPM reached out to him. “As for the role it plays,” Hamid said, “look, this does provide real ammunition to the conspiracy theorists when you have American sources seemingly verifying what they are saying.”

So while we may laugh at Gohmert when he makes comments like this, we need to remember that words like this can matter.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.