Hillary Rodham Clinton (EPA)
CHEAP SHOTS: Protesters show their show bottoms — a huge insult — yesterday near the US Consulate in Alexandria, where Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was speaking at a ceremony to mark its reopening (inset). (
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Now that’s a low blow!
A crowd of tomato-tossing Egyptians taunted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday with chants of “Monica, Monica.”
The jeers — a reference to the affair her husband, ex-President Bill Clinton, had with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — came as the secretary of state was visiting the newly reopened US Consulate in Alexandria.
The demonstrators also shouted, “Get out, Clinton,” and threw shoes and water bottles in addition to tomatoes at her motorcade.
While neither Clinton nor her vehicle — which were guarded by police in riot gear — were struck by the flying objects, an Egyptian official wasn’t as lucky.
The official was hit with a tomato in the face.
The protesters were angry over suspicions the United States helped the Muslim Brotherhood win recent elections in Egypt.
A day earlier, angry crowds had gathered outside her hotel.
“I want to be clear that the United States is not in the business in Egypt of choosing winners and losers, even if we could, which, of course, we cannot,” she said yesterday.
“We are prepared to work with you as you chart your course, as you establish your democracy,”
Clinton said the United States wanted to back a “real democracy” in which “no group or faction or leader can impose their will, their ideology, their religion, their desires on anyone else.”
Clinton also met with groups of women and Christians who fear they will be relegated to second-class status during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood.
America’s top diplomat was in Alexandria to mark the reopening of the consulate.
The consulate was closed in 1993 because of budget problems, but it has been reopened to boost the economy in the critical port city.
Clinton met on Saturday with newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, who is battling the military for control of the country.
His powers had been limited by the military days before he took office, and Morsi responded by reinstating an Islamist-dominated parliament that the army had disbanded.
Clinton met yesterday with Egypt’s top general, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, to discuss the issues. She then flew to Israel for top-level talks on Iran’s nuclear program and the Palestinian peace process.