The US government “strongly condemned” on Tuesday remarks reportedly made by President Mohamad Mursi, almost three years ago when he was a Muslim Brotherhood leader, over Jews, saying the Egyptian leader should repudiate his comme

The US government “strongly condemned” on Tuesday remarks reportedly made by President Mohamad Mursi, almost three years ago when he was a Muslim Brotherhood leader, over Jews, saying the Egyptian leader should repudiate his comments.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that the language Mursi used was "deeply offensive" and that U.S. officials had raised concerns with the Egyptian government on the matter.

According to a video obtained by the New York Times, Mursi urged Egyptians in the year of 2010 to "nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred" for Jews and Zionists.
In a television interview months later, he described Zionists as "these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs," the newspaper said.

"We completely reject these statements, as we do any language that espouses religious hatred," Carney said when asked about Mursi's comments at the White House daily briefing.

Carney called on Mursi, elected in June after a popular uprising that ousted Egypt's longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak, to "make clear that he respects people of all faiths and that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable or productive in a democratic Egypt."

He noted, however, that Mursi, as president, had worked with the Obama administration to help broker an Israeli-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza late last year and had promised to uphold Egypt's peace treaty witthe Zionist entity.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters: "We'll also judge him by what he says, and we think that these comments should be repudiated and they should be repudiated firmly."