Sisi, Sisi, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!

Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el Sisi was on a state visit to Norway in the second week of December. There, he met with the Norwegian president, prime minister, and members of parliament.

He also met with the chairpersons of Norwegian companies operating in Egypt. A few days prior, he signed a declaration of strategic partnership between Egypt and Denmark.

Egypt Today reports that the declaration includes cooperation in a wide range of sectors, including “maritime transport, energy and green transition, health and scientific research, investment, agriculture, tourism, communication and Information technology, combating illegal migration and terrorism, and fighting poverty and desertification.”

Yet Sisi’s visit did not go uncommented by anti-genocide activists in Oslo. A group of activists demonstrated against Sisi, accusing him of being complicit in the genocide in Gaza and demanding that the border to Gaza be opened.

According to The New Arab Sisi and his delegation, upon seeing the protestors, were furious and offended but were “unable to blame the Norwegian authorities as their laws guarantee freedom of protest.”

The Egyptian military dictatorship under Sisi is, in fact, complicit in the genocide in Gaza by upholding the Rafah border of the concentration camp of Gaza and not allowing humanitarian aid to flow in directly, but also by upholding “peace” with the Zionist entity instead of aiding the Palestinian people.

Norway, which is not part of the EU, seems to be following the same interests as the EU, which has made multiple deals with Sisi in the past.

Western economic and political interests are the very foundation of the collaboration with dictatorships like Egypt. The talk of “human rights” is mere lip service, serving as a liberal facade for the brutal policies of “refugee containment” and condoning genocide.

While the EU currently supports the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the EU simultaneously fears a destabilization of the region that could lead to Palestinians fleeing to Europe. Israel continues to bomb Gaza, which has slaughtered over 45.000 Palestinian men, women, and children, while over one million people have sought refuge in Rafah on the border of Egypt.

The hypocrisy of the EU should come as no surprise. In its imperialist logic, the EU does not come to the only viable solution to stop the ongoing causes of destabilization: the end of all economic, political, and military support to the settler colony of Israel.

Instead, the EU, as it has done before, fortifies its borders to hinder those same refugees fleeing from the bombs that the EU member states themselves have delivered to Israel while simultaneously supporting the brutal military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el Sisi.