A report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) is highly critical of EU aid spending to promote key areas of governance in Egypt in the periods before and after the Uprising of January 2011. “The ‘softly softly’ approach has not worked, and the time has come for a more focused approach which will produce meaningful results and guarantee better value for the European taxpayers’ money” stated Mr Karel Pinxten, the ECA member responsible for the report.

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Here is what I wrote in October 2010. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad al-Badi, had just given a sermon calling for the overthrow of Egypt’s government, which happened four months later, and a jihad against the United States, a country he considered weak, foolish, and retreating from the Middle East. I declared that this was:

WASHINGTON, June 17, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Coptic Solidarity is taking up a critical issue this week through hosting their fourth annual conference titled To What Extent Will the U.S. and the International Community Support an Islamist Government in Egypt? This timely topic follows on the heels of the unprecedented attack on the Coptic Papal seat at St. Mark's earlier this year as well as continued systematic discrimination and persecution of Egypt's Coptic minority.

Two weeks ago in Egypt, a Coptic Christian man named Milad living in Tanta in northern Egypt submitted a formal complaint to authorities, saying that “unknown persons” invited him and his family to renounce Christianity and submit to Islam and convert.

On Tuesday, I visited a bakery in Cairo’s dirt-poor Imbaba neighborhood, where I watched a scrum of men, women and children jostling to get bread. You have to get there early, because the baker makes only so many subsidized pita loaves; he sells the rest of his government-subsidized flour on the black market to private bakers who charge five times the official price.