CNN and the Washington Post published over the weekend separate interviews with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi conducted during his trip to New York last week. CNN posted El Sisi’s interview with Erin Burnett in two parts; the first features his comments on meeting with US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which CNN already provided a preview of last week and which we noted in Thursday’s issue. It also includes El Sisi’s diplomatic response as to whether the US is providing enough aid to fight Daesh, as well as Egypt’s progress on economic reforms.

In part two, Burnett asks El Sisi if Egypt is safe enough for tourists to visit, to which he replied in the affirmative and invited all interested state parties to send security delegations to inspect Egypt’s airports. El Sisi also called on social media websites to step up their efforts in helping combat terror recruitment online. In response to Burnett’s question on the debate in the United States on the use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” which US President Barack Obama and others have said are unhelpful terms to use in framing the fight against terror, while Republicans including Donald Trump have insisted on its use as being an important first step in diagnosing the problem. El Sisi affirmed it is fair to use to use such labels, and while this may seem to be a break from previously outlined style guide issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2015 advising against the use of such terminology, El Sisi framed the issue in the context of reforming religious discourse, a point which he has spoken on a number of times over the past few years.

• Part one of CNN’s interview — Egypt president: No doubt Trump would be a strong leader, 8:05
• Part two of CNN’s interview — Egypt president: It’s safe for tourists to visit,11:43

The Washington Post’s foreign affairs opinion columnist David Ignatius sat down for separate interviews with El Sisi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani which Ignatius has rolled into one piece titled, oddly enough, ‘Egypt and Iran have the same problem — and the same answer.’ That problem, as Ignatius sees it, is domestic security, as defined by domestic stability with an eye on the economic demands of each respective country’s peoples as well as the threat from terrorism. The solution, as Ignatius sees it, is that “neither country will grow and prosper without more freedom to empower its citizens.”