President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi will be travelling to New York to attend the UN General Assembly meeting, where he will also meet with a number of heads of state, most notably US President Barack Obama. This will be the Egyptian president's first public international appearance after his first 100 days in office. What message will he take to world leaders? Al-Sisi's very presence in that assembly of nations conveys to the entire world an affirmation of the birth of a new Egypt, one that is different from the Egypt under the inept Muslim Brotherhood regime. Standing at Egypt's helm today is a representative of the most competent institution of the Egyptian state. He will be setting off to that international forum with some major accomplishments under his belt. Not only has he rid the country of a regime that was universally rejected by the Egyptian people he took the difficult decisions that had long been needed to reform the tattered economy, drained for decades by a wasteful subsidy system that failed to support the intended beneficiaries. He then opened the horizons to a number of megaprojects that promise to alter Egypt's economic and demographic face. This new Egypt not only differs from the Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, whose dismal performance no one in the world can defend. It is also different from the Egypt of the post-25 January Revolution period in which confusion and disorder prevailed due to a lack of vision and the general loss of a sense of direction. President Al-Sisi has already had one-to-one meetings with a number of foreign leaders. His visit to the UN will be his first major encounter with the international community. This will not be an occasion to bring Egypt to task for its political performance over the past year, as no one has the right to do this. On the contrary, it will be an occasion to remind other nations of their responsibilities. Since the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood regime, we have suffered considerably at the hands of those who call themselves our friends. At first they urged us to reinstate the Muslim Brotherhood regime on the grounds of its ostensible legitimacy. They finally abandoned these efforts when faced with the Egyptian people's total rejection of that legitimacy, which had collapsed. Today, those friends have begun to prevail upon us to reconcile with the Muslim Brotherhood, which opted for terrorism rather than the political process. Yet none of those friends ever suggested a similar course in the cases of the terrorism they confronted in their own countries. The Egypt that the international community will meet when the new General Assembly session convenes is the Egypt that has overcome all those difficulties. It is the Egypt of legitimacy grounded in the will of its people, a democratic Egypt that has chosen the path of free elections, an Egypt that is confident as it pits all its might against a diabolical foe, an Egypt of the future that is building prosperity for its people. This is the Egypt that will be represented by its upstanding citizen, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, at the podium of the UN General Assembly. Its true friends are those who support Egypt's new era. Al-Sisi's visit to New York will be a means to sort friend from foe.
