CAIRO, July 21 (IslamOnline.net) – Coming all the way from the United States to "investigate" whether human rights are being violated in Egypt, members of a US semi-official commission found themselves besieged by an avalanche of accusations starting from Abu Gharib abuses to the Secret Evidence law targeting Muslims in the States.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) asked Egyptian rights officials about how good human rights are being respected in the North African country.

The graphic pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees and unspeakable indiscrimination against Muslims in the US were the reply.

"They [the US commissioners] evaded the embarrassing experience by denouncing such human rights abuses and drawing up reports on them," Chairman of the Egyptian Human Rights Organization Hafez Abu Seda told IslamOnline.net Tuesday, July 20.

The USCIRF Commissioners include Felice D. Gear, vice chair; Bishop Ricardo Ramirez, Tad Stahnke, deputy director for policy; Dwight Bashir and Executive Director Joseph R. Crapa.

The USCIRF delegation is currently on a seven-day visit to Egypt for talks with officials, rights activists and Christian and Muslim leaders.

Akram El-Shaer, an Egyptian parliamentarian for the outlawed but officially-tolerated Muslim Brotherhood, was too frank in accusing the visiting delegation of having "malicious goals" during a meeting on Sunday.

Meeting them in his capacity as member of the People’s Assembly’s (lower house of parliament) Committee on Foreign Relations, Shaer put it bluntly that they "came to stoke up sectarian sedition between Muslims and Copts."

He said the unwelcome visit as a "blatant interference" in Egypt's home affairs.

"The US administration is oppressing its Christian citizens as they distinguish between natives and naturalized people," Shaer told the delegation.

"More and more, it gives an unfair treatment to the US Muslims, let alone its oppressing policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and a carte blanche for [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon to kill Palestinians," the lawmaker continued his diatribe in exclusive statements to IOL.

Asked by Gear whether his group tolerates the arrests of its members by Egyptian authorities, Shaer told her the group spurns foreign intervention in Egypt's affairs.

"We Egyptians are like one family, who can sort our problems out and strongly oppose solutions imposed from outside," he told Gear to her outrage.

Consolidating his position, Christian Munir Fakhri Abdul Nour, the representative of the opposition Al-Wafd party in the parliament, said national unity is the backbone of the Egyptian social fabric.

"No one in Egypt has complained about religious oppression and solutions should come from within," he told the dumbfounded commissioners.

Pope Shenouda III, Patriarch of Alexandria and Saint Mark Dioceses, has said he would not meet the delegation and assigned some of his aides to set with them.

Members of the parliament’s Committee on Foreign Relations further revealed to IOL that Gear has staunchly defended the Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"Gear labeled the legitimate Palestinian resistance as ‘terrorist’ and said that Israel has every right to defend itself no matter what it takes," they told IOL, requesting anonymity.

Gear is known for her pro-Israel stances ex officio as the Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights of the American Jewish Committee.

Egyptian newspapers, mainly opposition, hit out at the commission for paying undivided attention this year to Jews living in Egypt, Bahaists and homosexuals.

The commissioners initiated their visit, which started on Friday, July 16, with a visit to the Jewish synagogue in Cairo. They also visited another one in Alexandria on Tuesday and met with the 63-strong Jewish community in the country.

The commission will reportedly present the Egyptian government with a dossier on the Jewish properties in Egypt left in the wake of the 1948 war and the 1952 Revolution, with a recommendation to restore them.

The USCIRF was created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to give independent recommendations to the executive branch and the Congress.

It is a bipartisan federal commission that advises the President, Secretary of State, and Congress.

According to its advice, the State Department issues an annual report on international religious freedom worldwide.

Countries criticized by the report are designated by the Secretary of State (under authority delegated by the President) as "countries of particular concern."