Mohamed ElBaradei. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Egypt’s interim president, Adly Mansour, on Tuesday appointed Mohamed ElBaradei as the country’s interim vice president. ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been accused of exhibiting an overly lenient attitude about Iran’s nuclear program as well as anti-Israel bias.

“For many years he was very comfortable for the Iranians, and without this softness I don’t think the Iranians would be where they are today [regarding their nuclear program],” former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Itamar Rabinovich told Israel Radio, according to theJerusalem Post .

After Syria’s nuclear plant was attacked in 2007, ElBaradei insisted on publicly censuring Israel as the orchestrator of the attack and accused the Jewish state of taking “the law into their own hands.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry released a statement calling on ElBaradei, then the IAEA director-general, “to prevent political bias in the investigation into Syria’s covert nuclear activities.”

In 2011, when ElBaradei announced intentions to run for the Egyptian presidency, he said Egypt “would declare war against the Zionist regime” if the IDF attacked Gaza, according to Yedioth Achronoth.