Ahmed Ezz al-Arab denies the Holocaust, thinks Anne Frank's diary is a fake, and has some bizarre theories about Jews burying Babylonian treasures on Temple Mount. Why should we pay attention to this crackpot? Because al-Arab is a leader of the 'secular, liberal' Wafd party, Egypt's oldest and the second most influential after the Muslim Brotherhood. The Jerusalem Post has this report:
“The Holocaust is a lie,” Ahmed Ezz el-Arab told The Washington Times in an interview.
“The Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?” Ezz el-Arab said he accepted that the Germans had killed “hundreds of thousands” of Jews, “but gas chambers and skinning them alive and all this? Fanciful stories.”
Ezz el-Arab dismissed The Diary of Anne Frank, which he said he studied as a doctoral student in Sweden, as a forgery.
“I could swear to God it’s a fake,” he said. “The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”
The deputy chairman also questioned the accepted account of the September 11 attacks. Osama bin Laden “could not have the know-how or the ability to do it,” he said, calling the al-Qaida leader “an American agent."
“If he had the ability, one plane only landing on the Knesset would give more effect,” he said, naming the Mossad, CIA and America’s “military-industrial complex” as the actual perpetrators of the terrorist attacks.
Continuing the bizarre tirade, Ezz el-Arab said American soldiers “with double Israeli nationality and Jewish religion” stole Jewish antiquities from the Babylonian exile period and reburied them in Jerusalem to cement their historical claim on the city.
“It’s not a kind of monument robbery for selling in the black market,” he said. “The things they took from Babel, they took with the intention – to my judgment – of digging it under the Aksa Mosque so that when it’s discovered, they say, ‘Here was the temple.’“ Mubarak’s ouster has stoked concerns in Israel that the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty could be abrogated. Ezz el- Arab, who chairs Wafd’s foreign relations committee, said there was “no chance at all” of that happening. “Egypt will not go to war unless it’s attacked,” he said.
The interview was conducted on the sidelines of the “First Annual Conference on Democracy and Human Rights,” hosted in Budapest late last month by the Tom Lantos Institute and Center for Democratic Transition. Lantos, a longtime Democratic congressman from California who died in 2008, survived a forced-labor camp in his native Hungary and lost his mother and other family members to the Nazi occupation.
Approximately 450,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Ezz-el Arab identified with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, which he said was founded on antipathy toward Israel.
“He’s a hateful character, so whatever he says can be criticized,” the Wafd leader said.
“[Nevertheless], what he says about the Holocaust is true, but he doesn’t say it because it’s true. He says it out of hatred to the Israeli state.”
Iran – with which Egypt recently reinstated ties – hosted a Holocaust-denial conference in 2006 to protest the ban in many European countries on questioning the Nazi genocide.
“It’s a shame that the West – the cradle of liberalism – should have a criminal law incriminating any discussion of any historical fact,” Ezz el-Arab said. “It’s a sacred cow. The ‘Six Million’ is a sacred cow.”
A former Wafd youth leader told the newspaper that while Ezz el-Arab himself does not have a major constituency in Egypt or within the party itself, his views on the Holocaust are common.
“The vast majority of Egyptians think the Holocaust never happened,” Amr Bargisi said. “The fact that [Ezz el- Arab’s] presence in the party hierarchy hasn’t caused any objections tells you something about the farcical nature of Egyptian politics.”
The Wafd Party is one of Egypt’s oldest, established in 1919 and disbanded after the 1952 military coup that ended monarchic rule. The party was reestablished in 1983 under reforms Mubarak set in place to allow nominal opposition to the decades-long rule of the National Democratic Party.
Today – espousing a secular nationalist platform based on multi-party governance and human rights and featuring a cross and an Islamic crescent on its logo – it arguably represents the country’s most influential political bloc after the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.
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Israel and the Jewish people everywhere will have to ready themselves with a much rocky and bumpy road ahead with these so-called Arab spring revolutions when it comes to dealing with the state of Israel and Judaism. I have predicted much earlier in one of my blog entries that these are not revolutions in par with the Europeans ones battling both the hegemonic powers of the soviet iron curtain, or the dormant fascist states of Spain and Portugal and one may add the military junta of Greece, and to a lesser extent the late country of Iran (this case in an anomaly). These Arab spring revolutions should have been labeled winter or dark revolutions because they are anti-revolutions, in a sense that if more changes are anticipated and pushed forward, the more socially regressive they will become. This is a bit like what Iran has experienced in 1978.
ReplyDeleteAny type of democracy inroads that will be taken by the currently corrupt and failed Arab states will eventually have to confront their slumbering demons of Muslim anti-Semitism. Make no mistakes that even the more liberal and open political parties will have to align themselves with the anti-Jewish undercurrents deeply rooted in Muslim theology. The so-called Palestinian problem is only a fuelling rod to the fire of destruction and chaos.
It reminds me of the gaffe that the newly ushered and supposedly liberal and realist Egyptian TV channel called "Faraeen" made, when two years ago they started to dig and discuss the protocols of elders of Zion as a book of facts beyond any doubt. This happened all of the sudden after much optimism and cheers about their critical approach in discussing major problems plaguing Arab and Islamic cultures, from polygamy, treatment of women, child abuse (child marriage), female circumcision, and even the treatment of Dhimmis like Copts. They even went after corruption, freedom of expression and cult of personality and whole host of social and political issues.
The sudden turn in anti-Jewish programing was a shock to many liberal Egyptians. And this did not go un-noticed by the MEMRI group, which voiced its complaints. Faraeen's response was that.. "the Jews of the Arab countries are the "truly" Semitic people, thus "true Jews" and are our cousins and brothers in arms, but the Ashkenazy Jews are Europeans imposters claiming they are Semites when they are NOT.." Adding that these “false Semites” are for the domination of the Middle East and the whole of the protocols idiotic schemes...
Reverting to the Protocols is by itself despicable, but the naive explanation distinguishing Jewishness by ethnicity shows a big problem and reveals a much deeper rift when it comes to any possible rapprochement between the Arabs and the Jews.
It is to these absurd and irrational types of beliefs that I am referring to, when I claim that there will be worst to come from these Arab reform democratic winter revolutions... Political pluralism in Egypt (the Wafd party or not) will ultimately lead to political reductionism when it comes to anti-Israeli ideology. Maybe I am a pessimist, but only history will tell…