A big row erupted when Egypt’s new dictator, Mohammed Morsi, was caught on tape referring to the Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” The rest of the world was hastily assured that it lacked the “context” to appreciate the full wisdom and playful good humor of these remarks.
Well, Egypt had better become the world’s chief exporter of “context” pronto, because one of Morsi’s top aides just observed Holocaust Remembrance Day by failing to remember the Holocaust. Fox News reports on the “outrageous claims” of one Fathi Shihab-Eddim:
“The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented,” Shihab-Eddim said, leaving no room for doubt that the Egyptian government — like Iran’s — has at the very least significant elements that deny humanity’s greatest crime of all.
“U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their counterparts in allied nations during World War II created it [the Holocaust] to destroy the image of their opponents in Germany, and to justify war and massive destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers, and especially to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bomb,” Shihab-Eddim said.
The ludicrous claims were especially worrisome to Israeli experts who have been watching since the Muslim Brotherhood Morsi administration took over the Egyptian government in elections last summer, following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who maintained good relations with Israel. Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center in New York, said Shihab-Eddin’s comments were as troubling as they were ridiculous.
“Fathi goes on to claim that the 6 million Jews all really moved to the United States during the war (and oddly no one noticed) and that the number of Jews killed in the war was about the number who died in traffic accidents,” Greenfield wrote in Frontpagemag.com.
Who can forget the angry calls to nuke Hiroshima, using the remarkably high incidence of Jewish traffic accidents in scenic German towns like Auschwitz and Dachau as a flimsy pretext?
Who’s Fathi Shihab-Eddim? Oh, he’s just the guy who “is now responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run Egyptian newspapers.” It’s not like he has any influence or anything.
This brand of nitwittery is sadly common to the Muslim Brotherhood, that “largely secular” band of history buffs the Obama Administration was happy to help into power:
Anti-Semitic statements and denial of the Holocaust are seemingly part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood doctrine. Among many examples of the vitriol espoused by senior figures from the parent organization of the terrorist group Hamas, one of their spiritual leaders and a popular Islamic television figure, Youssef Al-Qaradawi said, “I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad [Israel] and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.”
Al-Qaradawi further stated in a 2009 broadcast about the Holocaust, “He [Hitler] managed to put them [the Jews] in their place. This [the Holocaust] was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”
Egypt’s leading secular reformer, Mohammed el-Baradei, called upon Shihab-Eddim to “courageously admit either the real stance he and the Muslim Brotherhood and their followers adopt, or how mistaken they had been for all these years.” That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, if Egypt wants to be treated as a civilized nation, does it?
