Anti-Semitism in the Arab Press: Expressions of Anti-Semitism in the Arab Press
(August 2000)
Egypt
In his interview to the Egyptian newspaper 'October' in April 2000, the head of the Coptic church in Egypt, Shanuda, referred to Israel and accused, it among other things, of being racist and an oppressor. Shanuda further accused Israel of violating human rights and of destroying fellow men by force, while bolstering the Jewish entity to the extent that it offended Allah and other religions. He went on to ask if all this had a historical basis created by Israel in order to spread fear in the hearts of everyone and to realize its illegitimate goals. The interview later quotes Shanuda from an earlier interview where he referred to the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.' According to 'October' "most of what Father Shanuda says arouses Israel's fury ... because he empties all the Israelis claims of their content and exposes the ideas that appeared in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' which are the very heart of Israel's satanic Zionist idea". The article further refers to sections in the 'Protocols' and verifies them one by one.
Other articles published in Egypt deal with Holocaust denial, such as an article printed on 6 May in 'Rose al-Yusuf', which described the connection between Israelis and soothsayers and the belief in mysticism. On this phenomenon they write: "what intensified this tendency was imagination which plays an important role in the lives of the Jews, especially in connection with Nazism in the modern age and various developments in previous periods. They therefore claim that six million of them were killed in the Nazi crematoria, when the actual number was much smaller".
On 17 May, the establishment newspaper 'Al-Akbar' compared the condition of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails with the cruelty the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. According to the newspaper: "Some of the prisoners are being held without having been brought to trial, while the Israeli authorities refuse to grant them POW status and object to human rights institutions and the international media visiting them. Israel and the Jews still continue to torment the international community and to acquire compensation for their war claims, despite the evidence that has emerged indicating that the Jews' stories are fabrications".
Another 'Al-Akbar' article of 30 July, refers to the criticism leveled at the Arab media, claiming that it publishes anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial articles: "The Israeli government and the Israeli press accuse our writers of being racist and anti-Semitic and of underestimating the severity of the Holocaust. The writers show such hatred towards the Jews in their articles that these motivate Arabs to hate Jews. This Israeli accusation against most Egyptian writers ties in with the Zionist terrorist approach Israel takes towards writers all over the world if they come close to exposing the true facts regarding the anti-Semitic myth which Israel created. This myth led to the creation of a further one called the 'Holocaust' claimed by Israel that Hitler burned six million Jews in the Second World War, because they were Semites, using crematoria - an accusation proven to be unfounded. It should be emphasized that historians in Egypt did not debate the validity of this Israeli myth and did not even deal with it. It was European historians, especially from England and France, such as Roger Garaudy, who presented conclusive proof in this matter."
Another subject often raised in the Egyptian press is the subject of "the murder of Egyptian prisoners in the 1956 and 1967 wars". In early July, the opposition 'Al-Wafd' newspaper wrote: "When will we avenge the blood spilled and when will the bloodsuckers who massacred the Egyptian POWs in the 1956 and 1967 wars be brought to trial? The new Nazis who are scattered over our land continue to smile and the Zionists continue to impudently demand the rights of those Jews persecuted by the Nazis, when at the same time they are not ashamed to admit to slaughtering thousands of Egyptians and burying alive thousands more soldiers in the sands of Sinai. The spillers of blood are still free, despite the crimes they committed against our soldiers who were slaughtered, butchered, dissected and buried alive. The Zionists also desecrated their bodies and all that was left for us was to find their skulls and bones. The question is, when will the Egyptian government act to restore the POWs' rights. We will not be silent until the blood suckers pay the price for their heinous crimes."
On 20 July, the establishment daily 'Akbar' published on the first page a quotation from the sermon of a religious preacher, Sheik Sharawi, who died two and a half years ago. He said that "the Jews trade in money (property) and in principles, and when we study the Jewish history books, we see the arrogance - from the murder of the Prophets, their destruction of land and their plots against the Muslims, ever since the beginning of Islam until today'. As for the question of the Jews throughout the world, we find that they ignite the fire of war throughout the world. They are the ones who divided the world into two camps - capitalist and communist. Their trade in property transformed society into being capitalist and their trade in principles transformed society into being communist. One contradicts the other. Disputes are widespread and create war."
On 11 August, the establishment weekly 'Al-Misr' published a severely anti-Israel article following Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's negative comments on Arabs and Sephardi Jews. The article read: "We believed that Sefardi Jews hate us less than the Ashkenazis. But the sermon of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the rabbi of the Sephardi Jews, in which he slandered the Arabs, revealed the bitter truth - that the Sephardi Jews are worse than the Ashkenazis. In light of this, the question is raised: What is the difference between Barak and Netanyahu, between Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, or between Ovadia Yosef and Abba Eban? In actual fact, there is no difference - they are all Jews and they are all murderers. They murdered children, cut open the stomachs of pregnant women, killed old people and murdered prisoners who dropped their weapons. This is while Hitler did not kill even one prisoner who surrendered to the German army on any front. Given this, the question arises: Why are the radical Muslims not interested in the Jews at all, but in Muslim fighters of their own religion? Even in Egypt itself, they direct their weapons only against us. We may be weak Muslims, but we are Muslims and believe in Allah and we have before us a mutual enemy - the Jews who are planning to 'swallow up' the earth and destroy all of us. But for radical Islamic elements, the killing of an old Muslim in the suburbs of Algiers, is considered less than the killing of an armed Jew in an Israeli settlement. As for Rabbi Ovadia, a day will come when this mad, stupid and shameless rabbi will stand before God and then his fate will be Hell."
Jordan
In early August, the daily 'Al-Ra'i published an article on Holocaust denial which said, "'The Holocaust industry created museums and memorials throughout the world but there is not even one memorial to living victims of Nazism. The number of gypsies murdered is greater than the number of Jews, and no one set up a memorial for them. There is a large Holocaust museum in Washington, but there is no memorial commemorating the slave trade. In his book, 'the Holocaust Industry,' Norman Finkelstein writes that some people who wrote books about that they saw in the camps are lying and claim they survived the death camps. He writes: 'There were 100,000 when the war ended and a quarter of them died two months later,' but the 'industry' claims that since the nineties, 10,000 people die each month. This means that there were eight million Jews in 1945. In Nazi-occupied Europe, however, there were only seven million Jews.
Sources: Israeli Foreign Ministry