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Special Dispatch - Egypt/Arab Antisemitism Documentation Project
September 10, 2004
No. 782

Former Editor-in-Chief of Egyptian Government Paper: 'We were Educated from
Childhood that the Holocaust is a Big Lie'

On a recent program on Egypt's Al-Mihwar TV, a group of politicians and
journalists discussed the issue of Holocaust denial. The panel included
former newspaper editor Muhammad Al-Zurqani, columnist Abd Al-Qader Yassin,
and author Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad, who recently made news for publishing an
article in the Egyptian government daily Al-Liwaa Al-Islami titled "The Lie
about the Burning of the Jews," which alleged that the annihilation of the
Jews in gas chambers during World War II was a lie invented by Zionists in
order to blackmail the West and to make possible the realization of the
Zionist project.(1) Muhammad Al-Zurqani was the Editor-in-Chief of the paper
at the time that the article was published, and he resigned following the
ensuing controversy. The following is text from the discussion on Egyptian
TV.(2) To view the clip, visit www.memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=229:

Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad, president of Jaffa Research Center in Cairo: "This
article was scientific research, which relied on many European and American
sources concerning this lie, one of the lies upon which the State of Israel
was established - the lie about the burning of the Jews in the Nazis' ovens.
The original intention of the article, its main aim and philosophy, was not
to go into this issue in depth, but rather to use it in order to highlight
the current Holocaust that we are experiencing in Palestine and which does
not cause the West the same pain that it feels about an event that was, at
the very least, falsified or exaggerated."

Sayyd Ali, host: "Or whose truth is in doubt..."

Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad: "Or whose truth has been in doubt for sixty years,
while today a true Holocaust is occurring from Rafah to Jenin, Nablus,
Baghdad, and Nafaj. This is the Holocaust that our nation and our region is
experiencing today, and the West does not pay attention to it and doesn't
feel the same level of pain that it feels concerning the old Holocaust. When
this article was published, the Zionist MEMRI organization in America and
the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is also Zionist, translated the article
and then disseminated it and sent letters to the American Congress, to the
American Embassy in Cairo and to the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, and other
places."

On the Phone - Muhammad Al-Zurqani, former editor-in-chief of Al-Liwaa
Al-Islami: "I agree with what Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad wrote and I accept
full responsibility. I think, Dr. Sayyed, that you and I are of the same
generation, colleagues who worked together. We were educated from childhood
that the Holocaust is a big lie."

Sayyd Ali: "Of course."

Abd Al-Qader Yassin, Palestinian politician: "The 'Chosen People'... The
Jews borrowed from Nazism all of its concepts - that they are exceptional
and that they are the best among the nations, exactly as Hitler thought of
the Aryan people. The truth is that in today's world, it is impossible to
speak of race. One can speak of nationalities, but they aren't even a
nation. No, they [the Jews] are a religion."

Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad: "Antisemitism is a new pretext that the Zionist Jews
have used since the '40s to blackmail both the West and the East. They used
this pretext to claim that anyone who says even a single word against the
Zionist enterprise is antisemitic. Semitic means in this case the Jewish
religion and the tribulations and tragedies that the Jews have undergone at
the hands of all humanity, including Hitler.

"In WWII, 18 million Germans were killed. Out of those 18 million, the
million and a half Jews they keep talking about - if they were killed, and I
am only saying for the sake of argument that one and a half million were
killed in this Holocaust - they were killed as a result of the war, and were
not killed by the...

"Of course I did not anticipate [these reactions], and if I had anticipated
them I would have written more. I would have done more to expose this
illusion."

Abd Al-Qader Yassin: "The Holocaust was carried out with the agreement of
the Zionist and the German leaderships. There was a very well-known
agreement between the leadership of the World Zionist Organization and
Hitler. But there is doubt as to the truth of this story. The Transfer
[Agreement]. There is also a book by Farris Glubb, the son of the Irishman
John Bagot Glubb, 'The Star of David and the Swastika.' Also, our brother
Mahmoud Abbas, 'Abu Mazen,' published a book for which he received a
doctorate from the former USSR, about the ties... Let's read the title so as
not to make a mistake... 'The Other Face - The Secret Ties Between Nazism
and Zionism,' published by Ibn Rushd publications in Amman.

"Goldmann met with Mussolini. Jabotinsky met with Mussolini. They published
joint statements which read 'We and you are the same,' fascism and
[Zionism]. If I say these things, which have been proven by books from the
West, from the East, from China and elsewhere, then I'm an antisemite?"

Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad: "The Palestinian prisoners today, who are leading the
Palestinian Intifada in the start of its fifth year, and on an empty
stomach, are suffering in the Palestinian jails [sic] a greater suffering
than what the Jews or others suffered in Nazi prisons. This suffering has
reached such a level that it has been said that all of the experiments
conducted in the Abu Ghraib prison on Iraqi prisoners or in Guantanamo were
first conducted on the Palestinian prisoners, whose numbers reach 8,000, and
among them 300 women and 300 children. Some of them suffered from
experiments that turned their bodies into germ laboratories and turned them
into human guinea pigs."

Sayyd Ali, Host: "Into laboratory mice..."

Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad: "They have made them laboratory mice out of these
heroic prisoners. This is an example of the modern Holocaust that we are now
experiencing. A fresh Holocaust. Where is the West's conscience? I ask where
is Anne Marie, the media advisor in the U.S. Embassy, on this issue? Where
is Bush himself?

"The annihilation of olive trees... In the last two years half a million
olive trees have been annihilated in Palestine. The olive tree is the oldest
and deepest-rooted tree in Palestine. Why are they being annihilated? Is
this not Nazism? Is this not a modern Holocaust?"

On the Phone - Imad Jad, Arabs Against Discrimination: "I believe that these
organizations, and MEMRI in particular, which is one of the most prominent
of those who monitor Arabic publications in this field - by the way, this
organization is composed of officers from Israeli military intelligence and
it is not a research institute. They monitored these two articles and said
that they appeared in a newspaper which represents the Egyptian ruling party
and not in the opposition newspapers. Afterwards, they began making a big
deal and claimed that the article represents what is being written in Egypt
in this field."

Endnotes:
(1) See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 756, July 30, 2004, "Egypt's Ruling Party
Newspaper: The Holocaust is a Zionist Lie Aimed at Extorting the West,"
www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=countries&Area=egypt&ID=SP75604 .
(2) Al-Mihwar TV (Egypt), August 28, 2004.

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