EgyptMorsi’s top aid: Holocaust a “hoax” concocted by U.S. intelligence

Gate into Auschwitz, now a Holocaust museum // Source: bigstock.com

Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior aid to Egypt’s president Morsi, whose area of responsibility includes editorial appointments at Egypt’s state-run newspapers, said the other day that Holocaust was “a hoax” concocted by the U.S. intelligence services.

Shihab-Eddim also said that six million Jews were never killed – they simply emigrated to the United States. “The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented,” Shihab-Eddim said.

“U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their counterparts in allied nations during World War II created it [the Holocaust myth] 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.

Efraim Zuroff, Israel Director of the Jerusalem-based Simon Weisenthal Center, told Fox News that the comments reflect a dangerous, but common, mindset.

“Obviously, if a person in that position makes that ridiculous claim it is of concern,” Zuroff said. “The sad truth is that these views are relatively common in the Arab world and are the result of ignorance on one hand and of government-sponsored Holocaust denial on the other hand.”

Last week video tapes emerged of anti-Semitic remarks made by Morsi himself in 2010, when he was one of the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a TV interview, Morsi said that Jews are “the descendants of apes and pigs,” and in a speech the same month he said the tasks of Egyptian schools is to teach Egyptian children to hate Jews.

Morsi aids said that these remarks were taken out of context, but Mohammed el-Baradei, one of the leaders of Egypt’s secular opposition, criticized Morsi, saying:  “We are all aware that those statements were not taken out of context and that this discourse is very common among a large number of clerics and members of Islamist groups,” El-Baradei said. “Apart from the remarks themselves, I am calling upon the person who made them to courageously admit either the real stance he and the Muslim Brotherhood and their followers adopt, or how mistaken they had been for all those years.”

Anti-Semitic comments are part and parcel of Egypt’s political discourse, with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups resorting to an especially crude form of anti-Semitism.

Thus, Youssef Al-Qaradawi, a popular Islamist TV commentator, said in a 2009 broadcast that “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.”

Zuroff told Fox News that the latest remarks should cause countries to ask themselves what kind of relationship they want to have with the Morsi regime. “Government-sponsored Holocaust denial is the most dangerous…as opposed to attempts by individuals to convince people that the Holocaust did not take place,” Zuroff said. “When it comes with a strict Islamic interpretation and one which is basically anti-Semitic, then it becomes much more dangerous.”