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."
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.