Or so asserts the official Egyptian government newspaper, Al-Akbar. A column in the newspaper recently claims that:
-The Holocaust is a hoax
-The author wishes it wasn’t, and that Hitler had killed all Jews
-That Hitler wasn’t all bad
-That Jews are the scum of the Earth and the root of all problems
-They tried to kill Muhammed, killed John the Baptist, and deceived Moses
-The Jews destroy everything that is beautiful.
I’m pretty confident you didn’t intend this to be in MPSIMS. You want I should move it to the Pit to share your outrage or to GD to debate the Egyptian press?
True, and I’m not. While I have no idea what exactly the relationship between Egypt’s government and their “official newspaper” is (see, here where there is actual freedom of the press, we don’t have one of those), one would hope that they might draw the line at supporting genocide.
True, but the fact that this guy managed to get this article published is an indicator that at least some (hopefully not a significant percetnage) people in Egypt think similarly.
If the article exists (no link to the original, perhaps surprisingly) and if the translation is accurate, it’s apparently written by a female contributor by the name of Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud.
Not quite sure how giving a rabble-rousing Holocaust denier editorial space makes Al-Akhbar (apparently the paper that printed the article) a “supporter of genocide” – rather, it seems to be something protected by First Amendment rights in the US ?
The First Amendment gives newspapers in the United States the right to publish things; it also gives them the right not to publish things. If a newspaper chooses to exercise its right to publish a particular opinion, the rest of the world has the right (and the duty) to draw conclusions as to what that newspaper’s editors support or don’t support.
What the relationship is between that newspaper and the government of Egypt, or how free from state interference the press actually is in Egypt, I don’t know.
What concerns me about this thread is the uneasy sense I have that Jews are being scapegoated and vilified. Obviously, I wasn’t around for WWII, but weren’t Jews tormented in just this way? I just hope that we don’t have another Holocaust. We will have learned nothing.
I’ve often wondered about this same question - why do Holocaust deniers, who are generally anti-semitic, like Hitler so much if he didn’t lift a finger against Jews? Ok, I guess we all know the answer - they’re idiots.
Also reported in the Middle East Media Research Institute. Also along the same lines is a similar article from last year. So it seems (and I’m sure you can find more at the MEMRI site) that Al-Akhbar at the very least allows itself to be associated with these views.
According to the World Press Review, Al-Akhbar is one of many government owned newspapers in the country. From what I can gather, it seems to have at least the appearance of having control over the material it prints, and is in no way the official mouthpiece of the government.