Even if the Muslim Brotherhood and the other Islamist parties were to somehow lose the upcoming elections, this is what the alternative looks like.
(Weekly Standard) — Consider these two quotations, both of which are provided by members of the Egyptian intelligentsia: “The Holocaust is a lie,” and “The victory of the Zionist ideal is also the victory of my ideal.”
As some readers will recognize, the first quotation comes from Ahmed Ezz el-Arab, vice chairman of Egypt’s flagship Liberal party, the Wafd, who just last week denied that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II. “The Holocaust is a lie,” he told the Washington Times. “The Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?” The second statement was made in the early 1920s by Ahmed Zaki, a leading intellectual.
To most readers these two statements must seem quite astonishing, each in their own way, of course. And yet they both reflect their respective contexts and indicate the huge gulf between the intellectual, political, and moral climate of early twentieth century Egypt and the present—and perhaps offer us a clue as to what happened during the intervening years.
Today, anti-Semitism is a disease shared by many across Egypt’s political spectrum, so it is hardly surprising that they are also anti-Zionist. This was not always the case. In the early part of the last century, Zionism won sympathy and support from many Egyptian intellectuals and politicians. For instance, an Egyptian newspaper in 1917, Al Lataif Al Musawara, described Jewish officers who died during Allenby’s campaign in Palestine as “falling in the battle in a land that is the homeland of their ancestors and one in which the children of Israel have always fought their enemies and the invaders of their land.”