Egyptian "Reform" Politician Blames 9-11 on US and Calls Holocaust a Lie

In an interview with the Washington Times, a leader of Egypt’s top secular party said the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were “made in the USA,” the Holocaust is “a lie” and Anne Frank’s memoir is “a fake.” Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt's Wafd Party, made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times last week.

In response to his remarks that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have pulled off the 9-11 attacks, the interviewer asked Mr. Ezz El-Arab who he believed was behind the attacks. Mr. Ezz El-Arab identified the CIA, Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, and the “military-industrial complex.”

Mr. Ezz El-Arab said he accepted that the Nazis killed “hundreds of thousands” of Jews. “But gas chambers and skinning them alive and all this? Fanciful stories,” he added. Mr. Ezz El-Arab also attacked the authenticity of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which he said he studied as a doctoral student in Stockholm. “I could swear to God it’s a fake,” the Wafd leader said. “The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”

He also alleged that Jewish American soldiers serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq had looted antiquities, with the intention of planting them in archaelogical digs at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in order to bolster Jewish claims that the Temple was once located there.

Mr. Ezz El-Arab is not a fringe politician. His Wafd is arguably the second-most powerful political party to the Muslim Brotherhood, a formerly banned Islamist group. Moreover, last month Wafd announced it would run jointly with the Brotherhood and 16 other blocs in September’s parliamentary elections to present a united front as Egypt forges a new government. So his beliefs about 9-11 and the Holocaust may well reflect the state of mind of the future Egpytian government. Indeed, he is probably a moderate compared with the Islamists in his future coalition.

Ironically, the Jerusalem Post notes that Mr. Ezz El-Arab gave the interview at the "First Annual Conference on Democracy and Human Rights," hosted in Budapest, Hungary by the Tom Lantos Institute and Center for Democratic Transition. Mr. Lantos of blessed memory, a longtime Democratic congressman from California who died in 2008, survived a forced-labor camp in his native Hungary and lost his mother and other family members to the Nazi occupation. Some 450,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, although Mr. Ezz El-Arab apparently does not believe it.


Remember how liberal pundits ridiculed Glenn Beck when he warned about emerging Islamist power in Egypt? I hope that they are still laughing a year from now, when Egypt probably will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wafd Party, and others sharing Mr. Ezz El-Arab-s enlightened outlook.