Haaretz
Kislev 22, 5766
CAIRO - The head of Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood, the main opposition force in parliament, echoed Iran's
president on Thursday in describing the Holocaust as a
myth.
"Western democracy has attacked everyone who does not share
the vision of the sons of Zion as far as the myth of the Holocaust is
concerned," Mohamed Mahdi Akef said in a statement.
Akef cited as
evidence of Western intolerance the cases of French writer Roger Garoudy,
who was convicted in France in 1998 of questioning the Holocaust, and
British historian David Irving, who faces similar charges in Austria next
month.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sparked an
international uproar when he said in a Dec. 14 speech that the Holocaust
was a myth.
In Israel, the director of the Israeli branch of the
Nazi watchdog group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, warned that, ""There's
no question that a very ugly wave of Holocaust denial is sweeping the Arab
world."
"The problem is that so far in the Arab world very few
leaders are willing to tell their own people that they have to understand
that the Holocaust did take place," Efraim Zuroff said.
Akef,
whose group won 88 of the Egyptian parliament's 454 seats in elections in
November and December, made his comment in an attack on the United States'
assertion that it is promoting democracy in the Middle East.
He
said the U.S. campaign was a cover for promoting its own interests and
those of the Zionist movement in the region.
"American democracy
... steers the world into the American orbit delineated by the sons of
Zion, so that everyone must wear the Stars and Stripes hat and keep away
from the Zionist foster child," he wrote in his weekly
statement.
He accused the U.S. House of Representatives of
hypocrisy when it threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority
if the Islamist movement Hamas takes part in January elections.
He
also criticised European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana for
saying that Europeans might think twice about aid to the Palestinians if
Hamas members were in parliament.
Hamas says it is an extension of
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 and which renounced
political violence inside Egypt decades ago. Hamas believes in armed
struggle to replace Israel with an Islamic state.
Last week the
deputy leader of the Brotherhood, Mohamed Habib, asked about Ahmadinejad's
denial of the Holocaust, said reports of Nazi attempts to wipe out
European Jews might have been exaggerated.
"We don't have confirmed
things to enable us to prove this matter or refute it. It needs
documentation but what one can be sure of is that there were attacks on
the Jews but not by means of gas chambers or perhaps not in these numbers
or on this scale," Habib told Reuters in an interview.
But Habib
said the debate was irrelevant to the situation of the Palestinians. "What
the Jews propagate about there being a Holocaust has nothing to do with
the way they treat the Palestinians on the land of Palestine," he
said.