Leading Egyptian politician denies Holocaust and blames 9/11 attacks on US and Israel

07 Jul 2011

A senior Egyptian politician and leading official of the liberal and secular al-Wafd party has called the Holocaust a “lie,” the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ a “fake” and the 9/11 terror attacks “made in the USA.” In an interview with the ‘Washington Times’ newspaper, Wafd foreign policy chief Ahmed Ezz el-Arab declared: “The Holocaust is a lie. The Jews under German occupation were 2.4 million. So if they were all exterminated, where does the remaining 3.6 million come from?”

El-Arab said he accepted that the Germans had killed “hundreds of thousands” of Jews but he discounted the existence of gas chambers and of skinning Jews alive, calling them “fanciful stories”. El-Arab then dismissed ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ which he said he studied as a doctoral student in Sweden, as a forgery. “I could swear to God it’s a fake,” he said. “The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”

The politician also questioned that the terror network al-Qaeda of Osama Bin Laden was behind the 11 September 2001 attacks. Bin Laden “could not have the know-how or the ability to do it,” he said, calling the al-Qaeda leader “an American agent.” “If he had the ability, one plane only landing on the Knesset would give more effect,” he said, naming the Mossad, CIA and America’s “military-industrial complex” as the actual perpetrators of the terrorist attacks.