Sadat Came to Israel--Peace Never Did

This was one of the events that you remember where you were and what you did. Thirty years ago today, I joined all of the guys in the campus Zionism organization for a walk to the Dorm room of a student from Egypt. He didn't know we were coming but since Anwar Sadat was visiting Israel, we were visiting him...with some cheap wine of course.

Thirty years later, Sadat, is Dead, I don't remember our "host's" name and the peace that Sadat and Begin forged is more like a secession of hostilities than a true peace. The US President who had this peace opportinity drop in his lap, has evolved into a purveyor of hatred against Israel and the Jewish People and Egypt has become the largest exporter of anti-Jewish hate materials in the world, and Israel is still grabbing for that elusive peace.

Hatred, Egyptian Style

By P. David Hornik

FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, November 19, 2007

It was thirty years ago today that the then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat first visited Israel, publicly launching a diplomatic process that led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. At present, though, Egypt is “the Arab world’s biggest center of publishing anti-Semitic literature.” So says a new report by the Tel Aviv-based Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

This literature that Egypt puts out, says the Center, “is marketed across the Arab and Muslim world, distributed through the Internet, and sold every year at the Cairo International Book Fair.” The Egyptian government, “despite its ability to impose strict censorship,” allows all this to go on.

Seven of these books were purchased, apparently by someone from the Center, at the Cairo fair that was held this year from January 24 to February 4. The books, published in Cairo over the past four years, “recycle lies, fabrications, and anti-Semitic myths rooted in classical European and Islamic anti-Semitism.”

First there’s The Nature of the Jews [as reflected] in the Torah and the Talmud by Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa. The front cover sets the tone: a ship called World Zionism is sailing the globe while Jewish snakes crawl over the various continents (the back cover is even more grisly). The author holds a PhD in comparative religious research from Al-Azhar University, considered the leading center of Islamic and Arabic learning in the world.

The book begins by explaining that “the Jews hate the Muslims and hate all the peoples and nations, since the Devil has whispered in their ears saying they are the smart and the clever, while others are unclean beasts.” A later, typical passage states: “Almost all the revolutions, coups d’état, and wars that ever happened in the world were brought about by the Jews, instructed by the falsified Torah, the Talmud, and ultimately The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [These texts] all incite [the Jews] to eliminate non-Jews, using all means to achieve their goal: ruling the world from Jerusalem….”

Then there’s Israel’s Follies and the Lies of Zionism: Religion and State by Ibrahim Abu Dah, who heads the Egyptian oppositionist newspaper Al-Siyasi al-Misri. This time the front-cover snakes, instead of crawling all over the globe, emerge from a Star of David containing pictures of Zionist, Israeli, and Jewish notables.

The Talmud, says Abu Dah, tells Jews that all the resources of the Earth belong solely to them, to be seized by them while freely killing any and all non-Jews. Abu Dah, though, provides hope: he sees signs in the Koran and even in Jewish holy books that the demise of the state of Israel is near.

The same Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa has also offered another of the many Arabic editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This one’s front cover varies the zoological content, showing, instead of Jewish snakes (an omnipresent image in the Arab world), a Jewish octopus enwrapping the Earth with its tentacles. The back cover informs readers that “the entire contents [of the Protocols] appear in the Talmud, written by the Jews themselves” and “our sole motive for publishing them is to warn the world about the Jewish threat.”

Muhammad Younes Hashem’s The Jews and the New Crusaders: The Religious and Political Controversy targets not only Jews but also Christians and the West. The author, a researcher, contends that “the Jews control the Western countries and have formed an anti-Islamic alliance with ‘Christian imperialism.’”

Publisher Dr. Huda al-Koumi, who holds a PhD in dramaturgy, explains in her Foreword that “the Jews keep using the most despicable weapons in conflicts with their enemies. They use women, sex, drugs, bribes, forgery, schemes, and mix drugs into food, beverages, agricultural farms, water, and anything [else].”

The cover of Dr. Baha al-Amir’s The Divine Inspiration and Its Reversal, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion shows Orthodox Jews praying in a sinister blood-red light. The back cover informs readers that “The Protocols is the centuries-old scheme of the Jews, implemented for hundreds of years. It is transmitted by the snake’s head from generation to generation and has led to the downfall of one nation after another since the 5th century BC.” The book’s text often invokes the Koran in making the case that the Jews seek to corrupt the whole world.

The Children of Israel and the Lie of Semitism was written by Dr. Ayid Taha Nassef, chief of the Information Center for National and Strategic Studies and Research in Egypt. The cover shows a Star of David superimposed on a hapless globe, and the text—among, of course, many other things—says that “the recent [persecutions] against the Jews in Germany were carried out by Hitler, who burned thousands of them in mass incinerators due to their despicable acts.”

Finally there’s Secrets of the Bastions of the False Messiah in the Hidden Island Triangle: The Wandering Jew and the Bermuda [Triangle] Region. This work is by Muhammad Issa Daoud, a famous, bestselling author in the Arab world.

The book develops the thesis that the Bermuda Triangle is home to Al-Masikh al-Dajjal, known in Muslim tradition as a repulsive false messiah of the Jews who will fight the Mahdi at the end of time. Author Daoud contends that in the 1990s Israel and the United States shot down Egyptian planes in the Bermuda Triangle and that the Zionist- and American-dominated world media covered up the crimes.

The lurid and insane fantasies that fill these books are genocidal in import. Both stemming from and feeding a frenzy of hatred, they hammer home again and again the message to millions of Arab and Muslim readers that Jews and the state of Israel are the source of all evil. As the Center notes, “the anti-Semitic myths, lies, and drivel take hold in the consciousness of those exposed to such literature . . . and lay the foundations for acts of violence against [Jews].”

That Egypt is the fountainhead of this toxicity does not prevent it from receiving large annual outlays of U.S. aid and being assiduously courted by both the U.S. and Israeli governments as an agent of peace. Ignoring the real nature of the Egyptian regime and society is both cowardly and a betrayal of the Jewish and other victims of hatred.