The Everlasting Hatred (21 page)

Mansour is hardly regarded as some kind of renegade nut in Egypt. In 1975, he represented the nation at the fortieth International PEN (writers) Conference in Vienna. Upon his return he charged that “the Jews are guilty” for Nazism, and that they “have only themselves to blame.”
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Egypt was just a walk in the park in the twentieth century compared to Syria, which was a living hell for Jews. The smoldering enmity against Jews that has always been in Syria burst into a roaring fire with the advent of Zionism. Damascus became the headquarters of anti-Jewish activities and feasted on Nazism.

During World War II, the Jewish quarter in Damascus was raided several times because of ridiculous rumors that Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed to make Syria into a Jewish state.

Israelis have told me on many occasions that the most vicious enemy in the whole Middle Eastern neighborhood is Syria—and that's a rough neighborhood. Today, Damascus is host to offices of virtually every Islamic terror organization on the planet.

Not only do Muslim families teach their children from the cradle to hate Jews, but Islamic educators also interweave this message of hatred into their class instruction.

Today, Muslim governments have official policies against Jews actually written into public school textbooks. For example:

“The Jews in Europe were persecuted and despised because of their corruption, meanness and treachery” —Jordanian history textbook, from 1966 onward.

“Israel was born to die. Prove it” —Instructions in a Jordanian high school.

“The Jews … live exiled and despised since by their nature they are vile, greedy and enemies of mankind” —Syrian junior high school textbook.

“We shall expel all the Jews from Muslim lands” —A fifth-year elementary school syntax exercise in a Syrian textbook.

“The Arabs do not cease to act for the extermination of Israel” —An Egyptian junior high school grammar exercise in a textbook.

“Israel hopes to be the homeland of the Jew, and they have the stubbornness of 4,000 years of history behind them. But Israel shall not live if the Arabs stand fast in their hatred. She shall wither and decline. Even if all the human race, and the devil in Hell, conspires to aid her, she shall not exist” —A ninth-grade Egyptian text.

“The anti-Semitic literature published by the Arabs since World War II has been voluminous, and is continually increasing, despite the almost total evacuation of the Arab world's Jews,” writes Peters. “The virulence of this literature is disturbing, but even more significant is the official or governmental origin of the publications—not from an extremist fringe, which might be lightly dismissed, but from Arab governments, including those called ‘moderate.'”
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The examples below are all too typical of the anti-Semitism in the Arab press:

El-Ahram
, a leading daily with more than 700,000 readers, carried a book review of
The First Terrorists
in which the
critic, Abd El-Muneim Qandil, asserted March 3, 1987: “I lower my pen in respect to the author who presents proof from Israeli books to the malice of the Jews who wish to kill all male newborns and pregnant women in order to uproot the Palestinians… . The author speaks about turning facts upside down … such as their claim that the gas chambers used by Hitler to get rid of people infected by plague were especially built to burn Jews alive.”

El Masa
, a daily of 100,000, reported April 21, 1987: “Jews distributed a ‘ridiculous lie' after the Second World War concerning the Holocaust. They started with the claim that 100,000 Jews were exterminated but later reached the figure of 8 million. Jews are inflating these numbers in order to achieve bigger help from the USA… .We can expect, therefore, that very soon the number of Jews killed by the Nazis will reach 10 million.”

Sawt El-Arab
, a daily with a large circulation, wrote on March 15, 1987: “Israel sells to Egypt seeds, plants and cattle infected with diseases in order to destroy the local agriculture.”

El Mukhtar El-Islami
, a monthly religious publication, states in April 1986: “The Jews were responsible for World War II. They initiated this war in order to crush Nazi Germany, which was the last obstacle before Jewish domination of the world. Europe was indeed destroyed and Zionist strategy had its victory. The Jews were also behind the murder of President Abraham Lincoln.”