This special report at MEMRI came out a few days ago, but I just got around to reading it; a thorough and thoroughly nauseating study of the insane antisemitism and anti-Americanism promoted by Egyptian media.

Conspiracy theories against the U.S. and the Jews are also common in Al-Ahram. President Hosni Mubarak was quoted shortly after September 11th in an interview with Al-Ahram stating that: “I find it hard to believe that people who were learning to fly in Florida could, within a year and a half, fly large commercial airliners and hit with accuracy the towers of the World Trade Center which would appear, to the pilot from the air, the size of a pencil. Only a professional pilot could carry out this mission, not someone who learned to fly for 18 months in Florida. For your information, a license to fly commercial planes has many conditions, in terms of study and training. Many hours of flying are needed to qualify as a co-pilot, let alone a pilot, of such planes.” [5]

More recently, on August 31, 2003, following a car bombing in Iraq that killed 120 people including Ayatollah Muhammad Bakir Al-Hakim, the former head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an editorial in Al-Ahram blamed the U.S.: “The responsibility for this very act of terrorism is Western responsibility – and, more specifically, American.” [6]

In another editorial, editor Ibrahim Nafi’ wrote during the early U.S. military actions in Afghanistan in October 2001 about “reports,” according to which the U.S. military was purposely targeting Afghani women and children and dropping genetically treated food in areas full of landmines. Nafi’ explained: “The humanitarian materials have been genetically treated, with the aim of affecting the health of the Afghani people. If this is true, the U.S. is committing a crime against humanity by giving the Afghani people hazardous humanitarian products, as it was said in those reports … ” [7]

Other conspiracies against the U.S. printed in Al-Ahram include allegations that the CIA and the Mossad introduced the AIDS virus to Africa: “Foreign nurses injected them with the AIDS virus, while pretending to immunize them … The CIA or the Israeli Mossad were behind this crime … ” [8] When Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed in 1999, Al-Ahram had a series of articles stating that the U.S. and Israel were behind the crash by quoting a series of high-ranking government officials. “Parliament Member Amin Hamed, from President Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, said he believed, ”the Israeli ‘Mossad’ infiltrated the American control tower and shifted the airplane from its course so it would be hit [by a missile].“ Many parliament members supported this position. Member of Parliament ‘Omar Barakat, from the opposition Al-Wafd party, said, ”There was an American - Zionist conspiracy. I blame the CIA and the Mossad, because 33 Egyptian officers were on board the airplane.“ [9]

The Jews were Behind September 11th

Dr. Gamal ‘Ali Zahran, head of the political science department at Suez Canal University, wrote in Al-Ahram shortly after September 11th: ”At the WTC, thousands of Jews worked in finance and the stock market, but none of them were there on the day of the incident. Out of 6,000 killed, of 65 nationalities from 60 countries, not one was a Jew!“ Dr. Zahran later wrote: ”There were many rumors, and open publicity, that the Jews, who were huge stockholders in the airlines and insurance companies, sold their stocks at the highest possible prices some 10 days before the attacks on America. After the stock market began functioning again, on September 17 … the Jews competed amongst themselves to buy [these] stocks at the lowest possible prices, or waited until the stocks reached their minimal value and then acquired them, for tremendous profits. There is no doubt that this can expose their involvement in the crime. This demands covert investigation by U.S. government bodies far from the official investigative bodies.”

The US gives Egypt more than $2 billion a year in foreign aid. How much of that money goes directly into the pockets of scum who write things like this?