Will Germany Confront Morsi’s Holocaust Denial?
When video footage from 2010 of then-Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi calling Jews “the descendants of apes and pigs” surfaced two weeks ago, it properly focused international attention on the Brotherhood’s bigoted ideology. Morsi’s comments, after all, are just the tip of the iceberg for the Brotherhood, which has long argued that Egyptian Christians should be barred from running for president, and which recently pushed through a new constitution that denies religious rights to Baha’is and Shiites.
Given that the Muslim Brotherhood is now Egypt’s ruling party and Morsi is Egypt’s president, the international community must challenge the Brotherhood on its many hatreds to ensure that they are never acted upon. In this vein, Morsi’s visit to Germany on Wednesday represents an important opportunity to force him to recant perhaps the vilest example of the Brotherhood’s intolerance: its denial of the Holocaust.
Ironically, Morsi’s visit will come only days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which the German government first established in 1996 and the United Nations later recognized in 2005 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Although the purpose of Holocaust Remembrance Day is to raise awareness of genocides to prevent them from being repeated, the Muslim Brotherhood used the occasion in 2010 to argue that the Holocaust is “the largest swindling operation in history.”
According to the Brotherhood, American intelligence agencies invented the Holocaust “myth” during World War II “to destroy the image of their German opponents” and “to justify a massive war of destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers.” In its revisionist history, the Brotherhood further accused “world Zionists and Israel” of using the Holocaust for “the political and financial blackmail of Germany and other Eastern European countries,” claiming that reparations “didn’t go to the Holocaust victims or their heirs, but to the Israeli war treasury in the greatest funding operation for the real Holocaust against the Palestinian people.” Finally, the Brotherhood invented statistics to argue that many fewer than six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. “The German census established that the number of German Jews ranged from 600-700,000 and half-a-million remained when the war ended,” according to the Brotherhood’s Holocaust history, “And this doesn’t include the Jews who died because of natural death, road accidents, and as victims of Allied air raids.”
More: Will Germany Confront Morsi’s Holocaust Denial? - Eric Trager - the Atlantic