(JTA) — A top official with one of Egypt’s leading secular political parties called the Holocaust "a lie" and Anne Frank’s diary “a fake.”
Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of the liberal Wafd party, also said in an interview with The Washington Times that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were “made in the USA."
"The Holocaust is a lie," he told the newspaper while in Hungary for the Conference of Democracy and Human Rights, which was convened June 28. "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 conceded that "hundreds of thousands" of Jews had been murdered, but pronounced the gas chambers “fanciful stories.”
He similarly dismissed "The Diary of Anne Frank," explaining that he had studied it as a doctoral student in Sweden.
“I could swear to God it’s fake," he said. "The girl was there, but the memoirs are a fake.”
El-Arab, the chairman of Wafd’s foreign relations committee, also criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"He’s a hateful character, so whatever he says can be criticized,” El-Arab said. “What he says about the Holocaust is true, but he doesn’t say it because it’s true. He says it out of hatred to the Israeli state.”
The Wafd official also said there was “no chance at all” that Egypt would cancel its peace treaty with Israel.
“The Jews are there,” he told The Washington Times. “Good or bad, they are there. You cannot as a human being think of exterminating 6 million or 5 million or whatever. That’s crazy.”
