At the pro-Respect blog Socialist Unity, everyone is outraged about film director Ken Loach’s appalling remark that antisemitism is “understandable.”
Ha ha. No, of course not. Instead Andy Newman has a post up celebrating “The Greatest Arab”– the late Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser. There’s a stirring video tribute to Nasser which I suspect will leave you as dry-eyed as it did me.
There are many things that could be said about Nasser and his “leftwing” admirers– and some of us said a few of them in the comments to Andy’s post.
But I’ll simply add that under Nasser, Egypt was a haven for fugitive Nazi criminals– and for the Nazi collaborator, Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
One of those Nazis, Goebbels’s protege Johann von Leers, was noted for the virulence of his Jew hatred and his antisemitic writings during the Third Reich. He came to Egypt in 1955. With the help of his close friend the Mufti, he got a job in the Information Ministry, where he specialized in anti-Israel propaganda (hardly a stretch– just change a few words here and there). He died in Cairo in 1965.
Louis Heiden, a wartime employee of the German Press Agency, also ended up in Egypt, where he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. The Egyptian government published an Arabic version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Nasser recommended to a visiting Indian journalist in 1958.
“It is very important that you read it,” The Greatest Arab explained. “I will give you a copy. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the European continent.”
