Exhorting Egyptian Jews to Return and Massad's Farrago of Lies

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
06 January '13..

Senior Muslim Brotherhood official Issam Al-Aryan elicited everything from fury to bloodcurdling antisemitic threats in Egypt last week when he exhorted Egyptian Jews to return to their country of birth; but Palestinian New York professor Joseph Massad has reacted with embarrassment that the Egyptians appear to have scored a propaganda own goal. Writing for al-Jazeera he undertakes an ugly damage-limitation exercise excoriating Egyptian Jews as disloyal and contemptuous of their Muslim neighbours. No Egyptian Jew is spared Massad's abuse - from Cairo department store owner Cicurel ( tarred with a Zionist brush ) to writer Lucette Lagnado, for scandalously speaking of an 'exchange of populations' between Jewish and Arab refugees. Here's a taste of Massad's poison:

"The current propaganda war in Egypt about the Palestinians and about Egyptian Jews, which was provoked by the recent pronouncements of Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is nothing but a distraction from the real problems that the country faces with the increasing incompetence of the Morsi government and the opportunism of his vocal opposition.

"If this propaganda war did not have major implications with regards to Israel and US plans to undermine the Egyptian uprising and to control its outcome so as to serve US and Israeli interests, it would be nothing but a storm in a teacup. That it has many regional and international implications is what produces the ongoing media frenzy in the country and internationally.

"The statements made by al-Aryan calling on Egyptian Jews in Israel to return home, however, are hardly novel. Indeed Egypt had already done so under Anwar Sadat's rule back in 1975 at the urging of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

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Rather than unpick the professor's lies one by one, I am reproducing a fitting rebuttal in the comments thread to Massad's screed by Egyptian-born Jew Semsem:

'Jews not allowed to pray' in Maimonides synagogue

Bataween
Point of No Return
28 March '10

More proof, if proof were needed, that Egypt intends its synagogues to be museums. Lord forbid any Jew should actually want to pray in one. From the Elder of Zion blog, via Solomonia:

Zahi Hawass, the Jew-hating general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and Egypt's top archaeologist, has announced that he will not allow any Jew to pray in the restored Maimonides synagogue in Cairo.

He told a Muslim scientific forum that "his decision to close the temple was a reaction to Israeli attacks on Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem."

He stressed that he would treat the Maimonides synagogue the same as any other Egyptian antiquities, and that the decision to cancel the opening rededication ceremony of the synagogue was to keep history and politic separated.

But he would not allow any Jew or Israeli to pray there and he would not allow the Egyptian Jewish community to administer the site. He also said that this was a reaction to "provocative practices that carried out by the Jews in their celebration which was held in the temple." He was referring to the dancing and drinking of wine, which he felt offended a billion Muslims.

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