Top Muslim Brotherhood Official in 2010: Holocaust Was Fabricated by U.S. and Six Million Jews Weren’t Killed but Rather Moved to America

Fathi Shihab (Photo via Muslim Brotherhood website Ikhwanonline)

Fathi Shihab is a senior Muslim Brotherhood official who used to head its labor department, but now chairs the Culture, Tourism & Information Committee in the Egyptian parliament.

According to Front Page Magazine Writer Daniel Greenfield, Shihab also heads the Supreme Press Council, which means he’s responsible for choosing editors for the state-owned newspapers, making his a voice to which people listen.

That he occupies this influential position in the Egyptian establishment is raising alarm about an article he wrote in 2010.

On Saturday, Greenfield – who refers to the official as Fathi Shihab-Eddin – published quotes from an article Shihab wrote in 2010 on the Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwan Online, in which he claims the Holocaust was an American fabrication and an effort at propaganda to disparage the Nazis. Shihab also wrote that six million Jews were never murdered, rather moved to the U.S.

The year he published his article, 2010, was the same year now-President Mohammed Morsi stated that Jews are “the descendants of apes and pigs” and “bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians.” Morsi’s spokesman now claims those words were taken out of context.

Here is the translation of one of Shihab’s quotes (via FrontPageMag.com):

The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented. U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their counterparts in allied nations during World War II created it to destroy the image of their opponents in Germany, and to justify war and massive destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers, and especially to hit “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” with the atomic bomb.

Greenfield of Front Page Magazine writes:

Fathi goes on to claim that the six million Jews all really moved to the United States during the war (and oddly no one noticed) and that the number of Jews killed in the war was about the number who died in traffic accidents […]

Last year, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated quotes from Shihab's article which referred to the European Jews’ alleged move to America (emphasis added):

The victorious [Allies] operated according to the law of the jungle in trying their adversaries for crimes they themselves had invented. [The Allies] exploited the illegal immigration of millions of Jews from Europe to the U.S. during the war years by claiming they had disappeared in the Nazi prison camps. This was despite the fact that Germany's registry data show that the number of German Jews [prior to the war] was between 600,000 and 700,000, half a million of whom remained [alive] after [the war]. Add to this the fact that the number of Jews who died of 'natural causes, road accidents, and Allied attacks' amounted to several thousand. How [then] can it be claimed that the Nazis killed six million Jews, when there weren't more than 700,000 [to begin with]?...

To bolster his argument, Shihab quoted well-known Holocaust deniers and referred to the Holocaust as “the greatest lie in human history.”

Other outlets picked up the story on Tuesday, but mistakenly suggested the Egyptian official made the statement in tandem with International Holocaust Remembrance Day which occurred on Sunday.

Efraim Zuroff who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office told Fox, "The sad truth is that these views are relatively common in the Arab world and are the result of ignorance on one hand and of government-sponsored Holocaust denial on the other hand.”

Perhaps the most notorious Holocaust denier in the region is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who calls the extermination of six million Jews during World War II “a myth” and says that Israel exploits the Holocaust to extract world sympathy. Note that “myth” is the same word the Egyptian official Shihab used to describe the Holocaust.

On Sunday, Ahmadinejad called on Muslim nations to mobilize together to destroy Zionism - that is, Israel. Whether by design or not, Ahmadinejad made his call on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Egyptian media reported last week that Ahmadinejad will visit Egypt on February 6, the first visit by an Iranian head of state in 30 years.