Nominations for the post of UNESCO Director General closed at the end of last week, while the campaign against the Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, the front runner to head UNESCO, continued unabated. The London Times claimed Saturday that Mr. Hosni called for burning Hebrew books. The paper also mentioned that the fiercest Jewish campaigns against his candidacy were coming from France and Germany, conducted largely by Le Monde. There are three points in the previous paragraph that are worth commenting on. - Farouk Hosni never called for burning Hebrew books. He was replying to an Egyptian Member of Parliament who claimed, during a heated argument outside of the assembly, that the Library of Alexandria was laden with Hebrew books attacking Islam. The minister denied this allegation, but at the MP's insistence, he challenged him to bring forward any such books that attack Islam from the Library of Alexandria, pledging to burn them himself. He said so while knowing that such books do not exist in the Library in the first place. Mr. Farouk Hosni wrote about this in Le Monde, explaining and apologizing for the incident, although I do not think that there's anything here that warrants an apology. - The campaign against Farouk Hosni is being led by groups in Germany and France, i.e. the country that murdered Jews, and the country that was the biggest collaborator with Nazi Germany as it sent around 70 thousand Jews to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. - Le Monde is an acclaimed newspaper and comes at the forefront of credible and objective newspapers in the world. The paper does not need a testimonial from me or anyone else, yet I allege that Le Monde has failed to give the subject the scrutiny and in depth analysis it deserves, especially in what relates to the accusations made against the Egyptian minister. Had Le Monde dutifully practiced proper journalism, as we expect from this newspaper, it would have quickly discovered that Mr. Farouk Hosni was a moderate liberal who fought many battles against both religious and political extremists, and that there were many fundamentalists who put a price on his head after they failed to oust him from the government. I imagine that if the Jews who write in Le Monde and the other Jewish intellectuals in Germany and France cannot make peace with someone like Farouk Hosni, then they will never make peace with any Arab or Muslim in the entire world. Last week, I commented in this same column on the letter written by Bernard-Henri Levy, Elie Wiesel and Claude Lanzmann in which they called for a campaign preventing Farouk Hosni from becoming the next UNESCO chief. But I had dropped a main point from this letter: It mentioned that the Egyptian Minister had warned against Jewish control over world media. I do not necessarily agree with this, but in light of this fierce campaign that is either ignorant or deliberate, I find that elements from this campaign only prove the above mentioned accusation against the world media. This media has been talking for days about the D-Day and is republishing old stories about Nazi crimes, all while turning a blind eye to the crimes that Israel commits on a daily basis against women and children as it maintains its occupation of their lands. In fact, the entire Gaza strip is an open air Nazi concentration camp. Netanyahu and Avigdor Liberman's Israel has placed itself under the leadership of a neo-Nazi government that rejects peace. While Levi, Wiesel and Lanzmann are celebrities in the world of international culture, they and a thousand other intellectuals like them cannot deny the fact that Israel, in its present form, is not a state, but a criminal gang that the world has been condemning year after year in the UN General Assembly. This is the whole world's opinion about Israel. It represents a democratic practice that the Israeli government cannot reply to except by accusing people of being anti-Semitic instead of admitting the truth and eliminating the causes behind it being suspect in the first place. Furthermore, figures do not lie. According to B'Tselem, the rate of mutual killing of minors - individuals less than 15 years of age - since the beginning of the second Intifada on 29/09/2000 and up until the end of last year, was 1,274 Palestinian children as opposed to 148 Israeli children, a comparative ratio of 9 to 1. This is clearly nothing less than a Nazi rate even without adding the 1,400 Palestinian deaths during the most recent war in Gaza, most of whom were civilians, and half of whom were women and children. On the other side of the intellectuals who sold their souls to the Israeli devil, there are a thousand Jewish intellectuals who condemned the crimes of Israel. I published their letters and their articles here before and I don't need to go back to those now, but I must add that the Independent carried last Saturday a news piece from Jerusalem entitled: “Threat of the 'thought police' alarms Israel's Arab minority.” The concept of Thought Police comes from George Orwell's novel “1984.” It seems that we have lived long enough to see the Holocaust descendants and survivors practice intellectual oppression against the people whose land they have stolen, asking them to suppress their grief over their lost country and to celebrate with the thieves who stole it instead. All that remains now is for these neo-Nazis to start burning books, and they're already half way to doing that. As for Farouk Hosni, he is a man of peace who is nobler than all of them.
