A Dream of Killing Sharon
Editor of the Egyptian opposition weekly, Al-Usbu', Mustafa Bakri described "a dream" in which he was sent by the Egyptian government to serve as a bodyguard for Ariel Sharon in his visit to Egypt. In the dream, Bakri goes to meet Sharon at the airport: "After a short while, the pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland's soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything: the past and the future, my wife and my children and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig's head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed: blood-vengeance for the [Egyptian] POWs, blood-vengeance for the martyrs. The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. The criminal died. I stepped on the pig's head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost. I kept screaming at the top of my lungs until my wife put her hand on me. I woke up from this most beautiful dream and decided not to surrender to humiliation."[1]
Justifying the Holocaust
Egyptian intellectual, Anis Mansour, wrote in his column in the government sponsored Al-Ahram, the leading paper in Egypt: "...If an Israeli is killed, he is one of five million Israelis or one of 14 million Jews in the world. On the other hand, if a Palestinian gets killed, he is one of six million Palestinians, of 300 million Arabs, or of one billion Muslims. This is why the Jewish peoples[2] consider one slain Israeli a great number. Nothing makes the life of the world's Jews as loathsome as the daily increase in the number of Israeli casualties. Otherwise, American Jews would find it difficult to justify the Jewish barbarism in Israel."
"[Without Israeli casualties,] it would become clear to the world that what happened to the Jews of Germany, Poland, and Russia, was justified. It is not true that all the Jews are peaceniks. There is a suicidal sect among them that does not desire to live. [Therefore,] they kindle the people's hatred and hostility and, as a result, people turn against them. Although there are many intelligent people among them, they use their intellect to devise new ways for people everywhere to hate them and unite against them."
"Because megalomania overcomes the Jewish peoples, they do not bow their heads in order to survive; they prefer to surface and [appear] behind the steering wheels of the leadership in the US and Europe, in order to evoke people's empathy. They were in the shadows, in the rear lines, and in the dark alleys before the establishment of the State of Israel. They prefer an Israel surrounded by enemies, to a ghetto that no one has heard of. Therefore, a large number of Jews opposed the establishment of the State of Israel, which became a target for all the Arabs. They believe that Israel was established before the time set for it in the Jewish religion. This is a Pariah state. Its existence [is prohibited, and so are], its money, its army, and having any relations with it."
"There are sects in Israel that view the Jewish State as a heretic state. They believe the Israelites deserve to be tortured and that what Hitler did to the Jews of the West is an appropriate punishment for their mistreatment of the Jews of the East. The "Heresy and Emigration"[3] movement will increase in Israel - denying the state and calling for emigration from it to the US and Europe, away from the stones and artillery of the Arabs! This is why Israel's philosophers intimidate the Jewish peoples to keep them in a state of self-defense. High alert and an eternal readiness to fight is the melting pot for the different [Israeli] skin-colors, religions, schools of thought, and [social] strata. Without this melting pot, nothing would be left of Israel, with the exception of the clergymen, the elderly, the sick... and Sharon!"[4]
A French translation of the article was published in the Cairo daily Le Progrès Egyptien.[5] A "refined" version was published in the English-language Egyptian Gazette.[6] In this version, the justification of the Holocaust was omitted, as were some of the anti-Semitic expressions, and the reference to Jewish barbarism.
[1] Al-Usbu' (Egypt), February 12, 2001. (Quoted in Al-Quds Al-Arabi (London), February 13, 2001).
[2] Mansour uses the term "Jewish peoples" frequently in his writing to note that the Jews are not a homogeneous nation.
[3] Here, Mansour is drawing a parallel between certain Jewish groups and the Egyptian Islamic terror organization Al-Takfir wa Al-Hijra, which means, in Arabic, Heresy and Emigration. Al-Takfir wa Al-Hijra members assassinated President Anwar Sadat.
[4] Al-Ahram (Egypt), February 13, 2001.
[5] Le Progrès Egyptien (Egypt), February 14, 2001.
[6] The Egyptian Gazette (Egypt), February 14, 2001.
