Last year, your Chargé d’Affaires in Cairo closed the American stand on the basis of our report... We urge you to make clear to the authorities thatthere will be no United States stand in 2021, unless CIBF is hate-free.”
PARIS - In a letter to United States Ambassador to Egypt, Jonathan Cohen, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for InternationalRelations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, noted that, “We monitor the shelves of six Arab book fairs annually for incitement to hatred and violence. We send our findings to the Frankfurt Book Fair, wheremeasures are generally taken to denounce and ban the listed offenders, who violate the contract signed with Frankfurt.”
The letter recalled that, “Last year, the US Chargé d’Affaires in Cairo, Thomas H. Goldberger, responded to our report on the CIBF’s antisemitic textson display, stating: ‘On receipt of your letter, I immediately contacted the Egyptian Government, on the phone and in writing, to protest the presence of antisemitic materials at the CIBF and todemand that it take immediate action to remove the materials.’... ‘I also instructed my staff to close the Embassy’s booth at the CIBF, and we will not reopen,’... ‘and I have also brought thismatter to the attention of the Department of State’.”
The largest display of Jew-hatred is annually found at the recidivist stand of Egyptian publisher “Dar Al-Kitab Al-Arabi” (see their Facebook pagevideo presentation of the CIBF 2020 stand).
https://www.facebook.com/darelkitabelarabi/videos/216482112719328/?tn-str=k*F
This year, its offerings included:
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Masonic Plot to Dominate the World, by Mansour AbdelHakim.
Pawns in the Game: The Practical Implementation of the Protocols, by William Guy Carr (translated by Magdy Kamel).
Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler (edited by Farid Al-Falluji).
Mansour Abdel Hakim (left) author of the adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a guest holding the book.
The letter added: “The 2020 Cairo Book Fair’s Laureate was Gamal Hemdan. In 1967, he published The Jews Anthropology, in which he argued that ‘contemporaryJews who claim to belong to Palestine are not the descendants of the Jews who left Palestine’.”
“Mr. Ambassador, apparently your Embassy put out a congratulatory press release, stating: ‘It was apleasure to welcome Minister of Culture Ines Abdel-Dayem to the U.S. Embassy booth at the Cairo International Book Fair. Egypt has long been a center of culture and history and can be proud ofthe annual Cairo International Book Fair, the oldest and largest fair of this type in the Arab world. The Book Fair is a really special event’,"
Samuels observed, adding, “While no action was taken by the Fair authorities against Dar Al-Kitab Al-Arabi for its antisemitic texts, they did closethe stand of the prominent Egyptian publisher, Khaled Lotfi, who had received a five-year prison sentence for publishingThe Angel, the story ofAshraf Marwan - the high ranking Egyptian official who spied for Israel - now a Netflix film.”
The letter continued, “We are aware of your initiative that the Embassy pay for the preservation of the1200 year old Bassatine Jewish cemetery in a Cairo suburb. Sadly, many Jewish cemeteries around the world are desecrated due to such incitement as the books displayed at the Fair.”
The Centre urged the Ambassador “to make clear to the authorities that there will be no UnitedStates stand in 2021, unless CIBF is hate-free.”
For further information, contact Shimon Samuels at csweurope@gmail.com, join theCenter on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent directly to your Twitter feed.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish humanrights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the The United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council ofEurope and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).
