Alexandria, Egypt, August 31 – Mohammad El-Bir is your typical blue-collar Egyptian: struggling economically, hoping for political stability, and certain that Israel is the chief cause of the world’s problems. Pictures of the recent carnage in the Gaza Strip, however, have confronted El-Bir with a dilemma: if, as Hamas leaders claim, Israel’s actions there are Hitler-like, that means Hitler was actually responsible for killing Jews, a notion that flies in the face of the Holocaust-denying ethos that pervades the Muslim world.
“I have no problem believing the claims of Hamas, even though they are wretched pig-dogs betraying Islam and trying to undermine Egypt’s stability,” said the 30-year-old day laborer. “Because those claims are consistent with everything I have been conditioned to believe about Jews and Israel. But the problem is that if Israel is like Hitler and Hitler was right, that means Israel is right, and that just can’t be.”
El-Bir added that it is difficult for him to wrap his head around the possibility that Hitler initiated killings of Jews on a mass scale, since that notion could never be assimilated properly in his mind, but that only such numbers of Jews killed would be congruent with charges of Israeli genocide. If the casualty numbers from the Hamas-run Gaza health authorities are to be believed, approximately 2,000 Gazans died during Operation Protective Edge, meaning that invoking Hitler makes no sense.
“If Hitler didn’t really do anything wrong, then Israel being like Hitler is simply untrue,” continued the father of three. “Only if Hitler actually did terrible things does it make sense to mention him. I’m having a hard time with this one.”
El-Bir is not alone in his confusion, says Joe Goebbels, who studies media manipulation and public opinion in the Arab world. “There is no end to the contradictions an Arab must face in his encounters with news. Jews are supposed to be descended from apes and pigs, but these simian and porcine people have also somehow managed to outfight them despite being outnumbered, over and over again. Israel has a burgeoning high-tech industry, a flourishing democracy, and a successful economy that is simply out of place in the Middle East. So are the Jews subhuman, or are they superhuman, capable of controlling the media, the banks, and whole countries, without leaving a trace of evidence?”
“You know who else confronted those contradictory notions about Jews?” said Goebbels. “Hitler.”
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