In “The Holocaust of the 21st Century,” published on his personal blog on Feb. 17, 2020, Mohamed Sherif Kamel suggests that the memory of the Holocaust is “controlling the minds of humanity” as part of “a planned and deliberate endeavour aimed at manipulating the gullible to accept the Zionist project.” He goes on to say that “The horrors of the 20th century Holocaust become a justification for a crime uglier than its predecessor, and the victim was thus transformed into a murderer and perpetrator of the 21st century Holocaust.”
The article has since been picked up by a number of Arabic media sources, including al-Meshwar (page 17), a Toronto-based Arabic newspaper with a long record of promoting antisemitism.
Just yesterday, B’nai Brith Canada exposed this same al-Meshwar newspaper for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and running a piece by a Hamas official.
Kamel is a co-founder of the Egyptian Canadian Coalition for Democracy (ECCD), which describes its mission as: “To create and mobilize an advocacy network that is committed to the universal values of freedom, justice, democracy, peace, prosperity, and rule of law, enshrined in Canada in the Charter, and brought to life by the Egyptian revolution.” Kamel is listed as the contact person for ECCD both on the group’s website and Twitter.
“It is shocking and bewildering that a leader of a group supposedly dedicated to democracy and Charter values would so callously abuse the memory of the Holocaust to spread dangerous mistruths about the world’s only Jewish state,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “World Jewry will never tolerate those who attack us through nefarious falsehoods about the State of Israel. It is irrefutably antisemitic and harmful to imply that the Jewish state – the only genuine democracy in the Middle East – and its citizenry have become modern-day Nazis.”
B’nai Brith has reached out to representatives from ECCD regarding this blog post. No substantive response was given.
The ECCD was founded in September of 2013, seemingly in reaction to the coup of July 2013 that deposed Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi and brought General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi to power in his stead.
Despite sensationalist claims of genocide and Nazi comparisons by anti-Israel radicals, the Palestinian population in the disputed territories has been rapidly increasing for a number of years. Israel has long supplied key resources and financial aid to the Palestinian population in the territories, despite the Palestinian Authority’s frequent misuses of aid money to support terrorism.
In June of 2019, Canada adopted the Working Definition of Antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The IHRA Definition includes “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as one particular manifestation of antisemitism.
Mostyn concluded: “One of the reasons why the Jewish community continues to expend so much time and effort on having individual governments, academic institutions and others adopt the IHRA Definition is precisely to prevent manifestations of antisemitism such as these.”
