screen shot of Khaled Fahmi. Photo: MEMRI TV

An Egyptian historian has placed much of the blame for the flight of Egyptian Jews in the first half of the 20th century on the Muslim Brotherhood.

In an interview posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) that first aired on Al-Nahar TV, Khaled Fahmi states that “the Muslim Brotherhood bears much of the responsibility for the fleeing of the Jews from Egypt.”

During the 1930s and 1940s thousand of Jews fled Egypt. During World War II Haj Amin Al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, lived in exile in the country. While there he allied himself with Hitler and appropriated funds from the Nazis to the Muslim Brotherhood in order to print antisemitic propaganda. In 1945 a pogrom took place in Cairo’s Jewish quarter that left ten people dead and 350 wounded. After the establishment of the State of Israel thousands more Egyptian Jews were forced out of Egypt due to ongoing tensions between the two countries.

The full transcript of Khaled Fahmi’s comments is posted below (provided by MEMRI):

Khaled Fahmi: The Muslim Brotherhood bears much of the responsibility for the fleeing of the Jews from Egypt. All the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood… If you grab a copy of their Al-Nazir newspaper [from the late 1930s], the editor-in-chief of which was Salah Al-Ashmawi, you will see that there were many anti-Jewish articles – articles that did not distinguish between Zionism and the Jews. An article published in 1938 accused the Jews, among many other things… The article was titled “The Danger of the Jews to the Islamic and Christian world.” It accused the Jews of being the cause of British colonialism in India. It claimed that the real colonialists in India were the Jews, not the British.

Interviewer: This was in 1938…

Khaled Fahmi: Yes. There were many statements to this effect. The conflict in Palestine also left its mark on Egypt. There were big skirmishes in 1945. The Jewish synagogue in the Mosky neighborhood was burned down, grenades were thrown, grenades were thrown, and people died.

A video of the statements is posted below: