Today's Egyptian antisemitism: Comparing Latrun incident to the Holocaust

Earlier this month, Israeli media revealed a terrible secret from the Six Day War. Yossi Melman tweeted:

After 55 years of heavy censorship, I can reveal that at least 20 Egyptian soldiers were burnt alive and buried by IDF in a mass grave, which wasn't marked & without being identified contrary to war laws, in Latrun. It happened during the Six Day's War.

Days before the war Egypt's Nasser signed a defense pact with Jordan's Hussein. Egypt deployed 2 commando battalions in the West Bank near Latrun, which was no man's land. Their mission was to raid inside Israel and take over Lod and a nearby military airfields.

Fire Exchanges took place with IDF troops and members of Kibbutz Nahshon. Some Egyptian troops fled, some taken prisoner, and some bravely fought. 

At a certain point IDF fired mortar shells and thousands of uncultivated dunams of wild bush in the dry summer were set on fire. At least 20 Egyptian soldiers died in the bush fire "the fire spread quickly in the hot and dry bush, and they have no chance to escape" I was told by Zeen Bloch (now 90 years) who was the military commander of Nachshon, a left-wing Kibbutz.

The next day IDF soldiers equipped with a bulldozer came to the scene, dug a pit, pushed the Egyptian corpses and covered them with soil. Bloch and some Nahshon members watched with horrors as soldiers looted personal belonging and left the mass grave unmarked.

Saleh Abu Muslim, an Egyptian writer in news site Elaosboa is comparing this incident with the Holocaust, which he is not sure really happened anyway.

When the word Holocaust is mentioned, one immediately thinks of the Holocaust against Jews and others by Nazi Germany and its allies led by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. Because of the genocide and the brutal Holocaust that the Jews were subjected to from 1935 until 1945, whether real or fiction, they are crimes of shame against humanity. Many scholars, historians and others believe that the Holocaust is a trick or a lie that is exploited by the Zionists to achieve their interests and blackmail the Western countries responsible for committing these crimes, and that is why those who deny the truth of the Holocaust by the Jews and their sympathizers are considered anti-Semites. ...

The Jews of the world are weeping and lamenting the burning crimes they were subjected to by Nazi Germany and its allies, and even calling for the prosecution of all those who deny the Holocaust and deny its occurrence, and they demand that Germany pay great financial compensation for the Jews who were exterminated. Yet here are the Israeli occupation soldiers and they practiced the same brutal crime against the prisoners and besieged Egyptian soldiers starting from the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars. ...After 55 years of blackout, the Israeli authorities now come to us to reveal to us that the Israeli occupation forces in 1967 burned and killed more than 80 soldiers of the Israeli forces.The Egyptian special forces during the June 1967 war in the Latrun area located between Jaffa and Jerusalem, when those forces were on a special mission to support the Jordanian army in that area. Successive Israeli governments since 1967 to reveal to us this horrific crime after the Israeli forces fired phosphorous shells in the middle of a barren desert area full of weeds and dry trees to be burned...

Let's make some things clear: The burning of the soldiers was an accident. It wasn't from phosphorus shells but regular mortars, according to Melman. 

The Egyptian soldiers were valid military targets under the Geneva Conventions. They were not innocent civilians, and they weren't prisoners of war. They were active combatants. 

The IDF was absolutely wrong both in burying them and in looting their belongings, no question. Those soldiers should have been punished. And the incident should not have been kept secret for this long. 

But comparing that to the Holocaust? 

Egyptians have every right to be angry over the incident and to demand answers. But using it as an excuse to minimize the systematic mass slaughter and genocide of millions of Jews is obscene. 

And even more obscene is that the editor of the newspaper felt that the writer was making a valid point. And that whenever such an obscene article is published in Arabic, there is no visible pushback from other Arabs.  

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