-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-480637,00.html
World News November 15, 2002 Israel outraged by 'anti-Semitic' TV drama By Stephen Farrell and Issandr El Amrani MIDNIGHT in Ramadan, and televisions in homes and restaurants across Egypt flicker to life with the most controversial television programme in years. Knight Without a Horse have been running for just over a week, but it has already drawn protests from Israel and the United States for incorporating elements of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic tract exposed as a Tsarist forgery by The Times more than 80 years ago. Jewish groups called for the 41-part series to be scrapped even before the alleged offending material was aired, calling it a disgrace in one of the few Arab states to have signed a peace treaty with Israel. But Egyptian liberals fear that the strident protests — 46 US Congressmen wrote to President Mubarak urging him to scrap the programme — were handled clumsily, allowing the Government no way of saving face and creating a backlash from the programme- makers and Egyptian public. Nabil Osman, the Government’s official spokesman, said that judging a programme before it was aired was a form of “intellectual and emotional terrorism”. There is a long history of controversy between Egypt and America over anti-Semitism. When President Mubarak made his annual trip to Washington last year Jewish groups launched a campaign taking out full-page advertisements in American newspapers reproducing anti-Semitic cartoons that had appeared in the Egyptian press. American diplomats say that little has been done to restrain anti-Semitism in the state press, particularly as the Israeli army attacks on Palestinians, which Egypt says are the source of anti-Israeli feeling among Egyptians, have intensified and become more violent. Knight Without a Horse tells the story of the region from 1855 to 1917 through the reminiscences of one man who fought what are portrayed as Turkish, British and Zionist occupiers. Screened on the Dream satellite channel it is also transmitted on state televison and reaches a far wider audience than Egypt’s 69 million population. Its star, Mohammad Sobhi, accuses the Israeli lobby of manufacturing a controversy by misrepresenting the extent to which a 41-episode series deals with the Protocols, which he accepts are forged. “The work doesn’t talk basically about the Protocols, but it’s the story of the struggle of a nation against occupation and enemies,” he said. “Does anybody have the right to confiscate my thinking? Does anybody have the right to dictate what Egypt broadcasts without having watched the series?” The Protocols purport to be a series of documents written by a secret cabal of Jewish leaders outlining a plan for worldwide domination in the late 19th century. In fact they are widely accepted to be an elaborate forgery by Russia’s Tsarist secret police, who plagiarized an 1864 book by the French lawyer Maurice Joly, Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which attacked the despotism of Napoleon III, but made no mention of the Jews. The Protocols gained widespread credence before being exposed as a forgery in The Times, after they were published in London in 1920 under the title The Jewish Peril. Between August 16 and 18, 1921, the paper’s Constantinople correspondent, Philip Graves, wrote a series of devastatingly influential articles entitled The Truth about the Protocols: A Literary Forgery, comparing extracts from both books to show the plagiarism. Certainly in Cairo’s Al Mastaba cafe, where students were smoking nargila pipes and playing cards after watching the midnight screening, Tamer, a 27-year- old journalist, and his five friends were bemused by the fuss. Only one had ever heard of the Protocols until the fuss. “We have watched all the early episodes and so far it has all been about the struggle against the Turks and British, there has been nothing about the Zionists at all,” he said. Emotions ran high, however, when the conversation turned to Israel, with near unanimity that the two countries’ peace deal was now “dead”, a relic from the era before two intifadas and daily scenes of Palestinian deaths screened on Al-Jazeera television. The publisher Hisham Kassem, in his offices at the Cairo Times, sighs with frustration at the decision to allow such potentially divisive material to be transmitted. Although moved only to boredom by the uncontroversial opening episodes, he remarked: “It’s probably going to turn anti-Semitic and ugly, if he is after a mix of the original novel and the Protocols — we all know what they are. “But when it comes to Egyptian state television insisting on broadcasting this at a time when they are supposed to be actively involved in a positive way working for a settlement between the two countries, that is when you put a question mark.”The American reaction to confront Egypt’s beleaguered regime publicly was, he feels, “very dumb”. He said: “The Government could not back out of this one at a time when national feelings are very anti- Israeli. Blocking it or taking it off air was not an option.” Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. 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