Egypt news official: Holocaust a U.S. hoax

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CAIRO, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The Holocaust was a U.S. intelligence hoax and the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis actually moved to the United States, an Egyptian state news official said.

"The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented," said Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi responsible for appointing the editors of all state-run newspapers.

"U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their counterparts in allied nations during World War II created [the Holocaust] to destroy the image of their opponents in Germany, and to justify war and massive destruction against military and civilian facilities of the Axis powers, and especially to hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bomb," Shihab-Eddim said.

He said the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II moved to the United States -- contradicting the accepted version of events.

His remarks came Sunday as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an independent Israeli journalist reported on the Fox News website.

The day's purpose is to remember the genocide that killed 6 million Jews, 2 million Roma and Sinti Gypsies, 15,000 homosexuals and millions of others by Germany's Nazi regime and its collaborators.

Morsi, who is attempting to quell anarchy spreading through three Suez Canal cities, had no immediate comment on the report.

His office said he was to leave Egypt Wednesday for a short trip to Berlin to seek urgently needed foreign investment.

Recently translated remarks Morsi made to pro-Palestinian Lebanese TV channel al-Quds referred to Jews as "the descendants of apes and pigs" -- remarks from Sept. 23, 2010, Morsi later insisted were taken out of context.

"Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war," Morsi said in the translation released this month by Washington's Middle East Media Research Institute.

"This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know -- these blood-suckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs," he told the TV channel while a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose party now rules Egypt.

Leading secular Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace laureate and former International Atomic Energy Agency director general, condemned Morsi's 2010 remarks and his recent assertion the comments were misconstrued.

"We are all aware that those statements were not taken out of context and that this discourse is very common among a large number of clerics and members of Islamist groups, ElBaradei said.

"Apart from the remarks themselves, I am calling upon the person who made them to courageously admit either the real stance he and the Muslim Brotherhood and their followers adopt, or how mistaken they had been for all those years," ElBaradei said.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, told FoxNews.com Shihab-Eddim's remarks should give other nations pause when evaluating their relationships with Morsi's struggling government.

"Obviously, if a person in that position makes that ridiculous claim it is of concern," Zuroff said. "The sad truth is that these views are relatively common in the Arab world and are the result of ignorance on one hand and of government-sponsored Holocaust denial on the other hand."

The Wiesenthal Center broadcast the 1982 Oscar-winning Holocaust documentary "Genocide," narrated by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor, on satellite across the Middle East and in Iran. The Iranian broadcast by opponents of the Iranian government had subtitles in Farsi and was streamed on Iranntv.com, run by France's opposition umbrella coalition the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has for many years called the Holocaust a myth.