Gamal Abdel Nasser

Carrying on with al-Ashqar, Gilbert devotes an interminable chapter on "the Nasser Years".

Nasser every now and again spewed out some vile rhetoric, and whenever he did the Israelis would note it and publish it about. At one point Nasser cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At several points he would claim that what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians was worse than what Hitler did to the Jews. Logically the maths didn't add up for that latter claim, so Nasser (infamously) gave air to Holocaust minimisers of such stripe whom Achcar (rightly) must flag as deniers.

Achcar proposes to apply "nuance" to all this. The Israelis kept using rhetorical trickery themselves, often comparing Nasser to You-Know-Who. In that light, why shouldn't Arab demagogues play tit-for-tat. Achcar says that the Protocols ref was a faux-pas which Nasser didn't employ a second time, and anyway it was all about European Zionists and that most Arabs knew it wasn't to be applied to the Jews among them at home. Achcar also claims that the Holocaust denialism also wasn't employed twice. He thinks Nasser's advisors advised the man that he was being an ignorant idiot in public. All those "ex" Nazis who found their way into Egypt (and Syria)? But but but the West were taking in Nazis too. The seizure of Jewish property in 1956? Temporary! But darn it, too many Jews didn't stick around for their property to be returned by that saint of a man, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

I just wonder about a pattern of "anti-Zionist" hostility that flares out into these bursts of MEMRI-worthy stupidity. And there are other laughable speeches in Nasser's output, like when he claimed that the Arabs had never been aggressors in their whole history. Just... LOL.

No, Nasser was not Hitler-On-The-Nile. But as I've noted elsewhere, if Nasser had defeated the Zionist Entity and upon it imposed al-qada, as he kept promising, the Jews in Egyptian-occupied Palestine had sufficient cause not to trust Nasser's magnanimity.

I might not finish Achcar's book which is starting to read like Fuller's. The first part of it was not wholly free of apologetic, but Nuance didn't take over the narrative, as is starting to happen in its second part. UPDATE 2 PM MST: okay, just finished it.