CAIRO: In an article critical of Culture Minister Farouk Hosni’s campaign to be the next director general of UNESCO, the Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine added fuel to the fire raised against Hosni’s candidacy.
A link reading “the racist who might head UNESCO on Foreign Policy’s website links to an August 24 article titled “Very, Very Lost in Translation by Raymond Stock.
The article condemns Hosni’s candidacy and the extreme anti-Israeli position of Egyptian academia.
“Indeed, the Hosni brouhaha is just the most recent demonstration of the extreme paranoia against Jews that exists in Egypt, writes Stock, differentiating between the Egyptian intelligentsia and the average Egyptian who, he says, is less prone to hard-line anti-Israeli sentiment.
He asserts that “Hosni s opinions about Israeli culture are par for the course among Egypt s intelligentsia, for whom 30 years of official peace with the Jewish state, the longest of any Arab country, have done virtually nothing to moderate its rampant Judeophobia.
To support this claim the author notes that “Egyptian cultural figures and academics are professionally barred from contacts with Israelis. Even the faculty senate at the American University in Cairo passed a resolution urging a boycott of Israeli scholars and schools.
The article summarized Hosni’s inflammatory statement in May 2008 to parliament that he would burn any Israeli books if he found them in Egyptian libraries. More recently he stated that this statement drew international criticism and a harsh editorial in Le Monde, a center-left French newspaper.
As Stock also notes Hosni, who if elected will be the first Arab to fill this post, later retracted this controversial statement and apologized for his words in an opinion piece in the French paper Le Monde. Hosni has also recently pledged to translate the literary works of two Israelis, Amos Oz and David Grossoman, into Arabic.
In addition to international concerns, pressure is also mounting from an unlikely source.
Some in Egyptian culture circles are critical of his rapprochement with Israeli culture. Other domestic opponents have claimed that the recent restoration of a Cairo synagogue is linked to efforts to promote Farouk Hosni’s candidacy.
However, Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, denied that the restoration of the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue, one of 13 in Egypt, was related to Egypt’s UNESCO candidacy
“The restoration of the Ben Maimon temple began over 14 months ago, before Egypt announced the candidacy of Farouk Hosni, he said in a statement last Thursday. He also took issue with recent internet claims that Egypt was mistreating local Jewish sites. This internet campaign has also been seen as an attack on Hosni’s candidacy.
Despite Hosni’s checkered past, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has quietly dropped objections to his candidacy.
His bid is also supported by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In July, Algeria withdrew its candidate leaving Hosni, an abstract painter, the sole candidate representing Africa. The final vote for the position will be held in October of this year.
Hosni has stated he will resign from his current post, one he has held for over 20 years, if he fails to win the UNESCO seat.
