Free Republic

CAIRO—Leading Egyptian political parties will back a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) for the assembly's speaker, with another Islamist group and a liberal party taking the deputy posts, an FJP official said on Monday. The prime task of the new parliament, the first elected since an uprising swept Hosni Mubarak from power last year, will be to pick a 100-strong assembly to write a new constitution. Liberals fear that sweeping gains by Islamists in elections will put faith-based parties in the driving seat and lead to more religious strictures. Islamists insist they want an...

BUDAPEST — A leader of Egypt’s top secular party says the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were “made in the USA,” the Holocaust is “a lie” and Anne Frank’s memoir is “a fake” — comments sure to roil the post-revolution political debate in the Arab world’s most populous country. Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt's Wafd Party, made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times last week while in the Hungarian capital attending the Conference on Democracy and Human Rights. He denied that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II.