CAIRO - Egypt’s culture minister yesterday blamed a conspiracy “cooked up in New York’’ by the world’s Jews for keeping him from becoming the next head of the UN’s agency for culture and education.
Farouk Hosny was defeated on Tuesday by Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova in a tight race for the position of UNESCO chair.
“It was clear by the end of the competition that there was a conspiracy against me,’’ Hosny told reporters at the airport upon his return from Paris.
“There are a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position,’’ he said.
Hosny’s candidacy raised an outcry because of a threat he made in the Egyptian Parliament last year to personally burn any Israeli book he found in Egypt’s famed Library of Alexandria. While he later apologized and Israel said it had withdrawn its opposition to his candidacy, several prominent Jewish activists spoke out against his UNESCO bid.
“It’s not on the eve of an election that one can change one’s whole personality and one’s whole approach to life,’’ said Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann wrote a letter opposing Hosny’s candidacy.
