Foreign Ministry decries Egyptian TV show predicting Israel’s destruction

The Foreign Ministry condemns a new Egyptian TV drama set in the year 2120 that predicts Israel’s destruction, as well as the breakup of the United States.

A Foreign Ministry statement says the series “is completely unacceptable, especially because the two states have had a peace treaty for the past 41 years.”

The Egyptian series “El-Nehaya” — Arabic for “The End” — is about a computer engineer living in a dystopian future dominated by cyborg clones. It is one of the many dramas and soap operas that air each night during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last week.

In the first episode, a teacher tells a class of students about “the war to liberate Jerusalem,” which he says occurred less than 100 years after Israel’s founding in 1948. The teacher says Jews in Israel “ran away and returned to their countries of origin” in Europe. He makes no mention of what happened to Jews in Israel whose families came from other Middle Eastern countries — roughly half the Jewish population.

A holographic map of a divided US is also shown, with the teacher saying that “America was the central supporter of the Zionist state.”

There was no immediate comment from the Egyptian government.

— AP