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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

AIBU be absolutely horrified that this product is widely sold in Egypt?

141 replies

notamum3210 · 03/11/2015 08:18

Backstory: I'm half Egyptian and was recently there with family. We needed to buy some pesticide and this product was recommended by a local shop.
My fiance is certainly horrified. He posted this to reddit last night www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3r96k8/my_fianc%C3%A9_went_to_egypt_and_went_to_buy_some_bug/

Warning: there's a lot of awful commenting.

I know that casual anti-semitism is rife across the Arab world and even, shamefully, my extended family but even this shocked me. According to the shopowner, it's one of their topselling products and sold across the country. He also seemed to find it hilarious.

AIBU be absolutely horrified that this product is widely sold in Egypt?
OP posts:
shovetheholly · 03/11/2015 11:17

OK, I get it, you're winding me up deliberately. Grin

IKnowIAmButWhatAreYou · 03/11/2015 11:20

Out of interest I googled "Funny Hitler Pictures".

Oh Dear. Sad

Maybe worry about the attitude Westerners have to him before you worry about some Egyptian version of Raid, as the halfwits that find some of these funny are the ones that our kids will be at school with.

There are some truly, truly nasty and offensive ideas of "humour" out there in our country.....

NanFlanders · 03/11/2015 11:25

I think that's horrific OP. Not funny in the slightest.

babybarrister · 03/11/2015 11:28

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Owllady · 03/11/2015 11:38

I can't believe people are defending this, especially given the context

IKnowIAmButWhatAreYou · 03/11/2015 11:44

I can't believe people are defending this

Not so much "defending" on my part as "failing to give be bothered".

Sorry!

howtorebuild · 03/11/2015 11:45

I wonder if the German company is aware their product is being packaged that way?

LurkingHusband · 03/11/2015 11:46

wonder if the German company is aware their product is being packaged that way?

I wonder if it would be legal in Germany ?

howtorebuild · 03/11/2015 11:50

It may be worth you contacting someone in EU exports and flagging this up, OP.

TheCreepyContessaOfPlumperton · 03/11/2015 11:56

I went to an Arabic school in the Middle East (ME) and one day we were discussing WW2. My best friend at the time casually said that Hitler's one mistake was not finishing the job and there were lots of nods as if that was just accepted. We were 17, so capable of considering the matter. I challenged the statement (as in 'You don't really think that, do you?') but it was dropped shortly afterwards.

I think this is a fairly common way of thinking in the ME. I can remember a lot of anti-semitic jokes which were considered hilarious at the time ('90s).

To me the product is saying 'You can be just like Hitler and kill vermin'. Nice.

Archfarchnad · 03/11/2015 12:17

"I wonder if it would be legal in Germany ?"

The answer to that is very clearly no. There are very specific laws banning the use of Nazi symbols for anything other than historical documentation (eg a photo in a history book). A picture of Hitler raising his arm for advertising would be very clearly illegal.

squoosh · 03/11/2015 12:25

some people are clearly deliberately missing the point - the joke is NOT that Hitler is being ridiculed, the joke is that you can be like Hitler and kill cockroaches ....

Exactly.

SaskiaRembrandtWasFramed · 03/11/2015 13:27

YANBU, that is appalling. Maybe that's because of my delicate European sensibilities, but I happen to think the mass murder of millions of people doesn't stop being wrong when you leave Europe.

hibbleddible · 03/11/2015 14:46

It seems pretty anti Semitic to me: comparing cockroaches to Jews. I don't see how it could be much worse.

How is it that people think this is OK?

Puzzledandpissedoff · 03/11/2015 14:58

Am I the only one wondering what the reaction would have been if the "cockroaches" killed had belonged to just about any other community?

howtorebuild · 03/11/2015 15:01

As has already been posted, there were many groups killed by the Nazis.

squoosh · 03/11/2015 15:08

I'm not playing genocidal top trumps but one group was killed in far higher numbers than others.

BartholinsSister · 03/11/2015 15:12

That would be the Russians, right Squoosh?

shovetheholly · 03/11/2015 15:21

Look, the comparison of Jews to cockroaches, insects and rats is a well-established trope in Nazi propaganda. Animalisation is away of othering and dehumanising that opens the floodgates for atrocity. Not only were repeated verbal and visual comparisons made of Jewish people to cockroaches (along with depictions of them surrounded by vermin, to suggest dirt and defilement), but the Jews were transported to the camps in cattle trucks, the architecture of the gas chambers was based on that of American slaughterhouses, and (as someone has already correctly stated), Zyklon B - a pesticide used on mice - was employed as a lethal agent for mass murder. These kinds of reduction of human beings to animals were not incidental to the holocaust. They were fundamental to the Nazi's own understanding of this unimaginable attempt at exterminating a race that they had come to see as less than human.

Quote from Body Studies: An Introduction by Margo DeMello, p. 114.

AIBU be absolutely horrified that this product is widely sold in Egypt?
kesstrel · 03/11/2015 15:33

"According to Kuntzel, the Nazi Arabic radio service had a staff of 80 and broadcast every day in Arabic, stressing the similarities between Islam and Nazism and supported by the activities of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni (who broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda from Berlin). The Nazi regime also provided funding to the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, which began calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses in 1936. After the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler received telegrams of congratulation from all over the Arab and Muslim world, especially from Morocco and Palestine, where the Nazi propaganda had been most active.... Before long political parties of the Nazi and Fascist type began to appear, complete with paramilitary youth organizations, colored shirts, strict discipline and more or less charismatic leaders........

Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Mahdi Akef has denounced what he called "the myth of the Holocaust" in defending Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of it. The Egyptian government-run newspaper, Al-Akhbar, on April 29, 2002, published an editorial denying the Holocaust as a fraud. The next paragraph decries the failure of the Holocaust to eliminate all of the Jews: " With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust.... Many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud!! That is, it is a 'scenario' the plot of which was carefully tailored, using several faked photos completely unconnected to the truth. Yes, it is a film, no more and no less. Hitler himself, whom they accuse of Nazism, is in my eyes no more than a modest 'pupil' in the world of murder and bloodshed. He is completely innocent of the charge of frying them in the hell of his false Holocaust!!"

There's plenty more where that came from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world

PausingFlatly · 03/11/2015 15:38

What, like the "cockroaches" killed in the Rwandan genocide, Puzzled?

Yes, the word was used there too.

So I'm not sure what you were hoping the answer was, but I react pretty much the same whoever the genocide is against.

Shame there are so many examples to test my reactions to...

Canyouforgiveher · 03/11/2015 15:45

Am I the only one wondering what the reaction would have been if the "cockroaches" killed had belonged to just about any other community?

No, I was wondering the same. I am amazed at the responses on this thread. It is funny to more or less say that "this exterminates cockroachs as efficiently as Hitler exterminated the jews"? Great sense of humour there.

And hitler and the Germans killed lots of people (so did the allies) but there were very few groups where the stated objective of the Reich was to exterminate them - the russsians weren't among them.

Puzzledandpissedoff · 03/11/2015 15:48

Shame there are so many examples to test my reactions to

Yes, I completely agree. However in this particular case I believe it's pretty clear who was being referred to - as the shopkeeper's appalling reaction made all too clear

Thatpoorpig · 03/11/2015 15:56

Only read first page but staggered at how many posters can't see that the product makers are comparing Jews to insects and think the packaging is just a rubbish but harmless joke!

Thatpoorpig · 03/11/2015 15:58

I now see that the second page has brought it more sensible people, phew.

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