Today, EMET would like to express our profound gratitude to Hillel Neuer and UN Watch for its recognition and appreciation of the tremendous courage of our own Hussein Aboubakr Mansour in its decision to bestow him with the Per Ahlmark Award this past Thursday evening.

Named for the late leader of the Swedish Liberal People’s Party and Minister in the Swedish Parliament, Hussein embodies or surpasses the identical qualities of intellectual rigor and discipline, compassion for human rights, and willingness to take controversial and unpopular stances for the sake of the truth. Ahlmark, like Hussein, was a writer, intellectual and dissident, and also a proud champion of the state of Israel’s moral clarity and unquestionable right to exist, as well as a defender of the Jewish people against antisemitism.

Although  Per Ahlmark had to suffer the social consequences of going against the tide of the then-current trends of intellectual conformity in academia and in societal groups, which are ubiquitous today, he never had to withstand the severe physical torture that our own Hussein Aboubakr Mansour had to endure for his sin of going against the prevailing tide of antisemitism an anti-Zionism in his native Cairo.

When Hussein describes his childhood in Egypt, he explains, “I also grew up on stories about the great supervillains of all history, those who are existentially opposed to my national identity, religious faith, and moral heritage: the Jews. I learned that the Jews run international politics, the world’s economy, and the world’s mass culture and uses them to eviscerate humanity in general, and Muslim societies, in particular from their moral content. And the embodiment of such Jewish villainy is the state of Israel, Zionist  misanthropes who spend their lives scheming and planning how to kill and oppress more Palestinians.”

This toxic culture of antisemitism is all-pervasive within much of Egyptian society, despite the fact that Jerusalem and Cairo signed a peace treaty in 1979. Today, Hussein spends every ounce of his being, together with the rest of the EMET team, fighting this odious, hateful ideology. In Hussein’s own words, “The road to building a new culture of human rights and human dignity in the Middle East starts with throwing off the shackles of the delusions of conspiracy theories, the mystical hatred for Israel, and the philosophy of historical victimhood. To accept Israelis and Jews as equal partners and neighbors and to use such a new reality as the anchor from which we can reconstruct a healthy sense of shared humanity, particular identities, and political thinking.”

Says EMET’s founder and president, Sarah Stern, “We at EMET will always remain profoundly grateful to the good work of Hillel Neuer and U.N Watch and for their wisdom as recognizing that Hussein is the apotheosis of the voice of democracy, freedom, and the quest for human rights as well as from the liberation of the stale, tired voices of antisemitism and prejudice; and we will forever remain very proud of Hussein.

To listen to Hussein’s speech at the UN Watch event, please go here