The television series, Khayber, celebrates the victory of Muhammad’s Muslim army over the Jewish tribes living in northern Arabia in the battle of Khaybar in 629 C.E. According to most Islamic sources, the Khayber story ends with the slaughter of thousands of Jewish men, women and children. The vanquished Jews were forced thereafter to hand over half their produce to the Muslims until later expelled by the Caliph Umar.

The ZOA has noted that Egypt is a signatory of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits the “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” and should be held accountable for the broadcasting and dissemination of this series.


The series is explicitly intended to demonize the Jews as an alien race hostile to Muslims and the welfare of the world. According to the series’ script-writer, Yusri Al-Jindy, “The goal of the series is to expose the naked truth about the Jews and stress that they cannot be trusted …I think it is time to expose them [the Jews] even in America itself. I am confident that the United States will realize that it paid a high price for supporting them.” Anticipating a charge of anti-Semitism Al-Jindy said that, “The charge of anti-Semitism is an out­dated trend, and in fact it is a lie that Jews use against any­one who tries to expose their naked truth and their conspiracies.” Al-Jindy is also the author of The Wandering Jew, which was banned in Egypt in the 1980s.

Khayber is produced by the Qatari company Echo Media Qatar which, in 2010, produced a television series, The Collapse of the Caliphate, which blamed Jews for conspiring with the enemies of the Ottoman Sultan to dismember the Caliphate, the Islamic empire administered for several centuries by the Ottomans. A report in the Qatari newspaper Al-Raya states that the series focuses “on the social, economic and religious characteristics of the Jews including politics and conspiracies and how they dominate and control tribes.” A report on Al Jazeera this week described Khayber as “the most important feature of the Islamic-Jewish fight. Muslims always raise its name in their rallies against Israel because it constitutes a memory of a harsh defeat for the Jews who lived in the Arabian Peninsula during the time of prophet.”

The promotion of anti-Semitic themes in the Egyptian media has been a long-standing and ominous problem. In 2002-2003, Egyptian television produced a 40-part series, Rider Without a Horse, dramatizing the classic anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The program depicts Jews murdering a gentile child to use his blood in making of Passover matzah.

The dissemination of poisonous anti-Semitism in a Middle East already awash in it is a serious development that cannot simply be ignored,” said ZOA National President Morton Klein.

“This vicious and venomous Egyptian TV series calls for practical action. We call upon the Obama Administration to hold the Morsi regime to the assurances it offered when it entered office that it will uphold the ways of peace and not act inconsistently with its obligations to maintain peace in the region.
“To broadcast and disseminate blood-curdling genocidal fantasies of Muslims slaughtering Jews is obviously and blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-peace,” Klein said. “It is clear: Egypt must be held accountable, as must any country that broadcasts it.

“In view of President Morsi’s own ugly record of ugly anti-Semitism, as outlined above, it will clearly require firm U.S. and international pressure on Cairo to ban the series. If the U.S. fails to demand these things, it will only show that the production of the most obscene hatred carries no U.S. penalty,” added Klein.