The Azzam Pasha quotation refers to a statement made by Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the Secretary-General of the Arab League from 1945 to 1952, in which he declared in 1947 that, were a war to take place with the proposed establishment of a Jewish state, it would lead to "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades." The quote was universally cited for decades as having been uttered on the eve of the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the Arab states several months later. The source of the quote was traced by the Computer Scientist Brendan McKay to an October 11, 1947 article in the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom, titled "A War of Extermination", which included the quote, with the added words "Personally, I hop