Soccer Dad

The nazi-islamist continuum

In the past Bernard Lewis has written:

European anti-Semitism, in both its theological and racist versions, was essentially alien to Islamic traditions, culture, and modes of thought. But to an astonishing degree, the ideas, the literature, even the crudest inventions of the Nazis and their predecessors have been internalized and Islamized. The major themes--poisoning the wells, the invented Talmud quotations, ritual murder, the hatred of mankind, the Masonic and other conspiracy theories, taking over the world--remain; but with an Islamic, even a Qur'anic twist.

The classical Islamic accusation, that the Old and New Testaments are superseded because Jews and Christians falsified the revelations vouchsafed to them, is given a new slant: the Bible in its present form is not authentic but a version distorted and corrupted by the Jews to show that they are God's chosen people and that Palestine belongs to them.1 Various current news items--the scandal over Swiss banks accepting Nazi gold stolen from Jews, the appointment of Madeleine Albright as secretary of state, even the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)--are given an anti-Semitic slant. Jewish world plots--against mankind in general, against Islam, against the Arabs--have become commonplace.

Matthias Kuntzel provided some historical details:

I would like to point out that the Mufti's so-called "Arab Revolt" took place against the background of the swastika: Arab leaflets and signs on walls were prominently marked with this Nazi symbol; the youth organization of the Mufti´s political party paraded as "Nazi-scouts", and Arab children greeted each other with the Nazi salute. Those who had to pass through the rebellious quarters of Palestine attached a flag bearing the swastika to their vehicles so as to insure protection against assaults by the Mufti's volunteers. [11]

Starting in 1933, the Mufti repeatedly offered to serve the German Nazi government. In the beginning, however, the Mufti's fight against Jews was supported in terms of ideology alone. It was not until 1937 that the Mufti's "Holy War" received substantive support from Nazi Germany in the form of financial assistance and the shipment of weapons. Klaus Gensicke writes in his dissertation on the Mufti's collaboration with the Nazis: "The Mufti himself admitted that it was entirely due to the money contributed by the Germans that allowed him at that time to carry out the uprising in Palestine." [12] Thus, Hitler's agents incited the anti-Jewish hatred of the Islamists in Palestine with slogans, weapons and money thereby encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

It was not until May 8, 1945, however, that the ideological approach between the Mufti, the Muslim Brothers and the Nazis reached its peak. This became obvious as early as November 1945. During this very month, the Muslim Brothers committed the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in all of Egypt´s history: The core of antisemitism had thus begun to shift from Germany to the Arab world.

Now Jeffrey Herf, a professor at the University of Maryland, is studying the connection (h/t MESI):

In the spring of 1942, officials in the American Embassy in Cairo began to send verbatim, English-language translations of the broadcasts back to the State Department in Washington. As only small fragments of the broadcasts remain in the German government archives and in the files of British intelligence, the Cairo Embassy files in the United States National Archives outside Washington, DC, are the most complete record in any language of these important documents. There remains much work to be done by scholars who read Arabic and Farsi to trace the continuities and discontinuities between past and present. Nevertheless, it is clear Islamism of recent decades echo some themes of wartime broadcasts.

In their Arabic-language broadcasts, the Nazis stated that Zionists had started the Second World War in order to establish a Jewish state and dominate the Arab world. In its propaganda aimed at Germans at home, the Nazi regime publicly asserted that it was "exterminating" the Jews of Europe. In the Arabic-language broadcasts to the Middle East, Arabic language announcers called on listeners to take matters into their own hands and "kill the Jews" in the Middle East themselves. Rather than translations of speeches by Hitler or Goebbels, it was a fundamentalist reading of the Koran that was crucial for justifying Jew-hatred with Muslim listeners. Husseini and others asserted that Jews had been the enemies of Islam from its inception. They presented Zionist goals in Palestine as only the latest of the Jews' efforts to destroy Islam.