Muslim Anti-Semitism's Nazi Roots Resonate with the Left

From the prolific, eloquent Melanie Phillips: Leeds University had shamefully cancelled a talk by the German scholar Matthias Kuentzel on the links between Muslim antisemitism and Nazism. His book, "Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11" comes out in November — and this week he finally delivered his paper to an audience of about 120 people.

In the intervening months, Kuentzel refined his original paper and brought it up to date. It is a brilliant and devastating piece of work. He framed it in the context of a Britain where — to the horror and amazement of Germany —an unholy alliance exists between the left and Islamic antisemites, giving rise in British discourse to a hardcore antisemitism which dehumanises and demonises Jews and which has a great deal in common with Nazi ideology. This, he says, is no accident.

Islamism, he says, was born during 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasser-ism but by the rise of Fascism and Nazism. It was established as a mass movement by the Muslim Brotherhood, which stands in relation to al Qaeda as the Bolsheviks did to communism. The Brotherhood is a revolutionary political movement focused almost entirely on Zionism and the Jews. It is inspired by two sources: the Koran and Islamic theology, plus Nazi doctrine and influences, using not only Nazi-like patterns of action and slogans but also, historically, Nazi funding.

Originally, the deranged European fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy was foreign to the Islamic view of the Jews. That particular collective libel was rooted in the Christian belief that the Jews killed God’s only son. Muslims despised Jews as second- class citizens but they did not see them as a global conspiracy. They do now — and that’s because of the influence of the Nazis. Key to this was the alliance during the 1930s between the Arab Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al Husseini, and the Nazis. And of particular importance was the Nazi radio station Radio Zeesen, which between 1939 and 1945 pumped out Nazi propaganda to the Arab masses in Palestine, skilfully mingling antisemitic propaganda with quotations from the Koran and Arabic music.
Kuentzel writes:

"The Mufti therefore seized on the only instrument that really moved the Arab masses: Islam. He invented a new form of Jew-hatred by recasting it in an Islamic mould. He was the first to translate Christian antisemitism into Islamic language, thus creating an ‘Islamic antisemitism’. His first major manifesto bore the title ‘Islam-Judaism. Appeal of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic World in the Year 1937’. This 31-page pamphlet reached the entire Arab world and there are indications that Nazi agents helped draw it up…

What we have here is a new popularized form of Jew-hatred, based on the oriental folk tale tradition, which moves constantly back and forth between the seventh and twentieth centuries. This kind of Jew-hatred is used today by the British group Hizb ut-Tahir."

This Nazi/Islamist propaganda also made an impact in Iran, where it reached a certain Ayatollah Khomeini:

"Even the German consulate in Tehran was surprised by the success of this propaganda.

Throughout the country spiritual leaders are coming out and saying ‘that the twelfth Imam has been sent into the world by God in the form of Adolf Hitler’ we learn from a report to Berlin in February 1941. So, ‘without any legation involvement, an increasingly effective form of propaganda has arisen, which sees the Führer and Germany as the answer to every prayer… One way to promote this trend is sharply to emphasize Muhammad’s struggle against the Jews in the olden days and that of the Führer today.’ While Khomeini was not a follower of Hitler, those years may well have shaped his anti-Jewish attitudes which in turn would later shape the attitudes of his most ardent follower Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

In other words, as Kuentzel writes, the belief that the Muslim hatred of the Jews was triggered by Israel’s existence or behaviour is yet another western delusion. The Muslim Brotherhood has ensured that the murderous prejudice at the heart of National Socialism lived on and gained even more influence in the Arab and Muslim world — and has also ensured that the deranged notion of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy has gained traction once again in Europe. As Kuentzel writes:

"Some observers claim that political concessions by Israel would be enough to stop anti-Jewish hatemongering within the Arab-Islamic world. They are wrong. For Islamists, the issue at stake is not the welfare of individual Palestinians but the abolition of enlightenment, reason, and individual freedom – achievements whose spread is attributed primarily to the Jews.

When even today Germans in Beirut, Damascus, and Amman are greeted with compliments for Adolf Hitler, this can hardly be Israel’s doing. When graffiti in Hampstead Garden Suburb combine swastikas with the words ‘kill all Jews’ and ‘Allah’ – what on earth has this to do with Zionism? Our historical excursion has, however, revealed that this combination is in no way accidental. The linkage of ‘kill all Jews’, ‘Allah’ and the swastika indicates a specific ideology, one that is connected both historically and ideologically with Nazism and needs to be opposed with equal determination."

But it is not. On the contrary, it has been embraced by a Left which has lost its moral and political bearings, and a political/intelligence establishment which is pushing the line that the Muslim Brotherhood are people we can do business with to fight al Qaeda.