The New Criterion

After the military defeat of Nazi Germany the center of radical Jew-hatred shifted from Europe to the Arab Middle East. The foundation for an Islamic version of Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism had, in fact, already been created in Egypt and Palestine, right under the noses of the British colonial administration. The Muslim Brotherhood emerged from the war as the largest mass movement in the Arab world, with over one million followers and an armed paramilitary cadre of 40,000. The charismatic preacher Hassan Al-Banna launched the Brotherhood in 1928 as a vehicle for a religious awakening, calling on all Muslims to return to the purity of early Islam by rejecting the corrupting influence of Western political ideas and social customs.

By the 1930s, Al-Banna had found much to emulate in the western totalitarian movements in Germany and Italy. Like the Fascists and Nazis, the Brotherhood claimed to speak for the oppressed working class and the unemployed against predatory Jewish capitalism and British imperialism. To the Koranic narrative depicting the Jews as treacherous enemies, Al-Banna appended the modern Nazi doctrine that “international Jewry” was the spearhead of a worldwide conspiracy to enslave the German Volk as well as the Muslim Umma. Al-Banna arranged for the translation and distribution of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while elements of the Brotherhood’s paramilitary wing volunteered for active duty with the nascent Nazi war machine.

Hitler’s most effective Islamic messenger to the Arabs, however, was the Palestinian Haj Amin el-Husseini. In 1921, the British appointed Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (charged with overseeing the Islamic holy places). He soon became the preeminent Arab leader opposing the British mandatory administration. Some Arab nationalists were drawn to an alliance with Nazi Germany based on the political calculus that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But, for Husseini, it was a matter of deep ideological affinity. Even before Hitler came to power the Mufti expressed his admiration for the Nazis and their solution for the “Jewish problem”—at the time, expulsion from Germany—and sent delegations of young Islamists to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. Eventually the Mufti took up residence in Berlin, where he played an active role in the wartime extermination of European Jewry.

By all rights Husseini should have been tried and executed as a war criminal. In June 1946, however, the postwar French government allowed him to escape to Egypt, where he was given asylum by King Farouk. Al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood and other nationalist groups welcomed him as a returning hero. Al-Banna called Husseini a hero who “challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”

In the following years, Al-Banna and Husseini joined forces and turned to the task of eliminating the Jewish presence in Palestine. With 20,000 members organized in several dozen branches in the Holy Land, the Muslim Brotherhood cadres filled out the ranks of the Palestinian contingent in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The Palestinians lost that war and now call it their Nachba, an unmitigated national catastrophe, perpetrated, of course, by the Jews. Their present leaders insist that the world turn the clock back and give them historical justice (that is, the “right of return”) before the present Arab-Israeli conflict can be settled. But in the 1940s, Al-Banna and Husseini were preparing their own nachba for the Jews—not merely turning them into refugees fifty miles from their original homes, but extending to Palestine the Nazis’ final solution.

We owe it primarily to the German political scientist and journalist Matthias Kuntzel and to the American historian of modern Germany Jeffrey Herf for connecting the historical dots and showing that the concept of “Islamofascism” cannot be dismissed as a glib political epithet. In his path-breaking 2007 book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, Kuntzel argued persuasively that revolutionary anti-Semitism is at the core of twentieth-century Islamism and jihad, that this is no mere coincidence, and that there is a direct line from the Nazi-influenced Muslim Brotherhood and the Grand Mufti to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the present government of Iran. Herf wrote the forward to Kuntzel’s book, calling attention to the fact that this connection had so far been ignored by most scholars:

Unmistakable echoes of Nazism’s violent, paranoid conspiracy theories about the evil nature and vast destructive power of the Jews have been evident in the ideological tracts and political purposes of radical Islam since it’s crystallization during and after World War II in Egypt. Yet despite the obviousness of these lineages and echoes, many of the fine works of scholarship and government commissions on the subject mention this connection briefly and, in some cases, ignore it completely.

Herf has now written his own study, Nazi Propaganda in the Arab World, that will hopefully make it more difficult for commentators and government officials to ignore the affinities between radical Islam and Nazi eliminationist anti-Semitism. During the war, the Nazi regime distributed millions of copies of printed works and, through short-wave radio, broadcast thousands of hours of ideological propaganda to the Arab world. Herf has gained access to this previously classified record and analyzes the content of the propaganda offensive. He also adds to the existing scholarship on the activities of Husseini and other Arab exiles in Germany during the war years. Herf concludes that although the Nazis expected to win allies among the Arabs based on mutual opposition to the British Empire, they also sought to “extend Nazism’s genocide of the Jews.” The Nazis were aware of the radical Islamist tendencies represented by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Grand Mufti and this collaboration represented the “diffusion of ideology and of a meeting of hearts and minds that began from very different civilizational starting points.”

The broadcasts to the Arabs reveal, according to Herf, that the Nazis came to view Islam as an ideological parallel to Nazism’s revolt against Western political modernity. The Nazis postulated an affinity between National Socialism and the traditions of Islam as a religion of the community, not of the individual. Just as National Socialism was the creed of the German Volk, so Islam was the collective expression of the Umma—each stressing the common welfare against individual greed. The founding Islamists, Husseini and Al-Banna, also touted this symbiosis. As the Final Solution was in full fury, Husseini opened the Islamic Institute in Berlin in December 1942, with a canonical statement of the connection between Nazism and Islam as rooted in the Koranic prescription that “the most hostile people are the Jews.” As Herf concludes, “In wartime Berlin, pro-Nazi Arab exiles worked together with officials of the Nazi regime to rearrange and reinvigorate components of already existing elements of the religion of Islam and of Arab nationalism.”

The relevance of Herf’s and Kuntzel’s work to the present confrontation with Islamofascism should be obvious. If the West will not name the enemy—if it does not challenge the ideological roots of Islamism—it cannot win the struggle.