The Nazism-Islamism Connection
Clifford D. May has reviewed Jeffrey Herf's new book on the links between Nazism and militant Islam:
Also overlooked is the historical context. In the 1930s, the mufti of Jerusalem was Haj Amin el-Husseini. He, too, despised Jews — there was not yet a state of Israel to despise. After participating in a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941, Husseini moved to Berlin. There he became Hitler’s ally, the “most important public face and voice of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda,” in the words of historian Jeffrey Herf, who adds: “Husseini was a key figure in finding common ideological ground between National Socialism, on the one hand, and the doctrines of Arab nationalism and militant Islam, on the other.”
Herf’s groundbreaking study, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, draws on archival resources not previously mined to explore the extent and significance of this collaboration. His nuanced conclusion: “Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda was neither an imposition of a set of hatreds previously unknown to the traditions of Islam nor a matter of simply lighting the match to long-standing but suppressed anti-Jewish hatreds.” Rather, the Nazis and their Arab partners drew on and emphasized “the most despicable and hate-filled aspects of the cultures of Europe and of Islam.”
They also added this audacious twist: They claimed they were the ones under attack. Their purpose, they insisted, was merely to protect themselves from a malevolent conspiracy. Over and over again, Nazi diplomats and their allies drove the message that Churchill had started the war against Germany “to expand British power,” and that Roosevelt was behind Churchill “as the exponent of world Jewry.”
Herf elaborates: “In Europe, the Nazis presented their policy of ‘extermination’ and ‘annihilating’ the Jews as a desperate and justified act of self-defense. In their propaganda directed at the Middle East, they urged Arabs and Muslims to take matters into their own hands and ‘kill the Jews’ before the Jews were able to kill them. In both its European and Middle Eastern dimensions, the propaganda rested on the identical logic of paranoia and projection.”
And here we are, more than a half century later, with the current mufti of Jerusalem fabricating crimes against Muslims for which Jews deserve to be put to death. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders openly declare their intention to annihilate Israel and exterminate Jews — claiming they, too, are acting in self-defense, and calling themselves a “resistance” movement.
The number of people who appear to be buying these fictions is not insignificant. Few scholars have examined the links between Nazi and Islamist ideas in the 20th century. Few journalists are examining their venomous legacy in the present era.
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