Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11

Jeffrey Goldberg’s review of Matthias Küntzel’s new book “Jihad and Jew-Hatred:  Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11” is worth reading in its entirety, and the book he reviews seems essential as well: 

One day in Damascus not long ago, I visited the understocked gift shop of the Sheraton Hotel, looking for something to read. There wasn’t much: pre-owned Grishams, a hagiography of Hafez-al-Assad, an early Bill O’Reilly (go figure) and a paperback copy of “The International Jew,” published in 2000 in Beirut.

“The International Jew” is a collection of columns exposing the putative role of Jews in such fields as international finance, world governance and bootlegging. . . .  These columns, which are based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — they are a plagiary of a forgery, in other words — were first published in Henry Ford’s’s Dearborn Independent more than 80 years ago.

Next to “The International Jew” was a copy of “The Bible Came From Arabia,” a piece of twaddle that suggests the Jews are not Jews and Israel isn’t Israel. And then there was a pamphlet called “Secrets of the Talmud.”  Not knowing these secrets (I was raised Reform), I started reading.  The Talmud apparently teaches Jews how best to demolish the world economy and gives Jews the right to take non-Jewish women as slaves and rape them.

The anti-Semitic worldview, generally speaking, is fantastically stupid. . . .  Anti-Semitic conspiracy literature not only posits crude and senseless ideas, but also tends to be riddled with typos, repetitions and gross errors of grammar, and for this and other reasons I occasionally have trouble taking it seriously.

The German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed.  His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. 

And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews — intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs — have become scandalously ubiquitous. . . .

The question is not only why, of course, but how:  how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse?. . . . Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument:  the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.

He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The story of the mufti is a familiar one:  he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator.  He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. . . .

Hassan al-Banna did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner, but through the 1930s, his movement, aided by the Germans, led the drive against not only political Zionism but Jews in general. “This burgeoning Islamist movement was subsidized with German funds,” Küntzel writes. . . .

Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. . . .  Küntzel argues that we should see men like [former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz] Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

The 2007 London Book Festival named Kuntzel’s book as the grand prize winner of its annual competition honoring books “worthy of greater attention from the international publishing community.”