Nazi ghost still unexorcised in Islamism

Bataween
Point of No Return
11 April '10

On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, Lyn Julius considers how the lingering influence of Nazism still fuels Jihadist Jew-hatred in the Arab world in her review of Matthias Kuntzel's book: Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11:

Who said: “the victory of the Zionist idea is the turning point for the fulfilment of an ideal which is so dear to me, the revival of the Orient”?

Was it Herzl? Ben-Gurion? Jabotinsky? None of those. These words were spoken by Ahmed Zaki, a former Egyptian minister, on the fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in 1922.

For a mainstream Arab politician to pronounce his support for Zionism nowadays appears to be revolutionary and heretical. But in 1922, and into the 1930s, Egypt stood aloof from pan-Arabism and Islamist movements. Even in 1933 it allowed 1,000 Jewish immigrants on their way to Palestine to pass through Port Said.

In his passionate, perspicacious and articulate book Jihad and Jew-hatred, the German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel describes how fundamentalist discourse, with at its core, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism fuelled by conspiracy-theory propaganda such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, adopted the Palestinian cause of Nazism’s local henchman the Mufti of Jerusalem, insidiously took over Arab politics, and have driven them ever since. Even nominally secular leaders like Nasser and Arafat had been infected with Islamist ideas. Arafat was a disciple of Hitler’s ally the Mufti of Jerusalem, a distant relative, and Nasser had been brought up in Young Egypt, the para-Nazi youth group. Hamas, the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood with its blatantly antisemitic Charter, holds power today. As Kuntzel says, it is virtually impossible to graduate from Gaza’s Islamic university without being antisemitic.

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