Historians run out of excuses for Arab-Nazi alliance

Bataween
Point of No Return
21 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

Many academics have hitherto given a free pass to the Arab Middle East, dressing up its collaboration with the Nazis as pragmatic 'anti-colonialism'. But leftist and liberal conventional wisdom has been unravelling in the face of irrefutable evidence that Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred was, and remains, ideological. In this interview with Karl Pfeifer, first posted on Harry's Place, Professor Jeffrey Herf is convinced that a paradigm shift is taking place.

You have been to the conference “Arab responses to Fascism and Nazism” at Tel Aviv University at the end of May. What did you experience?

JH: I saw historians of the modern Middle East having great difficulty sustaining a now well-established paradigm of explanation in the face of challenges coming mostly from historians of Nazism as well as Israeli historians of the Arab and Islamist politics. As the historian of science Thomas Kuhn argued in 1962 in his classic work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” scholars cling to established paradigms and are often fiercely resistant to evidence that does not support them. This, he argued, was the case in the history of physics. Today I think it is also the case as advocates of the paradigm whose key words are “third world,” “anti-imperialism,” “Orientalism,” “sub-altern studies” and in the case of the Middle East, “anti-Zionism” tied themselves in knots when faced with clear evidence that some very important Arab, Palestinian and Islamist leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, enthusiastically, willingly and effectively collaborated with the Nazi regime, shared its hatred of the Jews as Jews, and played a major role the cultural fusion of Nazi and Islamist- not Islamic- forms of anti-Semitism.

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Nazi propaganda in the Arab world by Jeffrey Herf

Bataween
Point of No Return
14 February '10

What is remarkable about this interview with Jeffrey Herf, author of Nazi propaganda for the Arab world, is that it was conducted in an Egyptian newspaper, al-Masry-al-Youm. The book's findings are best summed up by Bassam Tibi of Cornell University, who writes on the flyleaf: "The traces of Germany's Nazi antisemtism disclosed in this groundbreaking analysis persist, despite the Islamization of this ideology":

"Jeffrey Herf, professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park, recently authored Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, published by Yale University Press. In 2006 he published The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust. Al-Masry Al-Youm spoke with Herf to discuss his latest publication.

Al-Masry Al-Youm: The West in general uses the term anti-Semitism, although both Arabs and Jews are Semitic. Are there other terms that are more apt?

Jeffrey Herf: The answer to this and other questions are in my book, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. An entire chapter explores the extensive efforts made by the Nazi regime to avoid the use of the term "anti-Semitism." It was, its officials stressed, a regime animated by antagonism toward the Jews but not towards Arabs and Muslims in general. The term anti-Semitism has long entered academic discourse to refer to hatred of Jews.

Al-Masry: Most Arab historians agree that the Nazis did not contribute great ideas that grew in the region, but you posit the opposite. What evidence supports your position?

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