Another Quote from Al-Banna (The Liberal Anti-fascist)

DVZ
CAMERA/Snapshots
19 February '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/02/another_quote_from_albanna_the.html

At a certain point, it becomes nearly impossible to give Tariq Ramadan the benefit of the doubt. His recent description of his grandfather and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, as an anti-colonialist and an anti-fascist is so demonstrably false that one has to wonder just how stupid Ramadan thinks Westerners are.

Does he think we have no translations of his grandfather's writings? Does he think we have no libraries where we can get our hands on these translations? Does he not know that when he makes outragous claims about Hassan al-Banna's alleged enmity toward colonialism and fascism that these claims will be checked by people who will actually, you know, read what al-Banna has written?

At the risk of boring our readers, Snapshots is providing yet another gem from the writings of Hassan al-Banna as translated by Charles Wendell, mentioned previously. In this passage, al-Banna expresses admiration for Adolf Hitler.

In an essay titled "To What Do We Summon Mankind?" al-Banna invokes Hitler to demonstrate the power of "patience, steadfastness, wisdom, and persistence" to bring weak political movements with "feeble resources" to the "pinnacle of success and fortune their leaders were hoping for." After listing the success of a few Muslim leaders to demonstrate this truth, al Banna writes:

And who would have believed that that German workingman, Hitler, would ever attain such influence and as successful realization of his aims as he has?

In his analysis of this quote in Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman writes accurately "Hitler was the only non-Muslim name in al-Banna's list of exemplary models."

In other venues, Frere Tariq has argued that he should not be held accountable for his grandfather's writings, despite his tendency to lay claim to al-Banna's legacy before sympathetic audiences. (This tendency is well documented by Caroline Fourest, in her text Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.)

The issue is not whether or not Ramadan should be blamed for his grandfather's writings. The question is why Frere Tariq offered such a distorted and whitewashed view of his the Muslim Brotherhood's founder? Ramadan was the one who brought al-Banna into the discussion in his New York Times article about the organization. Instead of distancing himself from the more troubling statements offered by his grandfather, he whitewashed them altogether.

Why would someone committed to pluralism, dialogue and honest discussion behave in such a way?

See related article: Tariq Ramadan, Your Grandfather Was a Colonialist

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Paul Berman on Nazi sheikhs in sheep's clothing

Bataween
Point of No Return
27 May '10

'A mishmash of Nazi ideas using Islamic rhetoric': that's how Paul Berman, in this interview with Guernica, describes the anti-Jewish ideology of the 1930s, spearheaded by the Mufti of Jerusalem, which primed the Arab world to abet the genocide of the Jews of the Middle East. Today we know this ideology as radical Islam or Islamic fundamentalism. Berman's latest book, The flight of the intellectuals, argues that one of radical Islam's key exponents, Tariq Ramadan, has, by suppressing the Nazi roots of the movement, seduced well-meaning western liberals into believing he is one of them: (with thanks: Eliyahu)

Paul Berman: The Germans had a research center at the University of Tübingen of orientalists, looking for ways to present the Nazi project in Muslim terms. German theoreticians and scholars were coming up with all kinds of ideas of their own, like, couldn’t they present Hitler as somebody perhaps granted a new revelation beyond Mohammed; or in relation to Shiism, couldn’t Hitler be presented as the twelfth imam? Of course, the Mufti didn’t think there was going to be a new revelation because that would be against Islam; Mohammed is the final prophet. But he did go along with recasting some German ideas in Islamic terms, the most important of these was how to think about the Jews. In the Nazi idea, we sometimes forget what Nazi antisemitism was. There were two aspects: one was biological. The Nazis were racists on biological grounds and the Jews were inferior. And the Germans wanted to exterminate these and other inferior races for the genetic good of the future of Aryan mankind. But there was another strand, which was paranoid, based on a paranoid conspiracy theory.

Jeff Herf is a great historian on this topic. The Nazis pictured themselves as under assault from the Jews. There was a danger that the Aryans, the German race, was going to be exterminated by the Jews, so the Nazis were fighting a war of self-defense against this gigantic Jewish conspiracy to exterminate Germany. The war against the Soviet Union and communism was really a war against Jews because the Soviet Union and communism were controlled by the Jews. On the other front, the Nazis were at war against the British Empire. The British Empire was likewise controlled by the Jews.

This was another element of the conspiracy. When America entered the war it turned out that America too was controlled by the Jews. So Nazis were fending off in their own minds this gigantic conspiracy. Of course, the meaning of this is that the Nazis were picturing Jews as a supernaturally powerful and demonic force. So the Nazis had to massacre the Jews simply out of self-defense. This is why, as the war went worse and worse for the Nazis and they needed more and more to send troops to go fight the Soviets or the Western allies invading from the West, instead they sent forces to exterminate the Jews. This was their doctrine. Now they, in collaboration with the Mufti and other exiles, began to present this whole series of ideas in Koranic and Islamic terms. Herf was able to turn up the actual transcripts of the broadcasts which had never been seen before.

(Read full article)

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