Matthias Küntzel: Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East Go to content Go to navigation Go to search × About the author Articles Islamism and Antisemitism and Nazism and the Left Antisemitism in Europe in the Middle East in Iran U.S. Foreign policy United Kingdom Israel / Middle East Middle East History Iran Germany and Europe and the U.S.A. and the Middle East and Iran and Islamism Books Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East Reviews Germany and Iran Reviews Jihad and Jew Hatred Reviews Events Bonn & the Bomb Reviews Deutsche Texte Textes en Français About the author ☰ Topics Hitler's Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East By Matthias Küntzel Yale University, November 30, 2006 Share on Facebook Tweet Send via E-Mail Download PDF Printer-friendly This paper was first presented at the international seminar series “Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective” under the auspices of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, New Haven, November 30, 2006. The video of this presentation and the discussion afterwards is here available. Nobody here will have forgotten the horrors of the most recent Middle East war, which took place this summer. But who still remembers the hopes of the previous summer, in 2005, when Israel, despite massive internal resistance, pulled all its troops and settlers out of Gaza? Back then many people hoped that the Gaza strip would develop into a model Palestinian region that could form the nucleus of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But what happened was the opposite. Almost immediately this territory was transformed into an outpost in a war against Israel, as new weapons dumps and arms factories sprang up everywhere. From Gaza, Islamists bombarded the Jewish state with hundreds of Qassam missiles. Why? It was the same story in southern Lebanon. Following the withdrawal of the Israeli army in 2000, it was turned into a deployment area: Hizbollah installed over twelve thousand rockets, supplied by Iran via Syria, near the Israeli border.[1] The area was turned into a base for aggression, with a well-planned system of fortified positions and network of tunnels, from which on 12 July 2006 an attack was launched on Israeli troops. Why? In both Gaza and Lebanon the possibility existed of a normalisation of relations with Israel, leading in all probability to an economic upturn. So why do Hizbollah and Hamas prioritise weapons and war rather than peace and welfare? Why are they spurred on in doing so by Iran, a country that has neither a territorial dispute with Israel nor a Palestinian refugee problem? This is the answer given by Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah: “Israel is a cancer in the region and when a tumour is discovered, it must be cut out.”[2] And here is what Khaled Mash’al, leader of Hamas, said: “Before Israel dies, it must be humilitated and degraded. … We will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”[3] While Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, promises that, “Very soon this stain of disgrace will be purged from the centre of the Islamic world – and this is attainable.”[4] My final example of this kind of statement comes from Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, the representative of the Iranian Supreme Leader, who stands even higher in the Iranian hierarchy than Ahmadinejad. On 16 November 2006 Rahimian declared that, “the Jew is the most stubborn enemy of the believers. And the decisive war will decide the fate of humanity… The reappearance of the twelfth Imam will usher in a war between Israel and the Shia.” [5] Many Western commentators ignore such pronouncements, because they are so crazy. But were Hitler’s speeches any less crazy? Hitler sincerely believed his propaganda and attempted, in his peculiar sense of the word, to “free” the world of the Jews by murdering them. Islamists too genuinely believe in their own hate-filled tirades. They celebrate suicide attacks on any and all Jews as “acts of liberation”. The fact that people who are not Islamists participate in this jubilation reveals a second similarity with the Nazi era. I am referring here to the impact of antisemitic brainwashing techniques, which have been refined since the days of Josef Goebbels. One of the instruments of this brainwashing is the Hizbollah satellite TV channel Al-Manar, which reaches millions of people in the Arab and Islamic worlds. Its popularity is due to its countless video clips, which use exciting graphics and stirring music to promote suicide murder. Indeed, Al-Manar has made the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – Hitler’s textbook for the Holocaust – into a soap opera. Episode by episode, the series peddles the fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy: Jews unleashed both world wars, Jews discovered chemical weapons, Jews destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, in short, Jews have brought nothing but death and destruction upon humanity. The most bloodthirsty scenes are brought into Muslim family homes by Al-Manar. In one such scene a Rabbi says to a young Jew, “we have received an order from above. We need the blood of a Christian child for the unleavened bread for the Pesach [Passover] feast.” In the following shot, a terrified youngster is seized from the neighbourhood. Then the camera zooms in on the child for a close-up of his throat being cut. The blood spurts from the wound and pours into a metal basin. Here mediaeval antisemitism is being drummed into the collective consciousness of normal Muslim families with a suggestive force comparable to that of Nazi productions such as the film “Jud Süß“. A child who has seen this scene of slaughter will be affected for the rest of his life. It will take generations to remove this mental poison from people’s minds. When the Hizbollah-provoked war with Israel broke out in summer 2006, this investment in mass antisemitism paid off. Think of the pictures of the dead civilians in Lebanon and of the children of Beit Hanoun, killed by a stray Israeli shell. When Israel’s army is compelled to defend itself, the results are not pretty for either side. But what is decisive is the context in which one views such images. Where the emotional infrastructure of antisemitism has been built up by a steady stream of propaganda over many years, the “meaning” of such images is self-evident. By such means, an eliminatory hatred of Israel and the Jews has been fostered on a mass scale, including in people who have nothing to do with Hizbollah. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who as leader of Hizbollah is responsible for Al-Manar, can feel satisfied. There is yet another point of contact with National Socialism – albeit a bizarre one. And that is Holocaust denial, espoused by the Iranian President with the acclaim of Hamas and Hizbollah. Here, either the dead are murdered a second time, since it is denied that they were killed the first time. Or the victims are subjected to antisemitic mockery, as in the Iranian cartoons, one of which showed Anne Frank in bed with Hitler. This is to us unimaginable malice, but it is nonetheless a part of Iranian foreign policy. I will return to this issue later. The fact is that not a single Muslim or Jew would have been killed this summer if Hamas and Hizbollah had decided to pursue peace rather than war. Once again Judeophobia has led to terrible suffering. Peace in the Middle East requires a struggle against this hate propaganda. But what is the reason for this hatred? Is it Zionism and Israeli policies? Or might it be that Judeophobia is an integral part of Islam? Why and how did antisemitism come to the region? These are the issues I want to address now. The approach I intend to take is a historical one. So my talk centres on four excursions into history. The first takes us back eighty years. What were the relations between Jews and Muslims like in the Egypt of the 1920s? Islamic modernism Prepare yourselves for a surprise: In the 1920s the Jews of Egypt were not isolated and hated, but an accepted and protected part of public life: they had members of parliament, were employed at the royal palace and occupied important positions in the economic and political spheres. The Egyptian population too were favourably inclined towards the Jews. “It merits emphasis”, reported a Viennese journalist, “that the Jewish shopkeeper and commission agent enjoy great popularity with the domestic population and are mostly considered to be very honest.”[6] How was this possible in a country where Islam was the state religion? Astonishingly, the century-long history of Islamic modernism is now entirely forgotten. This phase began at the start of the nineteenth century, reaching full bloom between 1860 and 1930. For example, in 1839 the Ottoman Sultan decreed equality for Jews and Christians and in 1856 this equality was established in law. This measure was motivated not only by pressure from the European colonial powers, but also by the desire of the Ottoman elite to draw closer to European civilization. Of course, the dhimmi status of the Jews meant that their situation did not improve everywhere and at once. Some Jewish communities in several Arab lands still suffered humilations. But at least in the urban centres, Jews were permitted to become members of Parliament, hold government posts and, after 1909, were recruited into the military.[7] In the 1920s the bulk of the Islamic elites no longer lived under sharia law. Kemal Atatürk’s regime abolished it in Turkey in 1924. In 1925 Iran began to secularise under Reza Shah. In Egypt, sharia law only applied in the personal sphere, otherwise the legal code was of European provenance.[8] In this period rather than the nation being a sub-unit of Islam, Islam was a sub-unit of the nation, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews enjoyed equal rights.[9] The Zionist movement was likewise accepted with an open mind. For example, the editor of the Egypt’s daily al-Ahram wrote: “The Zionists are necessary for this region. The money they will bring in, their intelligence and the diligence which is one of their characteristics will, without doubt, bring new life to the country.” [10] In the same vein, the former Egyptian minister Ahmed Zaki wrote in 1922 that, “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”. Thus in 1926 the Egyptian government extended a cordial welcome to a Jewish teachers association delegation from the British mandate territory. Later, students from the Egyptian University travelled on an official visit to Tel Aviv to take part in a sports competition there. When the conflict in Palestine escalated in 1929, the Egyptian Interior Ministry ordered its press office to censor all anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish articles.[11] Even in 1933, the Egyptian government allowed 1,000 new Jewish immigrants to land in Port Said on their way to Palestine.[12] No wonder, therefore, that the German Nazi party’s Egyptian section was in despair in 1933. “The level of education of the broad masses is not advanced enough for the understanding of race theory”, declared a spokesman for the Cairo Nazis in 1933. “An understanding of the Jewish threat has not yet been awakened here.”[13] To summarize our first trip into history: thirty years after the founding of the Zionist movement and twenty years before the creation of the State of Israel relations between Jews and Muslims in Egypt, Turkey and Iran were better than ever before. This fact shows how flexibly the Koran can be interpreted in a given historical situation. Admittedly, under European influence Christian antisemitism had entered the region, but its influence was restricted to Christian circles in the East. It was during the 1930s that this began to change. And that brings me onto the second historical excursion. Islamist reaction To Islamic traditionalists the advance of modernity was an outrage. Their resistance laid the groundwork for what is commonly described nowadays as the “Islamist” movement, that is to say a movement combining Islamic fundamentalism with jihad in the sense of permanent holy war. It was from the outset both anti-modern and anti-Jewish. Its three leading protagonists were Amin el-Husseini, appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921, the Syrian Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, killed in 1934 by British soldiers, and the charismatic Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.[14] Their common teacher was Rashid Rida, a religious scholar heavily influenced by the Saudi Wahhabites. Rida’s three prominent students followed their master in demanding a return to sharia law and traditional Islam, so as to drive Western civilization from Palestine and the Arab world, before going on to defeat it throughout the world. Their Judeophobia was a declaration of war on the invasion of the world of Islam by liberal ideas. Nowhere was the impact of this invasion so divisive as in Palestine. As the Mufti complained to a conference of religious teachers, “… They [i.e. the Jews] have also spread here their customs and usages that are opposed to our religion and to our whole way of life. Above all, our youth is being morally shattered. The Jewish girls who run around in shorts demoralize our youth by their mere presence.” [15] For el-Husseini, “Jerusalem” was the focal point of the “rebirth of Islam” in its pure version, and Palestine was the centre from which the struggle against modernity and the Jews was to start. However, for the time being the anti-Jewish pogroms, which the Mufti organized in Palestine in the 1920s, found no echo in the rest of the Arab world. To sum up: while the conflict between Zionism and anti-Zionism appeared on the surface to be about land, it concealed within it a far bigger conflict, over the question of how to relate to modernity. While the modernisers as a rule sought compromise with the Zionists, the Islamists denounced any attempt to reach an understanding with the Jews as treachery. In 1937 Britain put forward the first two-state solution in the history of the Middle East conflict in the form of the Peel Plan. This compromise was initially supported not only by the Zionists, but also by moderate Palestinians and several Arab governments. The Mufti on the other hand decisively rejected the partition plan and would eventually succeed in imposing his view. However, until mid-1937 the balance of forces between the two currents was more or less in equilibrium. But thereafter the picture began to change. Now Nazi Germany threw its weight onto the side of the Islamists. Which brings me on to my third topic. Islamism and National Socialism For the Mufti, Nazi Germany was more than simply an ally in the struggle against France and Britain; he knew the nature of the Nazi regime and for that very reason was seeking an alliance with it as early as spring 1933. Berlin was at first dismissive. On the one hand, Hitler had already stated his belief in the “racial inferiority” of the Arabs in Mein Kampf while on the other, the Nazis were extremely anxious not to jeopardise British appeasement. In June 1937, however, the Nazis changed course. The trigger was the Peel Plan’s two-state solution. Berlin wanted at all costs to prevent the birth of a Jewish state and thus welcomed the Mufti’s advances. Arab antisemitism would now get a powerful new promoter. A central role in the propaganda offensive was played by a Nazi wireless station, now almost totally forgotten. Since the 1936 Berlin Olympics a village called Zeesen, located to the south of Berlin, had been home to what was at the time the world’s most powerful short-wave radio transmitter. Between April 1939 and April 1945, Radio Zeesen reached out to the illiterate Muslim masses through daily Arabic programmes, which also went out in Persian and Turkish. At that time listening to the radio in the Arab world took place primarily in public squares or bazaars and coffee houses. No other station was more popular than this Nazi Zeesen service, which skilfully mingled antisemitic propaganda with quotations from the Koran and Arabic music. The Second World War allies were presented as lackeys of the Jews and the picture of the “United Jewish Nations” drummed into the audience. At the same time, the Jews were attacked as the worst enemies of Islam. “The Jew since the time of Mohammed has never been a friend of the Muslim, the Jew is the enemy and it pleases Allah to kill him”.[16] Since 1941, Zeesen’s Arabic programme had been directed by the Mufti of Jerusalem who had emigrated to Berlin. No less important than this technical innovation was the fact that the Mufti invented a new form of Judeophobia by recasting it in an Islamic mould. The Mufti wanted to “unite all the Arab lands in a common hatred of the British and Jews”, as he wrote in a letter to Adolf Hitler. But European antisemitism had proved an ineffective tool in the Arab world. Why? Because the European fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy was totally foreign to the original Islamic view of the Jews. Only in the legend of Jesus Christ did the Jews appear as a deadly and powerful force who allegedly went so far as to kill God’s only son. Islam was quite a different story. Here it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who in Medina murdered the Jews. As a result, the characteristic features of Christian antisemitism did not develop in the Muslim world. There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil. Instead, the Jews were treated with contempt or condescending tolerance. This cultural inheritance made the idea that the Jews of all people could represent a permanent danger for the Muslims and the world seem absurd. The Mufti therefore seized on the only instrument that really moved the Arab masses: Islam. He was the first to translate Christian antisemitism into Islamic language, thus creating an “Islamic antisemitism”. His first major manifesto bore the title “Islam-Judaism. Appeal of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic World in the Year 1937”. This 31-page pamphlet reached the entire Arab world and there are indications that Nazi agents helped draw it up. Let me quote at least a short passage from it: “The struggle between the Jews and Islam began when Muhammed fled from Mecca to Medina… The Jewish methods were, even in those days, the same as now. As always, their weapon was slander… They said that Muhammed was a swindler… they began to ask Muhammed senseless and insoluble questions… and they endeavoured to destroy the Muslims… If the Jews could betray Muhammed in this way, how will they betray Muslims today? The verses from the Koran and Hadith prove to you that the Jews were the fiercest opponents of Islam and are still trying to destroy it.” What we have here is a new popularized form of Judeophobia, based on the oriental folk tale tradition, which moves constantly back and forth between the seventh and twentieth centuries. Classical Islamic literature had as a rule treated Muhammed’s clash with the Jews of Medina as a minor episode in the Prophet’s life. The anti-Jewish passages in the Koran and Hadith had lain dormant or were considered of little significance during previous centuries. These elements were now invested with new life and vigour. Now the Mufti began to ascribe a truly cosmic significance to the allegedly hostile attitude of the Jewish tribes of Medina to the Prophet. Now he picked out the occasional outbursts of hatred found in the Koran and hadith and drummed them relentlessly into the minds of Muslims at every available opportunity – including via the Arabic short-wave radio station in Berlin. Radio Zeesen was a success not only in Cairo; it made an impact in Tehran as well. One of its regular listeners was a certain Ruhollah Khomeini. When in the winter of 1938 the 36-year-old Khomeini returned to the Iranian city of Qom from Iraq he “had brought with him a radio… truncated (23,191 more characters in archive)