Recorded Jan­u­ary 27, 2008
MP3: Side 1 | Side 2
REALAUDIO

Flesh­ing out the grow­ing For The Record archives about Islamic fas­cism, this pro­gram sets forth the explic­itly Nazi ori­gins of the vir­u­lent anti-Semitism dom­i­nat­ing much of the Islamic world. Although the Koran pro­vides a foun­da­tion for Mus­lim anti-Semitism, the notion of Jews as a world dom­i­nat­ing, sin­is­ter power elite has its ori­gins with the Third Reich’s effec­tive liai­son with the Arab and Mus­lim worlds. Work­ing with the fas­cist Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem), the Third Reich suc­cess­fully pro­mul­gated the Euro­pean brand of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Mus­lims. In addi­tion to direct pay­ments to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the Third Reich estab­lished a radio sta­tion at Zeesen, that suc­cess­fully indoc­tri­nated a gen­er­a­tion of Mus­lim cler­ics and activists with the world­view pro­mul­gated in the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. Hav­ing arisen at the same time as Nazism, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood por­trayed humanity’s ills as stem­ming from a world­wide Jew­ish con­spir­acy, and this stance was rein­forced by the Nazi radio ser­vice. The suc­cess of the Third Reich in both its above ground and under­ground phases has laid the ground­work for a vir­u­lent Islamic anti-Semitism, the suc­cess of which can be mea­sured by a recent Lon­don Times poll that found that 46% of British Mus­lims felt that Jews were con­spir­ing with Freema­sons to con­trol the media and pol­i­tics. More than a third of British Mus­lims felt that Jews in Britain con­sti­tuted an appro­pri­ate tar­get for vio­lent attacks!

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The influ­ence of the Radio Zeesen ser­vice on the young Ruhol­lah Khome­ini, who led the Islamic rev­o­lu­tion in Iran; the influ­ence of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood on Khome­ini; the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s mint­ing of sui­ci­dal jihadism; the active cen­sor­ship within insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing that is brought to bear against any­one will­ing to con­front, ana­lyze and crit­i­cize Islamic anti-Semitism.

1. Among the many dis­turb­ing points of infor­ma­tion in this lec­ture is the fact that more than a third of British Mus­lims polled felt that British Jews rep­re­sented legit­i­mate tar­gets for attacks! Almost half felt that Jews were actively con­spir­ing with Freema­sons to con­trol the media and pol­i­tics. This view­point is a direct inher­i­tance of Nazi ide­ol­ogy and reflects the Nazi activism within the Mus­lim com­mu­nity before, dur­ing and after World War II. (Among the pro­grams that high­light this ide­o­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion is FTR#601, which presents the Hamas char­ter. Hamas is an off­shoot of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.) “ . . .Finally, an opin­ion poll of 2006—according to the [Lon­don] Times—‘revealed that a hor­ri­fy­ing 37 per cent of Mus­lims polled believed that the Jew­ish com­mu­nity in Britain was a legit­i­mate tar­get; and no fewer than 46% thought the Jew­ish com­mu­nity was in league with Freema­sons to con­trol the media and pol­i­tics. . . “
(“Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Anti­semitism in the Mid­dle East” by Matthias Kuntzel; A lec­ture given at the Uni­ver­sity of Leeds.)

2. Of pri­mary impor­tance in Kuentzel’s analy­sis is the Islam­o­fas­cist Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, whose leader Has­san al-Banna minted the sui­ci­dal genre of jihadist atti­tude. (For more about the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 343, 455, 473, 537.) “ . . . This is shown by the exam­ple of She­hzad Ten­weer. With his ‘We love death the way you love life’ he was plac­ing him­self in the direct tra­di­tion of Has­san al-Banna, who founded the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in 1928. Ten years later, in 1938, Has­san al-Banna pub­lished his con­cept of jihad in an arti­cle enti­tled ‘The Indus­try of Death’ which was to become famous. Here, the term ‘Indus­try of Death’ denotes not some­thing hor­ri­ble but an ideal. Al-Banna wrote: ‘Only to a nation that per­fects the indus­try of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eter­nal grace in the life to come.’ This slo­gan was enthu­si­as­ti­cally taken up by the ‘Troops of God,’ as the Mus­lim Broth­ers called them­selves. As their bat­tal­ions marched down Cairo’s boule­vards in semi-fascist for­ma­tion they would burst into song: ‘We are not afraid of death, we desire it. . . . Let us die to redeem the Mus­lims!’ . . .” (Idem.)

3. Next, Kuentzel presents the ori­gin of Islamic anti-Semitism. Between the two world wars, the Grand Mufti launched a num­ber of anti-Semitic pogroms in the British pro­tec­torate of Pales­tine. Even­tu­ally ele­vated to the rank of gen­eral in the Waf­fen SS, the Grand Mufti was the first leader of the Pales­tin­ian national move­ment. (For more about the Grand Mufti, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 354, 414, 416.) The anti-Semitic stance was jus­ti­fied as fol­low­ing an exam­ple set by Mohammed, who expelled two Jew­ish tribes from Med­ina and exter­mi­nated another Jew­ish tribe. “ . . . The start­ing shot for this cam­paign, which estab­lished the Broth­er­hood as an anti­se­mitic mass move­ment, was fired by a rebel­lion in Pales­tine directed against Jew­ish immi­gra­tion and ini­ti­ated by the noto­ri­ous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. The Broth­er­hood orga­nized mass demon­stra­tions in Egypt­ian cities under the slo­gans ‘Down With the Jews!’ and ‘Jews Get Out of Egypt and Pales­tine!’ Their Jew-hatred drew on the one hand on Islamic sources. First, Islamists con­sid­ered, and still con­sider, Pales­tine an Islamic ter­ri­tory, Dar al-Islam, where Jews must not run a sin­gle vil­lage, let alone a state. Sec­ond, Islamists jus­tify their aspi­ra­tion to elim­i­nate the Jews of Pales­tine by invok­ing the exam­ple of Muham­mad, who in the 7th cen­tury not only expelled two Jew­ish tribes from Med­ina, but also beheaded the entire male pop­u­la­tion of a third Jew­ish tribe, before pro­ceed­ing to sell all the women and chil­dren into slav­ery. Third, they find sup­port and encour­age­ment for their actions and plans in the Koranic dic­tum that Jews are to be con­sid­ered the worst enemy of the believ­ers. . . .” (Idem.)

4. In an attempt to seize the Mid­dle East and its petro­leum resources, the Third Reich uti­lized the Islamic fas­cists, tak­ing full advan­tage of the anti-Semitism that they both held in com­mon. “ . . . Their Jew-hatred was also inspired by Nazi influ­ences: Leaflets called for a boy­cott of Jew­ish goods and Jew­ish shops, and the Brotherhood’s news­pa­per, al-Nadhir, car­ried a reg­u­lar col­umn on ‘The Dan­ger of the Jews of Egypt,’ which pub­lished the names and addresses of Jew­ish busi­ness­men and allegedly Jew­ish news­pa­per pub­lish­ers all over the world, attribut­ing every evil, from com­mu­nism to broth­els, to the ‘Jew­ish dan­ger.’ The Brotherhood’s cam­paign used not only Nazi-like pat­terns of action and slo­gans but also Ger­man fund­ing. As the his­to­rian Bryn­jar Lia recounts in his mono­graph on the Broth­er­hood, ‘Doc­u­ments seized in the flat of Wil­helm Stell­bo­gen, the Direc­tor of the Ger­man News Agency affil­i­ated to the Ger­man Lega­tion in Cairo, show that prior to Octo­ber 1939 the Mus­lim Broth­ers received sub­si­dies from this orga­ni­za­tion. Stell­bo­gen was instru­men­tal in trans­fer­ring these funds to the Broth­ers, which were con­sid­er­ably larger than the sub­si­dies offered to other anti-British activists. These trans­fers appear to have been coor­di­nated by Hajj Amin al-Husseini and some of his Pales­tin­ian con­tacts in Cairo.’” (Idem.)

5. The Nazis uti­lized a broad­cast outlet—Radio Zeesen—to suc­cess­fully amplify their pro­pa­ganda directed at the world’s Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion: “ . . . 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 Muham­mad has never been a friend of the Mus­lim, the Jew is the enemy and it pleases Allah to kill him’.Since 1941,  Zeesen’s Ara­bic pro­gram­ming had been directed by the Mufti of Jerusalem who had emi­grated to Berlin. The Mufti’s aim was to ‘unite all the Arab lands in a com­mon hatred of the British and Jews’, as he wrote in a let­ter to Adolf Hitler. Anti­semitism, based on the notion of a Jew­ish world con­spir­acy, how­ever, was not rooted in Islamic tra­di­tion but, rather, in Euro­pean ide­o­log­i­cal mod­els. The Mufti there­fore seized on the only instru­ment that really moved the Arab masses: Islam. He invented a new form of Jew-hatred by recast­ing it in an Islamic mould. He was the first to trans­late Chris­t­ian anti­semitism into Islamic lan­guage, thus cre­at­ing an ‘Islamic anti­semitism’. His first 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 Muham­mad 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 Muham­mad was a swindler… they began to ask Muham­mad sense­less and insol­u­ble ques­tions… and they endeav­ored to destroy the Mus­lims… If the Jews could betray Muham­mad 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.’ . . .” (Idem.)

6. Among those influ­enced by Radio Zeesen was the young Ruhol­lah Khome­ini, later the leader of the Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist rev­o­lu­tion in Iran. “ . . . 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 receiver set made by the British com­pany Pye ... The radio proved a good buy… Many mul­lahs would gather at his home, often on the ter­race, in the evenings to lis­ten to Radio Berlin and the BBC’, writes his biog­ra­pher Amir Taheri. Even the Ger­man con­sulate in Tehran was sur­prised by the suc­cess of this pro­pa­ganda. ‘Through­out the coun­try spir­i­tual lead­ers are com­ing out and say­ing ‘that the twelfth Imam has been sent into the world by God in the form of Adolf Hitler’’ we learn from a report to Berlin in Feb­ru­ary 1941. . . .” (Idem.)

7. Khome­ini was men­tored by the head of a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate called the Devo­tees of Islam. As dis­cussed in FTR# 352, Khomeini’s exile in France prior to assum­ing power was financed by Fran­cois Genoud, one of the most impor­tant fig­ures in the post­war Under­ground Reich. (For more about Genoud, see—among other programs—FTR#453.) “ . . . The regime of the aya­tol­lahs in Iran grew out of a secret soci­ety called the Devo­tees of Islam, a Broth­er­hood affil­i­ate whose leader in the 1950s was the men­tor of Aya­tol­lah Runol­lah Khome­ini. . . .”
(“Cold War, Holy War­rior” by Robert Drey­fuss; Mother Jones; January/February/2006.)

8. Among the more grotesque phe­nom­ena to be found on the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal land­scape is the cozi­ness of ele­ments of the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor with these out­right Islamic fas­cists. Left­ist lumi­nary Noam Chom­sky is among those cozy­ing up to these Mus­lim Nazis. It is said that a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words. Check out this pic­ture of Hezbol­lah youth—the first frame of this Time Mag­a­zine photo essay is worth more than a thou­sand words. THIS is what Chom­sky, Paci­fica Radio’s Amy Good­man and oth­ers of their ilk cel­e­brate. “ . . . The naivety or mal­ice with which the polit­i­cal left has nev­er­the­less yielded to the siren songs of Islamism is there­fore fright­en­ing. Thus, in May 2006 Noam Chom­sky met the leader of Hezbol­lah, Has­san Nas­ral­lah, and defended and praised Hezbollah’s insis­tence on keep­ing its arms, in defi­ance of United Nations deci­sions; Tariq Ramadan, an elo­quent Islamist, has been given star treat­ment at Euro­pean anti-globalization events; the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s TV preacher, Sheikh Qaradawi gets invi­ta­tions from the left-wing Mayor of Lon­don, Ken Liv­ing­stone; while the Social­ist Work­ers Party have made the strate­gic deci­sion to ally with a British off­shoot of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood – the Mus­lim Asso­ci­a­tion of Britain – in build­ing the Stop the War Coali­tion. Last sum­mer thou­sands of peo­ple were mobilised by this alliance to march through cen­tral Lon­don chant­ing ‘we are all Hezbol­lah now’.” (Idem.)

9. Among the deeply alarm­ing aspects of Islamic anti-Semitism and fas­cism is the fact that Islamists and their sup­port groups in the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor have suc­cess­fully pres­sured those insti­tu­tions that offered open forums for dis­cus­sion of these issues. Thinkers such as Kuentzel have been actively denied their right to free speech by the very insti­tu­tions that empha­size free speech as a para­mount ideal. “ . . . Many Euro­peans assume that to draw atten­tion to Islamic anti­semitism is to play into the hands of racists. In Britain, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism has been the offi­cial civic reli­gion for so long that any crit­i­cism of any minor­ity group seems to have become the equiv­a­lent of pro­fan­ity. Obvi­ously, racism, dis­crim­i­nat­ing against peo­ple on the grounds of their ori­gin or skin colour, must be com­bated. You can’t be, how­ever, mul­ti­cul­tural and preach mur­der­ous loathing of Jews. In my opin­ion, we mustn’t defend Jew-hatred on spu­ri­ous ‘anti-racist’ grounds; we should rather dis­tin­guish between anti­semites and non-antisemites within the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties. We mustn’t advo­cate a crude ‘top’ and ‘bot­tom’ dichotomy, in which the anti­semitism of peo­ple from Mus­lim coun­tries is excused as a kind of ‘anti-imperialism of fools’. We should rather insist that the strug­gle against dis­crim­i­na­tion is a uni­ver­sal one. 3. Islamic anti­semitism is a taboo sub­ject even in some parts of acad­e­mia: a story of intel­lec­tual betrayal and the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of polit­i­cal com­mit­ment. Pro­fes­sor Pieter von der Horst from the Uni­ver­sity of Utrecht in the Nether­lands found this out when he pro­posed to give a lec­ture on the topic of the anti-Jewish blood libel. The head of the uni­ver­sity asked him to excise the sec­tion of his lec­ture deal­ing with Islamic anti­semitism. When he refused to do so, he was invited to appear before a panel of four pro­fes­sors who insisted he remove these pas­sages. A lec­ture on Islamic anti­semitism, so the argu­ment went, might lead to vio­lent reac­tions from well-organized Mus­lim stu­dent groups. Sim­i­lar things have hap­pened to me. When in April 2003 I was invited by Yale Uni­ver­sity as keynote speaker on the topic of ‘Islamic Ter­ror­ism and Anti­semitism: The Mis­sion against Moder­nity’, there was such an out­pour­ing of protest that the orga­niz­ers changed the pro­gramme. The orig­i­nal title of one of the pan­els — ‘Islamic Jihad. A Case of Global Non-State Ter­ror­ism’ – was changed to ‘Global, Non-State Ter­ror­ism’. In addi­tion a speaker was added to the podium whose sole qual­i­fi­ca­tion was that of being Pres­i­dent of the local ‘Pales­tine Right to Return Coali­tion’. At least I was able to give my talk. Not so in March 2007 at this Uni­ver­sity. Here too the term ‘Islamic anti­semitism’ stymied what should have been a lively debate already in March. Fol­low­ing e-mail protests by some Mus­lim stu­dents, my lec­ture title ‘Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic anti­semitism in the Mid­dle East’ was changed to ‘The Nazi Legacy: Export of Anti­semitism into the Mid­dle East’. This proved to be a futile seman­tic ges­ture: On the day of my arrival in Leeds, the Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion can­celed my talk ‘on secu­rity grounds’. No one, includ­ing the Mus­lim stu­dents, had threat­ened vio­lence. As before in Utrecht, free­dom of speech was sus­pended – in my opin­ion — by an act of pre-emptive self-censorship. Both uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tions prob­a­bly believed they were meet­ing the wishes of their numer­ous Mus­lim stu­dents in sus­pend­ing a lec­ture about Islamic anti­semitism.” (Idem.)

10. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­ated by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit TheAntiFascist.com.