by Jay Bushin­sky
Chron­i­cle For­eign Service

Bern, Switzer­land — At the behest of Pres­i­dent Bush, Swiss law author­i­ties are inves­ti­gat­ing an alliance between Islamic mil­i­tants and Euro­pean neo-Nazis who have allegedly been pro­vid­ing finan­cial sup­port to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.

Experts say Islamic mil­i­tants and far-right move­ments — a coali­tion they call the Third Posi­tion — share com­mon hatreds: the United States and Jews.

“Extrem­ists man­age to find ways to put aside their dif­fer­ences and find com­mon cause,” Rabbi Abra­ham Cooper of the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter said recently.

The cen­tral fig­ure in the probe is Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss con­vert to Islam who says the “Zion­ist Israel lobby con­trols the U.S. gov­ern­ment and mass media and shapes U.S. policy.”

Nada Man­age­ment, the Bern com­pany Huber helps direct, has been sin­gled out pub­licly by Pres­i­dent Bush.

Huber, a gre­gar­i­ous and out­spo­ken for­mer jour­nal­ist who spent three decades cov­er­ing the Swiss Par­lia­ment for a social­ist news­pa­per, is a strong sup­porter of Germany’s neo-Nazi National Demo­c­ra­tic Party (NPD) and such extreme-right politi­cians as France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Huber serves on the board of direc­tors of Nada Man­age­ment. Founded by a Swiss Nazi and for­merly known as al Taqwa Bank, the con­sult­ing and man­age­ment firm is part of the inter­na­tional al Taqwa group, which the United States believes has long acted as a finan­cial adviser to al Qaeda.

“Al Taqwa is an asso­ci­a­tion of off­shore banks and finan­cial man­age­ment firms that have helped al Qaeda shift money around the world,” Bush said on Nov. 7. The U.S. gov­ern­ment has frozen Huber’s assets and is pres­sur­ing the Swiss gov­ern­ment to arrest him for his alleged role in the al Qaeda money network.

Swiss inves­ti­ga­tors say Huber’s trav­els on the Mus­lim lec­ture cir­cuit in West­ern Europe and North Amer­ica brought him into con­tact with bin Laden’s fol­low­ers. Huber has admit­ted to meet­ing with asso­ciates of the Saudi exile, describ­ing them as “dis­creet, well-educated, very intel­li­gent peo­ple.” But he denies that Nada Man­age­ment under­writes al Qaeda activities.

Dur­ing an inter­view in his study, lined with books and por­traits and pho­tographs of Adolf Hitler, Richard Wag­ner, Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini, Haj Amin al– Hus­seini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Huber expressed his views to a Chron­i­cle correspondent.

“The U.S. is the ally of 15 mil­lion Jews against 1.3 bil­lion Mus­lims; it is allied with 5 mil­lion Israelis against 200 mil­lion Arabs,” he said. “We will bring down the Israel lobby and change for­eign pol­icy. We’ll do it in Amer­ica. When it hap­pens, you’ll understand.”

Huber min­i­mizes his role on Nada Management’s board of direc­tors, say­ing he is a minor player who receives only $1,500 annu­ally in com­pen­sa­tion. He says the company’s spon­sors are mostly wealthy Mus­lims from Malaysia and the Per­sian Gulf states who spe­cial­ize in projects “ben­e­fi­cial to Third World coun­tries — like new roads, clin­ics, agri­cul­tural development.”

But Han­sjuerg Mark Wied­mer, a spokesman for the Swiss attor­ney gen­eral, dis­agrees. His office has been inves­ti­gat­ing Nada Management’s activ­i­ties in Switzer­land, Ger­many and the United States for the past six months.

“There have been indi­ca­tions that al Taqwa could have been financ­ing al Qaeda,” he said. “Since Sept. 11, we have been seek­ing crim­i­nal con­nec­tions. We had been on their trail before but did not have enough evi­dence to open crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ings. This has changed.”

Wied­mer says the data he has gath­ered have been made avail­able to U.S. author­i­ties, but he spec­i­fied that if charges are even­tu­ally filed, the “cul­prits” will be tried in a Swiss court.

Three other Nada Man­age­ment board mem­bers have also been ques­tioned by Swiss, Ital­ian and U.S. author­i­ties: Youssef Nada, an Egypt­ian expa­tri­ate who has Ital­ian cit­i­zen­ship; Ali Him­mat, a Syr­ian national; and Mohamed Man­sour, a Zurich resident.

Nada lives in Cam­pi­one d’Italia, a tiny Ital­ian enclave and tax haven near the south­ern Swiss city of Lugano. Three months ago, Cam­pi­one police raided Nada Management’s local office and con­fis­cated records and documents.

The Nada Man­age­ment board is assisted by a com­mit­tee of Mus­lim schol­ars headed by Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, an Egypt­ian linked to his country’s out­lawed Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The committee’s pur­pose is to make sure Nada con­forms to Islamic doc­trine such as a ban on inter­est rates.

Huber’s long­time Swiss neme­sis is Jean-Claude Buhrer, a cor­re­spon­dent for the promi­nent French daily Le Monde. Buhrer recently cited a col­umn pub­lished in Mor­gen­stern, a news­pa­per read by sur­viv­ing for­mer mem­bers of Germany’s wartime Waf­fen SS, in which Huber said Mus­lims and Nazis were involved in the same fight.

“This is tan­ta­mount to a mar­riage between the swastika and the (Islamic) cres­cent,” wrote Buhrer.

Buhrer also assailed Huber for deny­ing the scope of the Nazi Holo­caust and for being a faith­ful dis­ci­ple of Fran­cois Genoud, a Swiss lawyer who funded Hitler and served as a Ger­man agent dur­ing World War II.

After the war, Genoud under­wrote the clan­des­tine Odessa orga­ni­za­tion, which,

accord­ing to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesen­thal, enabled such noto­ri­ous Nazi fugi­tives as Adolf Eich­mann, Alois Brun­ner and Klaus Bar­bie to escape to South Amer­ica and the Mid­dle East.

Author­i­ties believe Genoud founded al Taqwa Bank and allo­cated its resources to sup­port inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Car­los the Jackal, and bin Laden.

Genoud com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1996, shortly after Jew­ish lead­ers and Swiss bank­ing offi­cials announced an unprece­dented agree­ment to set up a com­mis­sion to exam­ine secret bank and gov­ern­ment files to search for funds deposited in Switzer­land by Holo­caust vic­tims, accord­ing to Buhrer.

Over the years, Genoud paid French attor­ney Jacques Verges to defend Ramirez and Bar­bie and also cov­ered the legal expenses of Eich­mann before an Israeli court in 1961. He also sub­si­dized Khomeini’s pro­longed exile in France when Iran was gov­erned by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Genoud’s admi­ra­tion for Khome­ini is shared by Huber. “‘He was a fan­tas­tic man,” Huber said.