Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11

by Matthias Küntzel
2007, Telos Press
ISBN-10: 0914386360
ISBN-13: 978–0914386360
180 pages

Jihad and Jew-Hatred makes a major con­tri­bu­tion to the under­stand­ing of rad­i­cal Islamism by trac­ing the impact of Euro­pean fas­cism on the Arab and Islamic world. Draw­ing exten­sively on German-language sources, Matthias Küntzel ana­lyzes the close rela­tion­ship that began in the 1930s between Nazi lead­ers and Mus­lim extrem­ists, espe­cially the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and the Mufti of Jerusalem. This path-breaking book pro­vides com­pelling doc­u­men­ta­tion of the Nazi roots of what became Islamo-fascism and jihadist terror.

This study demon­strates in his­tor­i­cal detail how the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood has con­sis­tently placed the hatred of Jews at the cen­ter of its ide­ol­ogy and poli­cies through an incen­di­ary rhetoric that inter­weaves pas­sages from the Koran hos­tile to Jews with ele­ments of Nazi-style world-conspiracy the­o­ries. Ancient prej­u­dice and mod­ern fan­tasies have become a deadly combination.

Jihad and Jew-Hatred also explains how the defeat of Nazi Ger­many in 1945 led to the shift of the cen­ter of global anti­semitism to the Arab world, lay­ing the foun­da­tion for rad­i­cal Islamist cur­rents in and around the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and more recent ter­ror­ist organizations.

Küntzel con­vinc­ingly shows that anti­semitism is no mere sup­ple­men­tary fea­ture of mod­ern jihadism, and cer­tainly no after­thought but its defin­ing ide­o­log­i­cal core. This hatred also goes far beyond ques­tions of Zion­ism and Israel. For Islamism, not only is every­thing Jew­ish evil, but every evil is Jew­ish, as the writ­ings of Sayyid Qutb and the Char­ter of Hamas clearly explain to any­one will­ing to read them. It was this Jew-hatred that fueled the Jihad of the 9/11 terrorists.

Review
The Ger­man scholar Matthias Kuentzel . . . takes anti-Semitism, and in par­tic­u­lar its most potent cur­rent strain, Mus­lim anti-Semitism, very seri­ously indeed. His brac­ing, even star­tling, book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (trans­lated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is per­ilous to ignore idi­otic ideas if these idi­otic ideas are broadly, and fer­vently, believed. . . . Kuentzel is right to state that we are wit­ness­ing a ter­ri­ble explo­sion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Mid­dle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invalu­able con­tri­bu­tion, in fact, is his capac­ity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its con­se­quences. The for­mer Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the ques­tion is not what the Ger­mans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Ger­mans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their pun­ish­ment. Kuentzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.
Jef­frey Gold­berg, New York Times

Review
Kuentzel’s method is a dialec­ti­cal mas­ter­piece; he is a social sci­en­tist who pur­sues con­nec­tions. The sui­cide attacks of the intifada in Israel are, for Kuentzel, inher­ently linked to the attacks in Amer­ica on Sep­tem­ber 11. That explains his rem­edy for fight­ing anti-Semitism: “Who­ever does not want to com­bat anti-Semitism . . . hasn’t the slight­est chance of beat­ing Islamism.” Kuentzel is in many ways the mod­ern suc­ces­sor to Paul Merker, a rare voice in Ger­many, who, like Merker’s view of Arab princes as embody­ing “reac­tionary inter­ests,” shifts the terms of the dis­cus­sion to anti-Jewish ide­ol­ogy as the sine qua non of under­stand­ing rad­i­cal polit­i­cal Islam, its destruc­tive energy and its social and polit­i­cal vio­lence.
Ben­jamin Weinthal, Haaretz

About the Author
Matthias Küntzel is a Ger­man author and a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist. He is a research asso­ciate at the Hebrew Uni­ver­sity of Jerusalem and a mem­ber of Schol­ars for Peace in the Mid­dle East.

THIS BOOK IS IN PRINT. Avail­able com­mer­cially. Find out more about Matthias Küntzel.