Com­ment: For close to a decade, we have exam­ined the Islam­ic fas­cist group known in Eng­lish as the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Al Qae­da, Hamas and Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad. In par­tic­u­lar, we have exam­ined the Broth­er­hood as the Islam­ic ele­ment in the post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al. For the bet­ter part of a cen­tu­ry, the Ikhwan (as the Broth­er­hood is known in Ara­bic) has nur­tured pro­found links to Ger­many and Ger­man fas­cists.

Ian John­son has just pub­lished A Mosque in Munich, high­light­ing the Broth­er­hood’s rela­tion­ship with the Third Reich and the CIA–a rela­tion­ship that helped spawn the Ikhwan’s Euro­pean pres­ence, the incu­ba­tor for the 9/11 attacks. (John­son’s boil­er­plate research  was cov­ered in FTR #518.)

“The Ger­man Con­nec­tion” by Matthew Kamin­s­ki; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 5/6/2010; p/ A17.

“. . . But the Broth­er­hood found safe haven in post­war Europe. This sanc­tu­ary was essen­tial to the Broth­er­hood’s future but attract­ed lit­tle atten­tion until the attacks of 9/11, for which Europe was the stag­ing ground. As a Jour­nal reporter (who, inci­den­tal­ly, left the news­pa­per ear­li­er this year), Ian John­son spent a good part of the years fol­low­ing 9/11 untan­gling Europe’s webs of rad­i­cal Islam. The result is “A Mosque in Munich,” an impec­ca­bly researched and eye-open­ing work of social and polit­i­cal his­to­ry. . . .

. . . As reli­gious fer­vor took on a polit­i­cal cast in the 20th cen­tu­ry, intel­li­gence agen­cies and pol­i­cy wonks, at var­i­ous times, sought to exploit Islamists for their own pur­pos­es. In the 1980s, for instance, Amer­i­ca sup­port­ed Osama bin Laden and the Afghan muja­hedeen against the Sovi­ets, inad­ver­tent­ly giv­ing force to the “blow­back” that fol­lowed. But Mr. John­son says that the roots of the “blow­back” extend all the way to Nazi Ger­many. Dur­ing the 1930s, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment saw the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, with its anti-Semi­tism and its anti-com­mu­nist views, as a use­ful ally. The Ger­mans bankrolled the group’s qua­si-mil­i­tary wing. At the same time, the Nazis recruit­ed reli­gious Mus­lims in Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­ca­sus to fight the Sovi­ets. Some of these Nazi-allied Mus­lims lat­er found refuge in post­war Ger­many, more than a few end­ing up in Munich. . . .

By then the Cold War was start­ing up, and Amer­i­ca was seek­ing ways to counter the Sovi­et Union. A CIA-backed out­fit called the Amer­i­can Com­mit­tee for Lib­er­a­tion recruit­ed the expa­tri­ate Sovi­et Mus­lims for Radio Lib­er­ty, a broad­cast arm of the U.S. gov­ern­ment that, among oth­er things, was try­ing to stir up Sovi­et minori­ties against Stal­in’s rule. The U.S. (and the British) also decid­ed to back the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood; as the sworn ene­my of Egypt­ian ruler Gamel Nass­er, the group looked like a use­ful friend.

The prin­ci­pal con­tact between the West­ern agents and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood was Said Ramadan, a promi­nent “broth­er” who had fled from Egypt to Europe in the 1950s and went on to write a clas­sic work on Islam­ic law. In 1953 he even met with Pres­i­dent Dwight Eisen­how­er at the White House. A CIA ana­lyst wrote: ‘Ramadan seems to be a Fas­cist, inter­est­ed in the group­ing of indi­vid­u­als for pow­er.’ [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.] It was an astute read­ing of the man and his orga­ni­za­tion. It was also ignored. Though the CIA files for this peri­od are closed and Mr. John­son can’t say “defin­i­tive­ly” whether Ramadan was on the agen­cy’s pay­roll, the U.S., he claims, used “finan­cial and polit­i­cal lever­age to give the Broth­er­hood’s man in Europe a leg up.” . . .