Jeffrey Herf: How Nazism Shaped Islamist Views
[Jeffrey Herf's 'Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World' is published by Yale University Press. He is a professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park.]
Political Islam is partly the product of a cultural fusion between European and Islamist traditions of Jew-hatred. Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda aimed at the Middle East during the Second World War indicates that a crucial chapter in the history of that fusion took place in Berlin during the war.
It was then and there that the highest-ranking officials of the Nazi regime, including Hitler and officials in the Foreign Ministry and the SS, had a meeting of hearts and minds with pro-Nazi Arab and Muslim exiles such as Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) and Rashid Ali Kilani, the former head of a short-lived Iraqi regime. Throughout the Second World War, their collaboration led to thousands of hours of short-wave Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East....
In their Arabic-language broadcasts, the Nazis stated that Zionists had started the Second World War in order to establish a Jewish state and dominate the Arab world. In its propaganda aimed at Germans at home, the Nazi regime publicly asserted that it was "exterminating" the Jews of Europe. In the Arabic-language broadcasts to the Middle East, Arabic language announcers called on listeners to take matters into their own hands and "kill the Jews" in the Middle East themselves. Rather than translations of speeches by Hitler or Goebbels, it was a fundamentalist reading of the Koran that was crucial for justifying Jew-hatred with Muslim listeners. Husseini and others asserted that Jews had been the enemies of Islam from its inception. They presented Zionist goals in Palestine as only the latest of the Jews' efforts to destroy Islam....
...For the Islamists, Israel's creation proved that Nazism's conspiracy theory about vast Jewish power had been proven correct. After 1945, the ideological poison unleashed by the Nazi regime did not die. Rather it mutated, changed its cultural context and merged with a distinctly different cultural tradition. The history of the seven decades of that mutation and evolution remains to be written. When it is, the chapter on wartime Berlin will be an important one.
Read entire article at The Jewish Chronicle
Political Islam is partly the product of a cultural fusion between European and Islamist traditions of Jew-hatred. Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda aimed at the Middle East during the Second World War indicates that a crucial chapter in the history of that fusion took place in Berlin during the war.
It was then and there that the highest-ranking officials of the Nazi regime, including Hitler and officials in the Foreign Ministry and the SS, had a meeting of hearts and minds with pro-Nazi Arab and Muslim exiles such as Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) and Rashid Ali Kilani, the former head of a short-lived Iraqi regime. Throughout the Second World War, their collaboration led to thousands of hours of short-wave Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East....
In their Arabic-language broadcasts, the Nazis stated that Zionists had started the Second World War in order to establish a Jewish state and dominate the Arab world. In its propaganda aimed at Germans at home, the Nazi regime publicly asserted that it was "exterminating" the Jews of Europe. In the Arabic-language broadcasts to the Middle East, Arabic language announcers called on listeners to take matters into their own hands and "kill the Jews" in the Middle East themselves. Rather than translations of speeches by Hitler or Goebbels, it was a fundamentalist reading of the Koran that was crucial for justifying Jew-hatred with Muslim listeners. Husseini and others asserted that Jews had been the enemies of Islam from its inception. They presented Zionist goals in Palestine as only the latest of the Jews' efforts to destroy Islam....
...For the Islamists, Israel's creation proved that Nazism's conspiracy theory about vast Jewish power had been proven correct. After 1945, the ideological poison unleashed by the Nazi regime did not die. Rather it mutated, changed its cultural context and merged with a distinctly different cultural tradition. The history of the seven decades of that mutation and evolution remains to be written. When it is, the chapter on wartime Berlin will be an important one.