The Warped Mirror: Hitler's heirs

Before President Bush left Israel last Friday to continue his trip to several countries in the region, he visited Yad Vashem. In the international press, this visit was widely described as "an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial", and reports highlighted that Bush "stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz  [...] and told his secretary of state that the US should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there". Bush described Yad Vashem as "a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it."

Whether it would have been indeed feasible to bomb Auschwitz is still a controversial question; but what is striking to note in the context of our own times is that, as one expert explained, the Jewish leadership "was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews". This can hardly fail to bring to mind that fantasies about wars being fought "for the Jews" have remained quite popular - whether among respected academics, pundits and commentators who worry about the "Israel Lobby", or among the wider public that shares such concerns. And when it comes to the Middle East, it is of course entirely acceptable to assert that there "was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it" - and in the context of the Hamas Charter's Article Twenty-Two there is no need to ask whose "fingerprints" it is all about.

It is perhaps tempting to dismiss the kind of open anti-Semitism espoused in the Hamas Charter as "fantastically stupid", as Jeffrey Goldberg admits he is often inclined to do. But in his review of the recently published "Jihad and Jew-Hatred" by the German scholar Matthias Küntzel Goldberg acknowledges that it is indeed "perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews - intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs - have become scandalously ubiquitous. Hizbullah and Hamas, to name two prominent examples, understand the world largely through the prism of Jewish power. Hizbullah officials employ language that shamelessly echoes Nazi propaganda, describing Jews as parasites and tumors and prescribing the murder of Jews as a kind of chemotherapy."

Küntzel's book is the result of years of work focusing on the Nazi influence reflected in Islamist anti-Semitism. Unsurprisingly, this is a topic which from the outset is rejected by some as inadmissible. Thus, a talk that Küntzel was scheduled to give last spring at the University of Leeds was cancelled because some Muslim students expressed outrage that anybody should dare to speak of Islamic anti-Semitism. Ironically enough, Küntzel has also been criticized for putting too much blame on Germany while underestimating the anti-Semitic tendencies encouraged in some Islamic texts.

An excerpt of  Küntzel's book available at the New York Times website introduces the first chapter on "The Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine". As Goldberg notes in his accompanying review, Küntzel "makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood."

 Küntzel claims that in the 1930s, the Muslim Brotherhood "was subsidized with German funds" which enabled the group "to set up a printing plant with 24 employees and use the most up-to-date propaganda methods." According to Küntzel the Muslim Brotherhood also played an important role as a distributor of Arabic translations of "Mein Kampf" and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", thus helping to whip up anti-Zionist hostility across the Arab world with Nazi methods and ideology; and Küntzel argues that the effects of this campaign continue to reverberate in the region until today.

It is of course precisely this argument that violates a central taboo of current debates about the Middle East, and it will be interesting to see whether Küntzel's book will change this in any way. For the time being there is no doubt that many will strongly disagree with Goldberg's conclusion that "Küntzel 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." But all too many are willing to dismiss the rhetoric of hate so common in the Middle East, and all too many deny that there is reason to worry about the consequences.

And when Goldberg recalls in this context that the former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told him that "the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans" it is all too obvious that once again we live in a time that has no problem to explain all the evils of the world with "what the Jews did".