Mick Hartley

An interview in the Egyptian Al-Masry Al-Youm with Jeffrey Herf, author of the just published Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (via)

Al-Masry: You claim in your book that the Nazis used Islamic heritage to increase hostility towards Jews. How was this done?

Herf: Nazi officials dealing with propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims concluded that a selective reading of the Quran and the commentaries about it was their most effective means of reaching this audience. In so doing they drew out the already existing anti-Jewish themes. They presented Islam — not radical, fundamentalist, political or jihadist Islam, but Islam in general –as a religion infused with and inseparable from hatred for the Jews. In their view, from the time that the Jews rejected Prophet Mohammed’s demands that they convert to Islam, the Jews became an “enemy” of Islam. In so doing, Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda placed the events of the mid-20th century into the far longer context of a supposed, but actually false, Jewish antagonism to Islam as a religion. They described Zionist aspirations as only the most recent chapter in a supposedly ancient Jewish effort to “destroy Islam.” In this effort they found quotations from the Quran and the commentaries on it that included pejorative and hateful comments about the Jews. […]

Al-Masry: What do you think of the position that the founding of the Jewish state was the main reason for Arab hostility against Israelis?

Herf: Of course, the conflict between Israel and the Arab states, as well as with the Palestinians, has caused enormous hostility on all sides. But the question reverses the causality of the 1948 war and of the failure to reach a lasting peace since then. There have always been Arabs, including Palestinians, who were willing to reach a compromise solution with Israel. President Anwar Sadat was the most prominent among them. Yet from the beginning those who found common cause with Nazism, such as al-Husseini, and those who, like Hassan Al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, fashioned a blend of Nazism and Islamism, always rejected any compromise with the state of Israel. They made no distinction between Jews and Zionists and rejected not just the policies of Israel but the very existence of a Jewish state in Palestine. As the assassination of Sadat made clear, those Arabs and Muslims who advocated compromise have faced the threat of assassination from nationalist and Islamist extremists. 

On the same theme, see also Matthias Küntzel – here.