Mick Hartley

After Hitchens' take on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan, here's a lengthy interview at Guernica with author Paul Berman, covering Hirsi Ali, Ramadan, Sheikh Qarawadi, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, and Nazi ally Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini:

[T]he whole political project that comes out of him [the Mufti] and out of al-Banna has victimized the Palestinians by instructing the Palestinians that they are in a supernatural struggle against demonic enemies. If you think that you are in a struggle with human beings and recognize that while you have needs other people also have needs, then you’re in a political situation. And the natural thing to do when you’re in a political situation is to strike a compromise. But this has not been the line that has come out of the Mufti and al-Banna. The line has been that it’s a religious struggle of Islam trying to prevent satanic Jews from exterminating Islam and that the only way to deal with it is to exterminate the supernaturally evil Jews. So the struggle is a religious and supernatural struggle. It becomes impossible to compromise, and becomes possible to think one’s own suicide might be an appropriate response because we’re in the realm of the eternal and the supernatural. So it prevents people from being able to make compromises and leads them to think that murder and suicide are principles that must never be yielded. The Hamas charter is the perfect example. It begins with a little quotation from the Koran, a quotation from al-Banna calling for the elimination or obliteration of Israel (it’s translated in different ways) then it goes on to cite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a fundamentally Nazi document, then in Article 7 it draws a quotation from one of the scriptural traditions which would seem to call for extermination of the Jews.

As always with Berman, the whole piece is worth reading.