Mick Hartley

Daniel Bel-Ami at Fathom reviews German scholar Matthias Küntzel's latest book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East:

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of an important but largely unknown chapter of Middle Eastern history. It focuses on the concerted drive by Nazi Germany to promote anti-Semitism in the region between 1937 and 1945. This was in line with the Nazi’s goal of annihilating the Jewish people not just in Europe but worldwide.

From there Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, draws a broader conclusion about anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In his view its origins do not lie in the Arab world’s reaction to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is instead better seen as an aftershock of the Holocaust. Several Arab regimes tried to destroy the newly formed Jewish state mainly because they were motivated by the Nazi propaganda campaign a few years earlier.

Of course, Küntzel is not denying there were instances of anti-Jewish hatred in the Islamic world before 1937. He is well aware, for example, that in many Muslim countries Jews were given the status of dhimmis. That is, they were protected as long as they accepted a clearly inferior rank and legal status. There are also several anti-Jewish passages in classical Islamic texts including the Koran. His argument is that Islamic anti-Semitism fuses together the racial anti-Semitism which emerged in Europe with the classic anti-Judaism evident in early Islam. It was the Nazis, Küntzel argues, who played the key role in bringing genocidal anti-Semitism to the region.

Küntzel identifies several channels through which the Nazis exerted their influence. From 1937 onwards they gave financial backing and other forms of support to Amin El-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. El-Husseini was an important religious and political figure as well as an ardent anti-Semite. In 1941 he met Hitler in Berlin.

The Nazis distributed large numbers of El-Husseini’s pamphlet, Judaism and Islam, first published in Cairo in 1937. For Küntzel, , it was a seminal document, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial anti-Semitism that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In his view it was the foundational text of Islamic anti-Semitism….

And this:

[T]he collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War brought an important change. The division of the region between Britain and France opened the way for Germany to intervene later on in the name of anti-colonialism.

It's not hard to see a current parallel here, with the Free Palestine anti-Israel crowd motivated by the cynical claims of Islamist groups like Hamas to be fighting in the name of anti-colonialism: claims which have been shamefully twisted into the mindless chants that somehow it's now Israel who are the new Nazis.