Harry's Place

In his recent post ‘The fall of the Nazi language‘, Gabriel argues:

To say “Hamas are like the Nazis”, “Ahmedinijhad is like Hitler”, “soldiers who evict settlers are Nazis” and so on, are also completely inaccurate statements which simplify what are complex and unique political problems. Hamas is certainly, at least largely, an anti-Semitic organization. However, Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. Without the 40-year occupation of Palestinian lands, there is no Hamas. This does not justify Hamas’ anti-Semitism, but it is a completely different story than wanting to wipe out Jews simply because they are seen as scum of the earth.

I wish to take issue with Gabriel’s claims about Hamas, in particular the claim that Hamas cannot justifiably be seen as ‘like the Nazis’ and that the ideology they follow is simply based on a land dispute as opposed to having a genocidal core that presents Jews as an eternal evil wherever they may be found.

[W]ith positively terrifying certainty [The Protocols] reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.

- Mein Kampf

Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.

- Haj Amin al-Husseini, Radio Berlin, 1944

Today it is Palestine, and tomorrow some other country or countries, for the Zionist plan has no limits… Their plan is expounded in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

- Hamas Covenant

In order to believe that it is incorrect to compare Hamas with the Nazis and that it is ‘the 40-year occupation of Palestinian lands’ alone that drives Hamas’s anti-Semitism, one has to ignore the support for the Third Reich which was found throughout the Arab world; one has to ignore the working relationship al-Husseini had with Nazi Germany; one has to ignore the shelter given to Nazi war criminals in the Middle East after World War 2; and one has to ignore the fact that an Arabic language copy of Mein Kampf, translated in Egypt by a Nazi fugitive named Louis Heiden, is sold in London today. As Heiden’s introduction states: ‘National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star’.

The following excerpt from an article of mine, ‘Jihadism and the “Dreamers of the Day”‘, covers some of the links between Nazi ideology and Islamist anti-Semitism, and hopefully gives some background to Hamas’s genocidal hatred of Jews (notes and references can be found in the full article here):

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948, Haj Amin al-Husseini, is arguably one of the key figures in the genesis of the modern Jihadist movement. Al-Husseini was an extremist ‘[e]volving in a parallel track’ with the Egyptian Hassan el-Banna who established the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo in 1928, an organisation al-Husseini joined and went on to lead in Palestine after the Second World War, and an organisation that provides the glue that binds elements within Islamism with radical Jihadism today. Al-Husseini was a great admirer of the German Nazi regime, and the Nuremberg Tribunals and Adolf Eichmann’s trial revealed the extent of this admiration. He first made contact with the Third Reich in 1937 via the German consul in Damascus and declared his solidarity with Hitler. Hitler duly sent Eichmann and SS Oberscherfuehrer Herbert Hagen to Syria for a meeting with the Mufti, resulting in his becoming Nazi Germany’s main representative in the Middle East. In 1943, al-Husseini contacted Alfred Rosenberg requesting the term ‘anti-Semitism’ be dropped in favour of ‘anti-Judaism’ as ‘anti-Semitism’ was a ‘term [that] had a negative connotation affecting the Arab world which sympathized with the Nazi cause’. Just as today Jihadists co-opt the language of Western ‘anti-imperialist’ discourse to justify their actions, in the 1940s ‘Third Reich officials spouted “anti-imperialist” rhetoric when talking about the Arab world’, much to the pleasure of al-Husseini.

Towards the end of the 1930s, the Mufti spent time in Lebanon agitating for the Nazis, before setting up a base in Iran. During the war, Iran became ‘a haven for Gestapo agents’, no doubt an agreeable situation for al-Husseini, whose ‘venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran’. Thanks in particular to the work of al-Husseini, ‘[i]n Tehran’s marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, “In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler”‘. In 1941, the Mufti relocated to Nazi Germany itself, where he met with Hitler, Himmler, Von Ribbentrop, and other Nazi leaders. These meetings resulted in al-Husseini being given his own bureau in Berlin, as well as access to Radio Berlin, which he used to pump viciously anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi broadcasts into the Arab world. One such broadcast in 1944 contained the command: ‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you’.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal was provided with a written statement by Dieter Wisliceny, a close collaborator of Adolf Eichmann in the ‘Jewish Affairs’ division of the Reich Central Security Office. This statement revealed that in 1942, Eichmann gave al-Husseini a detailed presentation on the Nazi ’solution of the European Jewish question’. The Mufti was ‘very impressed’ by what he heard and requested that after Germany won the war, Eichmann should send one of his agents to Jerusalem, where he would serve as his ‘personal adviser’ in ’solving the Jewish question in the Middle East’. In a summer 1943 meeting with Himmler, the Mufti was told about the Nazi successes in ‘liquidating’ the Jews, with the Reichsführer-SS proudly boasting that ‘up to now we have liquidated around three million of them’. In his post-war memoirs, al-Husseini attempted to whitewash the extent of his Nazi involvement by claiming to be shocked by what Himmler told him. Clearly the shock didn’t last long, as in November of that year he declared that Muslims should follow the example of the Nazis who had devised a ‘definitive solution to the Jewish problem’. Years before this, the Mufti had received a cordial telegram from Himmler in which he proclaimed: ‘The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag “the extermination of world Jewry”. Our party sympathises with the fight of the Arabs … I send my greetings and wishes for success in your fight’. Despite his typically Nazi attempts at post-war historical ‘revisionism’, it is clear that the Mufti fully endorsed the Nazi regime and, moreover, saw in it and its example the opportunity to annihilate every Jew in Muslim countries. When Westerners today excuse Jihadists’ talk of killing Jews by claiming they are referring only to Israelis and not to world Jewry, they would do well to take note of the example of al-Husseini.

Another aspect of al-Husseini’s relationship with the Nazis is even more shocking. Not content with merely promoting Nazism through his propaganda, he went a stage further and helped Himmler organise a Muslim division in the Waffen SS. In 1943, the Mufti travelled to Yugosalvia and succeeded in raising an army of at least 20,000 Muslims who made up the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar. The division dressed in Nazi uniforms and launched a genocidal campaign, killing thousands of Serbian civilians. The rampage of the Muslim division included the murder of Jews across Croatia and Hungary. This targeting of Jews was motivated by al-Husseini’s conviction that Jews are ‘the bitterest enemies of the Muslims who since time immemorial have confronted Muslims with cunning and trickery’, language that we find on the lips of Jihadists today.

After Germany’s defeat and the collapse of the Third Reich, the Mufti made his way to Egypt, where he was given a luxurious villa in Alexandria by King Farouk. His arrival in Egypt served as a beacon to fugutive Nazis, and a ’steady stream’ of Third Reich criminals hid themselves in Cairo: ‘As more Nazis inundated the Egyptian capital, the posh bars and elite social clubs of Cairo attracted a rogues’ gallery of SS renegades, Gestapo “interrogation” specialists, and German rocket scientists’. Nazi experts were put to work assisting the Egyptian police force and ‘advising’ the Egyptian army, and Major General Otto Ernst Remer was appointed as a ‘political adviser’ to President Nasser. Joining Remer were several of his associates from the banned neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party, who busied themselves with gunrunning schemes for Arab clients. While in Cairo, Remer wrote an article claiming that Germans and Arabs were being oppressed by ‘international Jewry’ and that ‘the creation of a strong Arab army is the immediate and direct concern to Germany’s patriotic forces [i.e. Nazis], which are prepared to offer the services of their best men’. In the post-Farouk era, the Mufti moved to a suburb of Cairo, where he lived in a guarded villa and ‘entertained delegations from throughout the Arab world while maintaining close contact with radical nationalists from Germany and other countries’. The Mufti engaged in fund raising from Arab anti-Semites and distributed more than a million dollars to various neo-Nazi groups to pay for anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propaganda.

While in Cairo, Johann von Leers, one of the Third Reich’s most venomous anti-Jewish polemicists and a good friend of the Mufti, converted to Islam and adopted the name Omar Amin. Writing to an American neo-Nazi activist, von Leers informed him that ‘[i]f there is any hope to free the world from Jewish tyranny, it is with the Moslems, who stand steadfastly against Zionism, Colonialism and Imperialism’. He explained further:

One thing is clear – more and more patriot Germans join the great Arab revolution against beastly imperialism. In Algeria half a company of German soldiers … have gone on the side of the Algerians and have embraced Islam. That is good! To hell with Christianity, for in Christianity’s name Germany has been sold to our oppressors! Our place as an oppressed nation under the execrable Western colonialist Bonn government must be on the side of the Arab nationalist revolt against the West. Let Adenauer be furious that honest German patriots [Nazis] are not extradited to him or to his British or American bosses, by those freedom-loving Arab countries. May the British swines call us ‘meddlers’ – in a short time British meddling in the Middle East will be over, as it has finished in Iraq where the infidel servants of British imperialism are all killed. l hamd ul Allah! [sic] … the backing given by USA to the Jewish tyrants in Germany will make the German nation revolt. Indeed, for our nation there is only one hope – to get rid of Western imperialism by joining the Arab-led anti-imperialist group.

Thanks to the Mufti’s connections, von Leers found himself working for the Egyptian Information Ministry, where he churned out ‘anti-Zionist’ hate literature and made regular radio broadcasts on Radio Cairo that reached much of the Arab world. Joining von Leers at the Ministry were ‘dozens of European Nazis who welcomed a fresh opportunity to continue their vendetta against the Jews’. Nazis in the Ministry produced Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the Egyptian government then published. For Nasser, The Protocols ‘proves beyond the shadow of a doubt’ that Zionists ‘govern the fate of the European continent’. As a great admirer of the Nazis, when organising his personal security detail Nasser called on the services of a former SS General wanted in Poland for war crimes and another SS man wanted for participating in the extermination of Jews in the Ukraine.

Von Leers died in Cairo in 1965, thereby escaping war crimes charges, but without his hoped for German ‘revolt’ taking place. While von Leers is dead and the ‘revolt’ never occurred, his legacy remains in the form of the ideology he helped to spread throughout the Arab world. In a very tangible form, the legacy of the Cairo Nazis has returned in contemporary Britain.

In 2002, two Daily Telegraph journalists were surprised to find an Arab language copy of Mein Kampf on sale in three newsagents on Edgware Road in central London, in an area with a large Arab population. The book, with a picture of Hitler and a swastika on its cover, was being sold for £10, alongside newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and sweets. The book was the product of a Lebanese publishing house and dated to the 1990s, but the translation itself dated to the 1960s and had an introduction by the translator, Luis al-Haj. ‘Luis al-Haj’ was the Arab name adopted by Louis Heiden, a wartime employee of the German Press Agency and one of von Leers’ circle of emigree Nazis in Cairo, and in the introduction he proclaims: ‘National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star’.

In 2005, another investigation of Edgware Road turned up Arab language copies of both Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in two bookshops. The copy of Mein Kampf is, once again, the translation of the Nazi Louis Heiden. The edition of The Protocols was published in Egypt and is accompanied by ‘academic’ analysis from Dr.Ahmad Hijazi al-Saqa (Professor of Comparative Religion at Al-Azhar University) and Hisham Khadr (a journalist for the Qatari periodical Al-Sharq), as well as a Foreword written by Ali Jum’ah (Professor of the Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence at Al-Azhar University). As we have seen, Egypt has been exporting copies of Mein Kampf since the ’60s, thanks to the original work of German Nazis at the Egyptian Information Ministry. How von Leers would be gloating if he were aware that 40 years after his death his attempts at infecting Muslims with Nazi ideology were still succeeding.

Post Script: For those interested in my views on Israel/Palestine, see this article.