The Origin of the Fear of a Muslim Holocaust in Nazi Propaganda

Yesterday I put up a piece about Paul Berman’s book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which argues that the modern Islamist movements – al-Qaeda, but also Hamas, and the Islamic Republic of the Ayatollah Khomeini, ultimately have their origins in the writings of Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood. The book also describes the role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Husseini, in translating Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda into the Muslim and Arab worlds. Al-Husseini claimed, despite the evidence of the very limited dimensions of the Jewish state at the time, that the Jews were planning to wipe out Islam and the Arabs, and to turn all the Arab countries in the Middle East into homelands for themselves and Black Americans. He therefore urged, and organised, a genocidal war against Jews, commanding his audience to kill the Jews and their children before the Jews killed them.

It’s vile, poisonous stuff from someone, who played an enthusiastic part in the Holocaust of European Jews, as well as massacres of those in Palestine. His fear-mongering of a Jewish superstate goes far beyond the Nakba, or ‘disaster, catastrophe’, the term Palestinians have given to the eradication of their communities and their displacement at the establishment of Israe. Looking through al-Husseini’s rhetoric also makes sense of the claims of a similar genocide made by one British Muslim firebrand in the 1990s.

This was Kalim Saddiqui, who was one of the Muslim leaders involved in stirring up hatred against Salman Rushdie over the Satanic Verses. In the early 1990s the Beeb screened a documentary on the problems afflicting the Islamic community in Britain. These problems included poor academic performance, unemployment and the consequent feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation. They filmed Siddiqui preaching in his mosque. He told the assembled worshippers that ‘British society is a gigantic killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.’ I’m aware of the racism and violence many Muslims have to face, not least from the Stormtroopers of the Far Right, like the BNP, and their successors, the English Defence League. But this went far beyond a complaint about racism to a bigoted, racist statement about non-Muslims Brits.

To their credit, the Beeb tried to tackle Siddiqui about this. His response was that it was part of his defence of Islam against the forces, of which Rushdie’s book was a part. He then claimed that the Satanic Verses was simply part of a ‘Holocaust of Muslims’ that was being prepared. It’s rubbish, of course, but such fears do now unfortunately have a certain verisimilitude now that Trump is demanding a halt to Muslim immigration, and the registration of those already in America. Against this, it needs to be noted that there are other Americans on the streets, including not just Muslim Americans, but also members of the traditional White and Black communities and Jews demonstrating against Trump’s poison. Several Jewish organisations were so horrified by Trump’s plans, which were so close to what they experienced during the Third Reich, that they organised demonstrations against the tousle-haired Nazi in 17 cities across the US. Siddiqui also made the comments at the time of the Bosnian War, when the Serbs were committing massacres against Bosnian Muslims. That might partly explain Siddiqui’s vile rant.

But mostly it seems to me now that Siddiqui had absorbed the conspiracy theories and the rhetoric of genocide against Muslims shoved out by the Grand Mufti as part of his pro-Nazi campaign. In which case, the roots of Islamism and Islamist terrorism in Britain go back at least two decades. Siddiqui and the other preachers of hate prepared a paranoid, intensely hostile mindset within the audiences, which may have made some susceptible to the teachings and propaganda of al-Qaeda and now ISIS later on.

Siddiqui and his fellows, like Anjem Chaudhury, do not represent all Muslims in Britain by any means. They’re extremely controversial, and there have been demonstrations against them as bigots, who pervert the message of Islam, by liberal Muslims. There are a number of books and Muslim organisations, like Imams Online, which exist to tackle the Islamism and hate they promote. If you go over to the anti-racist organisation’s Hope Not Hate site, there are also numerous articles on events that have been organised around the country to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together, with pictures of Muslim imams talking and laughing with Christian vicars, and members of the other faiths. Siddiqui’s rhetoric is part of the Nazi distortion of Islam, and doesn’t represent the whole of the ‘umma or its history.

Berman on the Nazi Origins of Modern Militant Islamism

Yesterday I posted up a very informative piece by Michelle Thomasson, on the origins of modern militant Islam, based on McHugh’s book, A Short History of the Arabs. This sees the origins of modern Islamic militancy in the work of the Muslim reformer, Rashid Rida, and the alliance of Muslim religious and political leaders with the Nazis following the foundation of the state of Israel during the British Mandate in Palestine.

The left-wing American journalist and writer, Paul Berman, says much the same in his book, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House 2010). This is partly an investigation into the career and ideas of the contemporary French Muslim writer and philosopher, Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan’s a highly controversial figure, as while many have found him an admirable spokesman for interfaith dialogue and on social questions like poverty, others consider that far from being a liberal modernist, Ramadan instead preaches a very hard-line, intolerant Islam concealed under a veneer of liberal verbiage. He has, for example, been championed by Ian Buruma of the New York Times, who sees his philosophy, based on traditional, universal Muslim values, as offering an escape from violence. Many of Ramadan’s opponents are liberal Muslims and women, shocked at what they see as his anti-feminism. Another of his opponents is the Lebanese historian, Antoine Sfeir. In addition to stirring up intellectual controversy, Ramadan has also been investigated by the Spanish authorities for possible terrorist connections.

Ramadan’s grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the leading organisations in the modern Islamic revival, and a nationalist campaigner against the French and British occupying powers. The Muslim Brotherhood taught discipline, obedience and adulation of al-Banna as their Supreme Leader. It also aimed at throwing out the British and other European colonialists, and reviving the former Islamic empire and caliphate. this would include all the nations and countries ever conquered and ruled by Islam, including modern peoples, who had also converted. Al-Banna’s ideas spread from his native Egypt to Palestine, Syria, Sudan and North Africa. They were introduced into Iran in Shi’ite form by the Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati. They were then exported from Iran to the Shi’a in Lebanon, and then into India and Pakistan by Abul Ala Mawdudi. In Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood became Hamas, a political party which has used suicide bombers against the Israelis, although al-Banna’s supporters have always defended him from accusations of terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood has also produced a number of splinter groups, one of which is al-Qaeda. Ramadan has written books presenting his grandfather as a democrat wanting to create a genuine national assembly free of British influence. However, some of his writings suggest he really wanted to create a theocracy, in which Egypt would be governed by Islamic scholars, though after consulting the general public. Other Muslim scholars also believe that al-Banna wanted the establishment of an authoritarian, anti-democratic state. These include Bassam Tibi, a German-Egyptian liberal Muslim, and the Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand. Tibi sees al-Banna as the creator of a modern totalitarianism at variance with the traditional teachings of Islam.

Critical in the creation of modern Islamic anti-Semitism was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. al-Husseini was at various times the head of the Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine, and chairman of the Arab Higher Committee. He was one of the leading figures in the resistance against the foundation of the nascent Jewish state. In the 1920s, he organised several attacks against both Zionist settlers from the West, and traditional, indigenous Jewish Palestinians, culminating in a pogrom in 1929. He was also partly responsible for Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s pro-Axis coup in Iraq in 1941, and the launch of a Farhoud, or pogrom, against the Jews in Baghdad. He met with Mussolini and proposed the creation of an Arab Fascist state comprising Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Trans-Jordan.

And in 1941 he met the Nazis, including Ribbentrop, Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Goebbels. He set up the Handzar, or ‘Sabre’ division of the SS, to fight against the Serbs and the anti-Fascist partisans in the former Yugoslavia, as well as exterminate Bosnian Jews. The Nazis employed al-Husseini and Rashid Ali in their Revolutionierungspolitik, or policy of stirring up internal revolutions in order to bring down their enemies from within. The most famous example was during the First World War when Germany sent Lenin into Russia on the sealed train with large sums of money to spark the Bolshevik revolution. The Mufti was charged with translating the Nazis’ anti-Semitism from Europe to Islam. He therefore combed the Islamic scriptures to present a Muslim version of the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the Jews circulating in Europe. He therefore created a vast conspiratorial view of Muslim history, in which the Jews had been trying to destroy Islam and the Arabs from the very beginning of Islam to the 20th century.

The Jewish state was initially extremely small, and Berman argues that there was little support for it in the Jewish populations of the Islamic world, except here and there in small pockets. Nevertheless, in al-Husseini claimed that the Zionists were aiming to create a gigantic Jewish homeland that would stretch from British Palestine to Egypt and the Persian Gulf. He also claimed that this new Jewish state would also include the north African Arab nations of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Or they were going to create two homelands, one of which would be the former north African Arab states. These would be colonised by the Jews. The second Jewish homeland, in north Africa, was to be established through the efforts of America, which was already dominated by the Jews. This homeland was to be colonised by Jews and Blacks from America. Britain was also under Jewish control, and, as with Nazism, the Jews were blamed for the creation of Communism. In their propaganda broadcasts on the radio, the Mufti and his followers urged the Arabs to rise up and kill the Jews and their children. Al-Husseini was personally responsible for sending 20,000 Jews to the gas chambers when Himmler wanted to release them as a publicity stunt. The Nazis were also planning the extermination of Egypt’s Jews if Rommel had won. Mercifully, he didn’t, and Montgomery stopped him.

Berman also states that traditionally, Western Jews regarded Islam as being far more welcoming and much less oppressive than Christianity, and cites Graetz’s history of the Jews of c.1900 of such scholarship. He notes that this view has been challenged more recently by others, who have seen the Islamic world as just as hostile to Jews as the Christian West. Other scholars consider that, while there has been anti-Semitism in traditional Islamic society, it was not as severe as in Christianity. In this case, contemporary Islamism and its poisonous anti-Semitism is essentially the creation of al-Banna, al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s simply a Muslim version of Nazism, with the irony that the Nazis also regarded the peoples of the Islamic world, the Arabs, Turks and Persians, as racially inferior. Hitler even referred to them in one of his speeches as ‘painted apes who long for the whip.’

If there is ever to be peace, then this poisonous, last reflection of Nazism must also be tackled and destroyed.

The Origins of Saudi Arabia and Modern Islamo-Nazism

I’ve posted several pieces discussing the role of the Saudis and their form of Islam, Wahhabism, in promoting the terrorism and vicious religious intolerance and warfare that has now overwhelmed the Middle East. Many of these pieces come from Michelle Thomasson, one of the commenters on this blog, who had done extensive research on these issues. Here’s another piece she posted in response to my previous article on modern terrorism and the role of covert American espionage actions in destabilising Assad’s Syria.

I am also very cautious when posting information and prefer to rely on original data / sources, so when reading up on Zionism I tried to scan a variety of referenced sources (second hand bookshops are a treasure trove for old document finds). Here is a précis of my notes on Wahhabism which leads into the quote:

Roots of ISIS fundamentalism

Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (born 1702/3) in Nejd, central Arabia founded Wahhabism. He was a zealous reformer; he looked at the intentions behind actions and advocated the most scrupulous, most inflexible interpretation of Islam, he also called for believers to engage with the Quran directly.

Muslims who did not share his strict interpretations, including his application of Sharia law were to be gently persuaded; if this did not succeed then arms were called against them to bring them back in to the fold (trying not to kill them). This tactic was also applied to Shi’ites. Adult males who fought against Islam and who were polytheists, that refused to convert were executed.

The Al Saud family backed by zealous Wahhabi’s (who considered it their task to purify Islam) have dominated central Arabia since the mid eighteenth century. Endorsement by leading Wahhabi scholars, legitimised the Saudi monarchy.

Rasid Rida (1865 – 1935, Syria) was a pupil of the great Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abdul; he urged Muslims to find unity and focus in Islam with a dynamism in their own traditions as an essence of Jihad. As Rida grew older he condemned the abolition of strict Sharia practices such as cutting off the hand, but he also began to praise Wahhabism and was a passionate supporter of the new Saudi kingdom. Rida’s endorsement enabled the spread of Wahhabism beyond the kingdom’s borders.

Conflicts increase – until 1914 Rida advocated coming to a mutual arrangement with Zionism, then after WW1 the Arabs wanted to collaborate with Israel directly, however, Zionist leaders such as Chaim Weizmann decided it best to cooperate with Imperial Britain instead. “For Rida, this put them on the other side of the great divide, and like many other Arabs he came to see Zionism as a British tool to split and dominate the Arab world. From the late 1920s onwards, he mined the most hostile traditions to Jews in Islam and combined such material with the conspiracy theories of European anti-Semitism to attack the Zionist project and Jews in general.

Thus, he focused on the hadith (italicised) ‘The Jews will fight you and you will be led to dominate them until the rock cries out; “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, kill him!”’ He claimed that the Torah exhorted Jews to exterminate people that they conquered, and that the Jews rebelled against God by killing the prophets he sent after Moses. They invented Freemasonry and the Western banking system, and in recent years had created capitalism in Western Europe and Communism in Eastern Europe with which to plot against the European nations. He also saw Jewry as contributing to Germany’s defeat in First World War in exchange for Britain’s promise to grant them Palestine.

From this final period in his life, we can see the origins of the anti-Semitism which has infected some parts of the Arab and Muslim struggle against Zionism and is now reflected, for instance, in the Hamas charter and the propagation of Holocaust denial in sections of the Arabic media.” (A Concise History of the Arabs, 2014, page 163, by John McHugo.)

I chose a Hugo quote because it is a summation of the information I found and his writing is not the stuff of alternative media fright nights, quite the opposite! He is ‘an Arabist, an international lawyer and former academic researcher. His writing has been published on the BBC, History Today and Chatham House’s The World Today.. He is the director of the Council for Arab British Understanding and of the British Egyptian Society.” (From the introduction page to the above quoted book.)

Please note tribal rivalry and local conflicts continued during the nineteenth century in Saudi, the charismatic Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud disposed of most local rivals in the first 2 decades and he conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, as well as Hejaz in 1924/5. The new Saudi Arabia was eventually proclaimed as such in 1932. The British then supported the Saudi’s because they saw them as a counterforce to the Ottoman Empire i.e. divide and conquer.

Re the role of academic legitimisation in the last decade, there have been calls for an Islamic front by Sheikh Essa an Egyptian ideologue who wanted to forge an Islamic front from 2003 and also Dr. Israr Ahmed an academic who called for the revival of the Islamic Caliphate.

Unless one has been made a target by groups that operate clandestinely, it is difficult to believe, but here is an academic unafraid to point out one of the elephants in the room, I posted this last year: https://theconversation.com/europes-elites-are-more-like-berlusconi-than-you-think-25769

Interestingly, the link to Berlusconi’s masonic lodge in above link has ‘disappeared’ since the article was published!

This is very much what I’ve found out, simply through looking through standard reference works like Carl Brockmann’s History of the Islamic Peoples and the Oxford Encyclopaedia of World Religions, as well as Alfred Kopel’s study of the modern religious revival, The Revenge of God. Berman, in his book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, also puts the origin of the vicious anti-Semitism now poisoning the Islamic world to the influence of Nazi propaganda following the establishment of Israel. The Nazis were hoping to manipulate Muslim public opinion to mobilise them against their British overlords in support of Nazi Germany. Before then he notes that there was little anti-Semitism in Islam, and that 19th century Jewish scholars generally saw Islam as being far more hospitable and welcoming towards Jews than the Christian West.

I’ve also found second-hand bookshops to be invaluable treasure troves for good books. I did see in one of them in Cheltenham a few months ago a documentary history of Israel and the Arabs, so books on this complicated and highly emotive subject are about.

As for the Masonic lodge, Propaganda Due, or P2, their role in modern Italian politics is extremely murky. There are articles in Lobster linking them to some of the Fascist antics in Italy in the 1970s, such as the Bologna railway bombings, where the Neo-Fascists blew up a train station killing and injuring something like 127 people. They also seem to have some involvement in the death of ‘God’s Banker’, Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under London Bridge, between the low tide and high water mark, with his pockets full of stones. This is supposedly one of the punishments in the Masonic oath that’s meted out to people who betray the brotherhood’s secrets. Calvi was also a senior figure in the Vatican bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, which was then in the middle of a corruption scandal.

Forget stupid, murderous lies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Conspiracies really do exist, and real politics is riddle with them. Fox Mulder didn’t know the half of it.

Channel 4 broadcast a programme about a decade ago now also examining the roots of modern Islamic terrorism. This also showed pupils in Saudis schools dutifully learning that hadith, and being explicitly taught that it was their religious duty as Muslims to fight and kill Jews. The allies might be our allies in the War and Terror, but they’re extremely untrustworthy. It’s been partly through Saudi influence that the ideology behind modern Islamic terrorism has been spread, and terror groups funded.